All Diets Are Pretty Much The Same, And You Don't Need A Diet Anyway

There are a huge number of commercial diet plans on the market. Each and every one of these diets promise to help you get the body of your dreams and shows you success stories of people who have apparently had great results. It can be overwhelming.

I think many people know that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The “Cookie Diet”? I mean, come on!

But there are plenty of popular diets with logical, legitimate-sounding explanations, and some of them even cite research to back up their claims. How do you choose? Spoiler alert: you don’t have to.

People Who Sell Diets Want You to Think That Their Diet is Different

In order to sell books and plans in an enormous and highly competitive dieting industry, most diets emphasize what’s “new” and “different” about them.

Some focus on eliminating specific foods or food groups. Others focus on calorie restriction. Some are structured with tracking systems or phases. Some claim that biological characteristics like your genetics should dictate how you should eat.

For example, here are five popular diets:

• Mediterranean Diet: based on the eating habits of historically healthy populations in Mediterranean countries

• Keto: very low carbohydrate, designed to put your body into ketosis

• Paleo: eat the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors did

• Plant-Based: eat mostly plants and avoid animal products

• Weight Watchers: a points-based system designed to balance your calorie intake across the day

They seem pretty different, right? They play up these differences to make you feel like you need to choose one over the others.

Either carbs are the enemy or they’re not. You eat animal products or you don’t (this can be for health or for other reasons). Either you believe that total calories are the key to managing your weight, or you think the ratio of macronutrients in your diet is more important.

If we look closer, though, we can see that all of these diets have a lot in common. None of their similarities are ground-breaking. They are based on simple, common sense behaviors.

Once you are aware of this, you can use those basic, sensible guidelines to create your own healthy eating pattern and leave the ups and downs of dieting behind.

If you want to learn the foundations of a truly healthy and sustainable diet, download my FREE Guide to Healthy Eating!

Five Popular Diets: The Similarities

Let’s look at some more details of these diets. Here are the foods that each diet allows and avoids, and a quote I found from an information page about each one.

Do you see a pattern here?

All of these diets advocate whole, minimally processed foods. They all specifically recommend you eat plenty of vegetables, and they all recommend limiting or avoiding highly processed and refined foods.

What else do these diets have in common? The person following them. By definition, someone who is on a diet is thinking about what they’re eating and actively trying to change it.

This is why most diets work. It’s not because of any one specific food or food group, or some magic ratio of fat to carbs to protein.

Simply being mindful of your eating choices, shifting away from heavily processed foods, and focusing on whole, minimally processed foods (especially vegetables) will get you most of the way to your health, fitness, and weight goals.

You Don't Need A Diet To Eat Healthy

I had a client who was trying to lose weight and insisted on “going keto” (despite my gentle objections…).

The premise of keto is that when you drastically limit your consumption of carbohydrates (which are your body’s preferred source of energy), you enter a state called ketosis in which your body is forced to burn fat for energy instead. To get into ketosis, you need to be eating barely any carbs.

This client was very “strict” about her diet at first, but she was struggling with cravings. Soon she would admit to me that she was having a drink or two occasionally or eating a little dessert each night. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t restricting her carb intake enough to truly get into ketosis, but she still lost weight.

If she wasn’t in ketosis, why was she losing weight? It wasn’t because she had “hacked” her metabolic system.

She was losing weight because prior to starting the diet she had been eating almost exclusively heavily processed foods. She would go to the drive-thru twice a day and snack on chips and cookies.

Now she was thinking about what she ate, cooking at home, and prioritizing whole, minimally processed foods. She didn’t need to go keto to do that.

In fact, it was the extremely restrictive nature of the diet that ended up holding her back. While she did lose weight, it only took a couple of months for the rules and restrictions to become “too much”.

She was feeling guilty whenever she would eat a food that was off-limits and wasn’t able to enjoy her social life. She abandoned the diet.

If she had just made those sensible changes without putting a “diet” label on them, she would have been on her way to achieving a sustainable healthy eating pattern and she may never have had to diet again.

Many people fall back to their old habits after giving up a diet and end up right back where they started, or are even worse off.

How To Get Off The Diet Rollercoaster:

Since the most important and most effective parts of healthy eating are shared by most diets, here’s how you can get the benefits of dieting without restriction and guilt.

Shift your mindset away from short-term results.

Focus on developing a long-term, sustainable eating pattern that you actually enjoy and that nourishes your body and supports your health.

Be mindful of your eating.

Tracking your intake can be very helpful, but even just thinking about what you eat and why you eat it is important.

Eat mostly whole, minimally processed single ingredient foods, especially vegetables and fruits.

Cover at least half your plate with veggies or fruits at each meal.

Prepare most of your food yourself.

It’s very difficult to achieve a healthy eating pattern if most of your food comes from restaurants or pre-packed meals (like microwaveable lunches or dinners).

Pre-packaged foods are usually full of additives and preservatives, and even restaurant foods contain ingredients that you don’t know about and don’t have control over. Cooking and preparing food at home is one of the most important things you can do to support your health.

Eat a variety of nutritious foods.

Restricting or eliminating specific foods only makes it hard for you to stick to a diet. It also makes you feel like you’ve done something wrong if you eat food that’s “off-limits”.

Yes, some foods (like ultra-processed foods) should be eaten only occasionally, but nothing should be completely off-limits. For whole foods, eat as many different types of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, beans, and legumes as you can, as often as you can.

Minimize your consumption of highly processed foods.

If it looks like it was made in a factory, try not to eat it. Stay away from fast food and junk foods as much as possible.

Take the slow and steady route.

Completely overhauling your diet and lifestyle all at once is usually not a good idea. Start with one small change at a time, make it a habit, then build on it.

If you want to learn the foundations of a truly healthy and sustainable diet, download my FREE Guide to Healthy Eating!