It looks like a new diet is created every day these days, and they all promise to be the total weight loss solution people have been waiting for, for years. One of the most recent of these is known as the CICO diet, which is said to have been around for decades yet only gaining mileage fairly recently.
So what is CICO exactly? The term is an acronym that stands for Calories In, Calories Out. If you’ve researched or done a lot of diets before, you’ll easily find that this one tends to be the simplest there is.
True to its name, CICO only needs you to take in fewer calories than you lose. There are no rules as to what you can or cannot eat. If you love pizza and burgers and steaks and all, you can help yourself until you’re satisfied as long as you don’t exceed your daily caloric limit.
This sounds perfect in theory, and in practice, it really does work. When you lose more calories than you consume, you create a deficit and that will make you lose weight, and that is science at work. But since you can eat anything you want, regardless of their nutritional value, you can easily develop or indulge in unhealthy eating habits. So while doing it CICO style can give you significant weight loss, you still need to make sure that you maintain a well-balanced diet.
The Advantages of CICO
Straightforward
There are lots of diets out there that you can try, but all of them seem to be complicated and time-consuming to follow. You need to watch what you eat, how much, how often and so on and so forth. With CICO, you can pretty much eat anything that’s there in front of you as long as long as you remain within your acceptable limit - that is, a certain number of calories that, when exceeded, will no longer work to make you lose weight.
No Deprivation
The worst thing about following most weight loss diets is the feeling of deprivation that builds up from not being able to eat foods that people really want to. For instance, if you go with the Keto diet, you are forced to limit your carbohydrate intake to a bare minimum, which is obviously torture for those who just love carbs. People who have weight loss issues generally love to eat, and from that perspective alone, the CICO diet appears to be a very friendly option.
Calorie Education
Finally, research reveals that a mere 12% of people in America are conscious or at least have some idea about their caloric intakes. Which means if people just learned more about calories, many of them would be able to lose weight just by knowing how much they should consume their caloric limits.
Find more info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_loss