Tell me straight, what is CICO and why does it matter?
CICO explains weight loss. Every diet that has ever existed followed the rules of CICO.
CICO, or ‘Calories In, Calories Out’ is an explanation of energy balance in your body. Or in other words, it explains when our body stores fat, and when it burns fat. Think of CICO like you think of a scoreboard, it doesn’t actually score the goals for either side, it just keeps track of them. The problems arise when people think it’s more than this, or worse, that it’s really simple, and both of those can lead to confusion and frustration.
The ‘Calories In’ part is the food you eat and the drink you drink, this is the easier part to manipulate when trying to lose fat (at least in theory!), and the ‘Calories Out’ part explains all the energy your body expends existing, moving, and basically just doing things.
So if that’s what it is, what is it not?
CICO is not a diet. CICO is not a method. CICO doesn’t tell you how to eat. Sometimes people make it sound like it is one or more of those things, but it really isn’t, it’s just the rules of the game.
Is it really that simple?
Yes. But also No.
It’s simple when you remember it’s an explanation and not an instruction. If your weight loss is not going how you hoped, CICO isn’t going to explain the exact reasons why, it’s not going to directly explain why you’re burning fewer calories, why you’re retaining water, or why your food doesn’t have the number of calories you believed it did. That’s where the people who oversimplify problems to CICO don’t help.
Knowing that CICO is just the explanation and not the instruction can help you think clearly about your weight loss journey and help you analyse your actual strategy to making that energy balance do what you want to do.
CICO is just something that we all benefit from understanding. It doesn’t tell us what to do, what to eat, or how much to train. It’s something to remember alongside strategies that do that. If you remember that, CICO will serve you well.