Diets for scaling down in theory can be very effective. Through some mechanism, they typically restrict your eating habits to force you into a calorie deficit leading to weight loss. Depending on how persistent you are, you could even hit your goals! Theory though, does not typically reflect our realities. Life rarely is ideal and most often is a hot mess! If every diet has its Pros and Cons – then maybe one might fit your life like a missing puzzle piece. Let’s look at what makes diets succeed and why they might fail.
The major groups of diets fall into a few different styles:
Avoid Sugar
Sugar is one of the primary energy transfer agents that exists throughout nature. It comes in a number of forms typically classified based on its source – sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose can all contribute to sweetening your diet. It is also the building block for carbohydrates (carbs!) which are found in grains like rice, corn and wheat which are the staples which have been feeding humanity since agriculture became important to our way of life.
In a world which has calorie rich diets our bodies haven’t figured out how to tell us we should avoid over consumption. This means that the efficiency of sugar coupled with our natural dependency on it have made it difficult to balance our consumption when it is so readily available. To top it all off, most of our treats are packed to the brim with calorie rich sugars – making staying away even more of a challenge.
To break this trend of over-consumption, diets that focus on controlling or cutting sugar and its derivatives remove one of the most common sources of calories (and many common sources of food!) which are then typically replaced by more green vegetables! This increases nutrient intake, and happens to be more expensive (another incentive to eat less!) and generally less tasty (so less addictive – which means you eat less!).
Diets that avoid sugar:
Atkins
The Atkins diet is a popular example which focused on cutting out sugars and refined flour to help cut weight quickly, and over the longer term to gradually reintroduce healthier carbs to bring some normalcy to the diet. The simplicity of the message with a giant red stop sign over anything with sugar or flour is what makes this an easy to understand diet and very restrictive. People were able to fill in the hunger gap with additional proteins and veggies but it wasn’t obvious how you should customize this to your own life since pasta, bread or rice could be central to your normal diet.
Keto
Keto is another similar diet which cuts sugars (all of them!) from your daily intake so even some fruits and veggies are typically avoided. The mass restriction allows for a focus on adding green veggies and proteins to your diet to fill the gap. After many days of keeping your body free of sugars as an energy source, the body flips to utilizing your fat for even body maintaining functions (like thinking!). This transition is called ketosis and allows the body now to work on your behalf to burn weight. The Keto diet is extremely restrictive by design but the community support for it is wide and robust – providing keto-friendly recipes to maintain the diet. This diet can be effective but it takes lots of effort to achieve ketosis regularly since avoiding sugars completely is almost impossible.
Paleo
Paleolithic (Paleo) Diet or the “caveman” diet is another diet which although isn’t exactly against sugar on principle, it strikes it out as soon as you understand the requirements. Getting back to a basic diet which could have been similar to what a caveman might have been able to procure before our technology advancements made food too calorie dense and too easy to access. Hunter type foods like fish and lean meat and Gather type foods like fruits and non-starchy veggies along with nuts are the basis of the inputs. Rejected are ‘farmed’ foods including dairy, grains, starchy veggies like potatoes and yams. Similarly processed/packaged foods are also out. Without the grains and starchy veggies, most of the common carbs drop away and without processing, sugar also gets dropped. The diet’s restrictions are what make it both effective if adhered to but also very difficult to actually maintain as the range of foods which are available end up being very small.
With sugar avoidance being an effective method of cutting calories out of most diets, the issue that consistently comes up is that the restrictive nature of the diets makes long term use very difficult. The reward can be exactly what you are hoping for, but the loss of a broad range of staples and a broader range of treats means meals become relatively boring. Perhaps after a time of detoxing off sugar, the palate recalibrates itself to enjoy the other elements of food – the herbaceousness of greens? Even the thought of it is unappetizing!
Eat less often
Broadly speaking, fasting (going without eating) is something most people do almost every day. We do it while we sleep and then we “break” fast in the morning with our first meal. Diets which focus on controlling your intake time periods help do two major things. First thing that will happen is that you’ll realize that what you thought was hunger was probably not as serious as you thought. Eating is a very habitual activity for most people so by interrupting this with restrictive eating times, we’ll learn a little bit more about when our bodies are actually hungry. The second thing that happens is that if you are awake for 18 hours a day, and can eat for only 8hrs (or less!) then you typically can only squeeze in 2 meals which will save most people almost a quarter of their calories because their meals are already filling enough. There are more extreme versions of fasting which eclipse a full day or more and push you to give your body time to fully process everything it was given the previous days. Again saving a large amount of calories in that period of time.
Techniques that Restrict Time:
Intermittent fasting is the term thrown around most often with weight loss discussions and amounts to what we just described. Eat in a squeezed timeframe to basically avoid snacking and other over-eating scenarios.
This method of picking your meal times is effective when you can control your eating time. Many people live in circumstances where they must eat during certain pre-mandated times (“Lunch Break”) or potentially live with others who are not following the same schedule and that means having to eat alone or enduring through someone else’s meal without partaking yourself. As a social activity, eating with other people is a very common way to spend time together and by putting restrictions on when you can eat, it can be socially isolating or generally awkward. Another area which might cause this method to be less effective is if the fast is offset by over indulgence. As we discussed, calorie rich food is readily available so if that becomes a primary input into your diet, then the result will not be calorie control.
Eat more consciously
Calorie reduction is broadly the name of the game for all diets whether they advertise it or not. Eating consciously or mindfully might mean counting your calories by recording your meals or sometimes it’s about ensuring your plate has more greens rather than carbs or sometimes it’s about switching to smaller plates so you add difficulty to loading up your plate or sometimes simply eating more slowly to let your body signal you are full. All of these can help you stop eating before you overindulge.
Interestingly, some diets even have you eating small portions, more times a day. By spreading your meals out and calories out more often (eating 5 or 6 times a day or every 2 or 3 hours), this method keeps you from snacking and straying from your goals because another pre-constructed meal is promised just around the corner.
The point behind these is to help you stay conscious of your food intake and to make choices actively to reach your goals. Because eating can be instinctive or habitual, putting up barriers to overeating or adding active thinking to your meal prep or choices can help shake us free of the self-defeating cycles.
Other popular diets
Mediterranean diets are inspired by the typical meals of southern Italy and Spain and emphasize vegetables, whole grains, and fish. Although grains are included in this diet, the usage of whole grains which are harder to digest and have more fiber help encourage less carbs in the overall diet while still keeping the types of food accessible to most Europeans and North Americans.
Accessibility is a very important feature of any constructed diet, because if you don’t know how to make the meals or don’t want to make/eat the meals then you’ll invariably find an alternative which likely does not line up with your goals. So many diets boil down to a similar calorie deficit formula, but what works for your tastes and lifestyle is so important to moving beyond the mechanics of what makes diets succeed and moving towards personal success.
