People who want to lose weight are often tempted to try one of the latest fad diets that are popular for a brief time and claim to help people shed pounds fast. Weight loss can be tough, and with promises of rapid transformation, it's easy to see why these diets are so popular. They offer an easy solution to a complex problem, often promising quick results. But fad diets don't work in the long term. If you are thinking of making significant changes to your diet, however, make sure to consult a dietitian or a doctor first.
What is a Fad Diet?
Kara Burnstine, a registered dietitian at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Florida, defines a fad diet as a "quick-fix way to lose weight that's usually popular for a short time and then fades away." Another tell-tale sign of a fad diet is that claims of its success in helping people lose weight are mainly based on anecdotal reports. "These diets don't usually have a lot of scientific evidence to back them up - they're based more on testimonials," she said. "You may see influencers touting benefits that appear too good to be true, which is often how these diets gain traction."
The Initial Appeal of Fad Diets
The reason why fad diets appear to work initially is because they tend to significantly cut calories or entire food groups, Burnstine said, so people usually eat fewer calories or limited portions of certain foods. This puts the body in a calorie deficit, where a person consumes fewer calories than they burn, which leads to weight loss.
The Unsustainable Nature of Restrictive Diets
However, the results are often short-lived because the diet is unsustainable as a lifestyle, Burnstine said. This can explain why most people regain the weight they've lost when they go back to their usual way of eating. Think about a time that you dieted, you lost the weight, you felt great, the diet ended, you went back to your normal life and the next thing you know you’re back to your starting weight and feeling more discouraged than ever. “Guess I’ve got to start my diet again,” you think to yourself.
Nutrient Deficiencies and Food Group Restrictions
Fad diets also limit food groups that may be needed for essential nutrients, Burnstine said. Commonly restricted food groups include dairy and carbohydrates, according to the British Dietetic Association. Dairy is a good source of protein and calcium, while carbohydrates are needed for energy, as well as B-vitamins and magnesium. Fad diets may also promote eating mainly one type of food - for example, the cabbage soup diet - or avoiding all cooked foods.
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Wesley McWhorter, a registered dietitian in Texas and a national spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, told Live Science that “most fad diets remove entire food groups (fruits, vegetables, grains, etc.) or are extremely restrictive, reinforcing a negative relationship with food.”
The Psychological Impact of Dieting
"The biggest problem [with fad diets] is the shame-based rhetoric that blames the failure [to lose weight] on a lack of willpower - which we know is simply not true," McWhorter said. "There are many factors involved in why, what, and how we choose to eat. It is important to consider those issues to help us make sustainable changes."
A 2020 review published in the journal Cureus also linked dieting with an increased likelihood of disordered eating. While it is difficult to draw any substantial conclusions from the data, the researchers said, results showed that dieting may carry more risks than benefits as a means of losing weight.
The "Set Point" Theory
Every person has a genetically determined ‘set point’ for their adult weight. Unfortunately, for the majority of people, diets do not work and when people go on diet after diet the rate of weight loss actually slows down or stops entirely. You then think to yourself “There must be something wrong with me, I must cut back more” or fall into the mindset of “Why should I even try, nothing is going to happen”, which leads to over- or under-eating.
Hormonal Responses to Food Restriction
If you’ve restricted food and don’t eat along with your natural hunger cues, such as when you’re hungry or when you’re full, there are specific hormones that fire off designed to make you eat. When you repeatedly tell yourself ’no’, cravings for specific foods get stronger, and even turn the food into a ‘forbidden fruit’ creating an addiction-like mentality towards it. Eating foods we enjoy releases dopamine, the ‘happy hormone’ in the brain responsible for the pleasure and reward feelings. This is why diets don’t work. When we resist this release over and over from following a strict diet, cravings get stronger and the desire to release that pleasure hormone grows greater. Ever sabotage your diet by eating a full tub of ice cream, an entire family-size bag of chips, or a double-cheese burger from your local burger joint? Yo-yo dieting and long-term dieting impair these dopaminergic pathways that regulate the systems responsible for regulating reward sensitivity, conditioning, and control.
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The Downside of Restriction: Food Insecurity and Body Dissatisfaction
Instead of learning how to nourish yourself, you learn how to deprive yourself, in a constant yo-yo back and forth focused on weight loss rather than overall health, driven by constant dissatisfaction with your body. This is referred to as ‘food insecurity’, an uncertainty, lack of, or inability to regularly eat healthy food in a safe and socially acceptable manner, as related to body size and aesthetic goals. Currently, in the United States, 35% of adults and 17% of youth are obese, and 14% of households are food insecure. Food insecurities can cause poor diets, poor relationships with foods, unhealthy weights, and have negative effects on overall health, which are often the largest reasons why people turn to diets in the first place and why diets don’t work - because they never learned how to intuitively eat for their body and their goals.
