The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.

So the idea of a highly advanced civilization requiring so little resource extraction, or even being able to entirely synthesize all its resource needs from energy, and manage global resources in a non-destructive way, while letting the natural ecology revert to as close as possible to a pre-civilizational state.

So you see small hubs of super-high-density cities, and vast expanses of "nature". Harder to detect from space that way, thus it could resolve the paradox?

You can see our own time moving that direction with urbanization and re-greening happening simultaneously, population growth falling, and a huge effort to abolish the use of one particular variety of extracted resource.