Welcome to /c/cico@lemmy.world!

The goal of this community is helping users achieve their fitness and dietary goals in a healthy, science-based way, through counting the calories in their daily life.

How does calorie counting work?

While many diets will offer different strategies, there’s one fundamental aspect that every single weight loss (or weight gain!) mechanism shares: the number of calories you eat in a day, minus the number of calories you’ve burned, will determine if you gain or lose weight. This means that if you want to lose weight, you need a calorie deficit - you need to eat less calories than you consume, and if you want to gain weight (be it as fat or muscle) you need to eat more than you consume.

In theory, this means you could eat a McDonald’s hamburger or deep fried chicken everyday and - if those calories were below your expenditure - you’d lose weight. While this is indeed true, it’s important to divide your calories taking into account the amount of protein, fats and carbs you need for a healthy life, sustain muscle growth, and get a good amount of all auxiliary nutrients like vitamins, minerals and so on.

Why is calorie counting so good?

Many studies suggest calorie counting is the most effective tool for achieving a sustained weight goal, while fad diets tend to work momentarily but burn people out, making them relapse into old eating habits. There are two aspects of calorie counting that make it particularly good: flexibility and precision.

Calorie counting diets are flexible by nature, because you’re mostly worried about the total calories at the end of the day. This means that if today you’re feeling like having pure protein, go for it. Tomorrow you crave carbs and want to take a bite out of some pizza? Sure thing. You crave candy and need a diet where you can fit 2 to 3 little pieces of chocolate a day? We can make it work. Calorie counting isn’t here to offer you a religion, lifestyle or cult - it’s just fitting the math of how your body loses or stores fat into your routine. CICO is also precise - by directly calculating your necessary caloric intake, your deficit or surplus, and how much you've eaten in a day, you can predict how your weight will change regardless of everything else going on in the world.