Stress Response and Cortisol Levels
Low-calorie and calorie-restrictive diets create a stress response in the body. This stress response elevates cortisol levels, the stress hormone, incorrect insulin, and leptin due to chronic stress. Ultimately, this leads to increased food intake and visceral fat accumulation.
The Influence of Diet Culture
Diet culture harms people of all sizes. Diet culture is fed to us through just about every media outlet; from the news to social media, magazines to festivals we are exposed to it all the time. Diets fuel diet culture, which is the belief or ideal system that focuses on and values weight, shape, size, all over well-being, health, and individuality. While you’ve learned a handful of reasons why diets don’t work, diet culture manipulates the information to say that diets are about health and not about diminishing health in the name of weight loss. “Lose weight by any means necessary” rings a bell to you. The thin ideal that is present in our society causes a profound amount of body-image disturbance, negatively impacting our natural eating pathology, needs, and desires.
Shifting Focus: Self-Acceptance and Holistic Well-being
If you’ve failed a diet, it’s not about you. By now, you know diets don’t work. You’ve gotten some answers to open-ended questions you’ve had over the years about why you gained weight back, why specific diets haven’t worked for you, and why they’re not going to work for you moving forward regardless of how many times you try. But what do you do? Here is a hard truth: if you’re not good enough now, you’ll never be. Dieting is not a gateway to self-acceptance. It’s actually one of the best ways to not accept, embrace, or empower yourself. Look, your worth isn’t dependent on eating ‘good or bad’ foods, and your self-worth doesn’t improve or decrease at different weights. Instead of focusing so much on the outside of our bodies and our appearances, we encourage you to focus on the inside. What makes you happy? What makes you satisfied, empowered, or accomplished?
The Power of Positive Self-Talk
Negative self-talk is like poison dripping from a pipe, eroding your health and your weight loss efforts. Every time you say something negative in your mind, your body hears it. These voices often come from others, whether family, friends, social media, or our diet-culture-obsessed society. Shame and self-criticism impact weight management behaviors in a highly negative way. Weight stigma can become associated with feelings of inferiority, shame, and self-criticism. Shame and self-criticism are associated with depression, body image dissatisfaction, binge eating, and obesity. The only way to reduce negative self-talk is to call ourselves to be more aware of it - why are we doing it? Where did it come from?
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Embracing a Lifestyle of Health and Movement
Establishing healthy habits that fuel whole-body health, regardless of whether they lead to a change in weight, is the key to gaining life instead of losing weight. When you stop focusing on losing weight, and instead, focus on gaining life, you can find health and happiness at every size, regardless of where you’re headed. Nobody ever went for a walk, did a workout, or played with their kids and said afterward, “Man I feel terrible!”. The body benefits from movement, and if you don’t move, your body is going to be sad and it’s going to show. So easy fix? MOVE! You don’t need some elaborate plan, a new gym membership, and 6 pairs of expensive leggings. You don’t need six-pack abs to be able to lift a bunch of weight. You just need to get your heart rate up, break a sweat, laugh a little and move around.
Making Sustainable Dietary Changes
Instead of following some restrictive eating patterns, take a look at the food you eat on a daily basis. How can you make a better decision? If you eat bagels, instead of eating a plain bagel, change it out for a whole wheat bagel. If you drink soda, swap it for a diet soda or carbonated water. If you buy lunch every day, why not prep a simple meal and bring it to work every day? In doing so, you’ll begin to establish a lifestyle that works for you and your goals, rather than following a diet that was made for someone else. You’ll also notice yourself feeling better with little improvements to what you already do. If you don’t know where to begin, instead of floundering, we recommend working with a nutrition and lifestyle coach. If you’re looking to reclaim your health, fuel your lifestyle, learn how to have a relationship with food, and how get healthy from the inside out, the amount of information you can gain from a 1:1 coaching experience is irreplaceable. Sure, the internet is full of information, but is it meant for you and your lifestyle? By working with a coach you will receive guidance to make nutrition and food decisions from a place of self-trust and intuition, with your individual goals and aptitude in mind. By going through your current lifestyle, foods, habits, and mentalities, your plan will not only set you up for the greatest chance of success for your short-term goals, but it will also enable you for long-term planning and maintenance.
