Which is not the end all be all for diet advice, but it generally works, and at minimum points people in the right direction. Of course there are edge cases, and other important factors. Consume less and move more is what most people need to do.
Although it's also worth mentioning that, while what you say is true, most diets will not work for most people (statistically speaking, from studies). Focusing on calories in / calories out is less important, in my book, than finding a diet that will work for you, because most won't.
It's well written and pretty much spot on. The difficult thing with advice is that one first needs to figure out where one is in the spectrum before determining whether it's applicable - i.e. overweight people could benefit from eating less, underweight people could benefit from eating more.
That's my theory too. Almost any diet will work because people will have a more controlled and thoughtful approach to eating vs the average diet where people eat all kinds of crap and too much.
What I got from it was that adherence to a dietary rule IS a matter of state of mind and for most people it's easier to adhere to a more moderate dieting regime.
All rings true to me and a moderate shift in diet can have a big impact for the very obese. If you are only a little bit fat and your diet is already reasonably clean though, then I'm not sure how well this works. The thinner you get the more sacrifices you need to make to lose the next pound.
The truth is that most diets "work" in the sense that, any amount of actually thinking about what you eat is better than just shoveling in whatever was last on TV or a billboard!
I'll agree that there are certainly different types of diets that we'd have to examine more closely. But what this does seem to tell us that there is basically no diet that really works for most people most of the time.
My impression is that studies find that any diet can help people lose weight if that’s why they began it - hypothesis is that it’s the change and increased attention that works, not what you change to.
"Everything in moderation" isn't actually great diet advice. There's a paper floating around somewhere showing that people with a limited diet of healthy things fare better than people with a very wide diet that included unhealthy things.
My take is that "everything in moderation" is a mental crutch that people adopt when there's some part of their diet that they know isn't _good_ but that they don't want to give up completely. It is true that we can sneak in unhealthy food here and there without hugely detrimental effects, but that doesn't mean it's a good baseline practice.
The one scenario where it might be useful advice is with somebody whose diet is terrible, and you want to ease them towards a somewhat nutritionally positive diet; even in this circumstance, a more direct approach of "eat less crap and more good stuff" would be more accurate.
If it works for them, so be it. The one thing that this quite obvious with diet and nutrition is that there is no “one size fits all” diet for everyone.
The more specific you get about a diet, the more specific you need to get about the person eating it. So long as most dietary advice is designed and tested at population scale, it's going to be fuzzy and inconclusive.
Even the most basic advice we can give today comes with asterisks.
While I'm sure this approach has general merits, I'm also fairly certain that different dietary approaches will work with varying levels of success for different people.
Dieting is notoriously difficult to follow 100%. And in this case that's important. In-patient, the intake is exactly what the dietician (and indirectly the doctor) prescribes. A better outcome could be expected.
Someone here--it may have been you--highlighted this problem once as the difference between a diet that works and public policy on diet that works. If you actually follow the (security guidelines|diet), you'll be good; but naively telling people has very little effect.
All diets fail for nearly everyone who tries them, the National Weight Control Registry notwithstanding.
The fact that a tiny percentage of the populace successfully loses weight does not make "try to do what those people claim they were doing" good advice, any more than the fact that a tiny percentage of people win the lottery makes "buy lottery tickets!" good financial advice.
The notion that "all diets fail" persists because thus far it sadly remains true - telling people to lose weight and keep it off by dieting is faith-based advice, wishful thinking. It's not science.
A friend of mine is a nutrition researcher, and one of the things that he said that resonated with me was "The best diets tell you that you don't need to cut calories, but make you less hungry so you do it anyway".
Youtube is where most people get their dietary advice now. The most influential diet advice is coming from young attractive healthy looking people. Whatever they're eating seems to be working. Obviously most of these people won the genetic lottery, but they've also nurtured their body correctly with food and exercise.
This seems like a much better approach in convincing people what to eat anyway. Look at the results and imitate healthy people if you want to look and stay healthy.
From reading diet boards, a lot of people find that their weight loss efforts are more successful with a compositional approach than just Eating Less. "Eat less" might be a simple rule, but implementing it is not so simple. Compsitional diets remove that problem, and appear to work for a lot of people.
I know there are a lot of HN readers who have used the Keto diet with considerable success, for example. And there are a good number of other diets that work for many people too whilst allowing an ad libitum approach to eating.
This rings incredibly true to me and I'm glad the idea is spreading. My diet philosophy pitch to people is this:
(Cribbed from my post above:)
THE BEST DIET to lose weight is about psychology 80% and nutrition 20%. Most of the value you're going to get by keeping your weekly calories low. You can try variations of macronutrients, meal timing and frequency, voodoo, etc. but the best one is the one you stick with, and can stick with long enough to reach your goals.
Maybe you'll need to think about essential minerals and nutrients if you're trying something really really extreme. But with even minimal variety you should be good.
reply