I have an instinctive distrust of anything with an acronym, so was dismayed to hear that the CiCo diet was spreading like wildfire across . Although it might sound like a tech start-up, CiCo stands for Calories in, Calories out and is far from innovative. It is based on the not-entirely-revolutionary principle that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, weight loss will ensue.
The seemingly attractive notion that you can eat whatever you want as long as you keep calories in check, plus anecdotal success stories, seems to have fanned the flames of this fad.
For someone like me, who spends a lot of time staring into the dark heart of diet culture, this might seem to be a reasonable development. It is a long way from the guilt inducing language of the various exclusion driven diets that have dominated social media in the past few years.
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CiCo does not classify any foods as clean, unclean, toxic, super, or acidic, and in that respect is more sensible. It is at least honest in acknowledging that an energy deficit is required for weight loss, which if nothing else, suggests a better understanding of the first law of thermodynamics than some of its dietary cousins.
But with its simplicity come difficulties and dangers. When people restrict what they eat, keeping nutrition balanced and adequate can be harder, especially if your calories of choice are entirely in the form of cheese and onion crisps. Many professionals worry that a laser focus on calories above all else .
But for me, the main issue with CiCo is that despite initial weight loss being likely, the odds are it will not work for long. Our bodies have complex and powerful mechanisms that try to keep us at a particular weight, even when society does not deem that weight ideal. The vast majority of dieters regain lost kilos within four to five years. Some studies have indicated just 5 to 10 per cent manage to keep weight off for that long, with plenty and .
I鈥檓 sure CiCo will continue to proliferate, because framing weight loss as a simple matter of self-control is a sales strategy as old as the hills. As with any diet with an extraordinarily poor long-term success rate, a capacity to fool ourselves that failure is our own fault will be key to its popularity. In reality, people gain weight for a , including genetic susceptibility, hormonal imbalances, psychological issues, stress, pharmacological side effects, sleep disruption, stigmatisation, eating disorders, and perhaps even a . To simply cut calories without considering any of these deeper problems or causes, is akin to spooning water out of a sinking ship, while ignoring the leaks below deck.
Being overweight or obese is not a single disease with a simple treatment and cure, it is the physical expression of a huge variety of complex factors and conditions. The only way to really tackle this is to work with individuals and understand their particular problems.
Sadly, this is expensive, difficult and hard work, and it is far easier to blame people for their behaviour. Against that backdrop, diets like CiCo, that frame weight as something easily solved with calorie counting and a bit of will power, just don鈥檛 add up.