The Two Phases of Weight Management
Weight management consists of two different phases: achieving the weight loss and maintaining the weight loss. This is why diets don't work. The strategies that work for initiating weight loss may not be effective for keeping the weight off and vice versa. Hence, when choosing a weight-loss diet, no diet can be suitable for everyone.
The Importance of a Whole Lifestyle Approach
Ultimately, Burnstine said, weight loss requires a long-term approach. "It's not sexy or trendy, but good old-fashioned hard and consistent work is what drives sustainable weight loss," she said. "It's not about quick fixes - slow and steady wins the race."
Sustainable weight loss requires a whole lifestyle approach rather than focusing on food alone. Many fad diets overlook the role of exercise, which is vital for optimal health. These diets also frequently ignore other important factors, according to Burnstine. "Psychology is involved as well," said Burnstine. "You need to know which foods may derail efforts with emotional eating. Getting proper sleep is also very important for sustainable weight loss.
Balanced and Sustainable Eating Plans
Dietitians, who are board certified food and nutrition experts, typically recommend making changes to your eating plan that you can maintain long term. They typically recommend eating plans like:
- The Mediterranean diet: This eating plan emphasizes eating whole foods, lean protein, and various vegetables, fruits, and legumes. It recommends avoiding ultra-processed foods and limiting red meat and dairy.
- The DASH diet: The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet focuses on fruits, vegetables, and lean protein and limits salt, sugar, and fat intake.
- The MIND diet: Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet was developed to reduce the risk of dementia and a decline in brain function as you age.
- The Harvard diet: The Harvard diet was developed for a study on longevity and combines aspects of the Mediterranean diet and the MyPlate eating plan.
These eating plans support balanced food choices that supply your body with important nutrients. They may also support weight loss along with other lifestyle behaviors, such as regular physical activity and stress management.
Fad Diets to Approach with Caution
Some fad diets to avoid include those that:
- Replace foods with liquids, such as the juice cleanse
- Claim to work “fast” (sustainable, healthy weight loss involves losing 1 to 2 pounds per week)
- Promote detoxification of body systems (your body naturally detoxes itself), such as the liver cleanse and colon cleanse diets
- Are overly restrictive, like the grapefruit diet or those that eliminate entire food groups
- Encourage using supplements that promise to deliver weight loss
- Promote disordered eating by adding moral labels to food and increasing guilt, disgust, or anxiety around eating
It’s always best to get nutrition advice from a licensed dietitian rather than a social media influencer or any person who is making money off “selling” the diet.
Examining Specific Diets: Keto, Atkins, South Beach, 5:2, Vegan, and Paleo
While many so-called fad diets are unbalanced and don’t live up to their claims, several do. But just because a diet may be effective for weight loss doesn’t mean it’s sustainable long-term. Research suggests certain fad diets may support weight loss in high quality, controlled studies for some people.
The Ketogenic Diet
Although the ketogenic diet has been called a fad diet, it can be effective for weight loss and may have benefits for people with prediabetes and diabetes. The ketogenic diet is a very low carb diet that works by lowering insulin levels and shifting your primary fuel source from sugar to ketones. Ketones are compounds made from fatty acids, and your brain and other organs can burn them for energy. When your body doesn’t have carbs to burn and switches to ketones, you’re in a state called ketosis.
However, unlike other low carb diets, ketogenic diets don’t gradually increase their carbs. Instead, they keep carb intake very low so people following the diet stay in ketosis.
A 2023 review of research suggests that the ketogenic diet may be an effective treatment for:
- epilepsy
- improving blood lipids in people with type 2 diabetes
The researchers note that though some research suggests it may benefit weight loss in people who are overweight or have obesity, the evidence isn’t strong enough to draw conclusions. More research is also needed to determine its long-term safety.
Another review of research notes that while the ketogenic diet may be associated with certain benefits in the first 6 to 12 months, it did not result in additional benefits beyond that, suggesting these benefits may be temporary.
It may also be too restrictive to follow long-term and may have negative health effects, including:
- lower bone mineral density and increased risk of fractures
- increased risk of kidney stones
- hypercalcemia (too much calcium in the blood)
- low parathyroid hormone, vitamin D, and alkaline phosphate (ALP) levels
- risk of impaired renal function
The Atkins Diet
Research suggests that low carb diets may be effective for weight loss and provide certain health benefits. The Atkins diet is another low carb diet with some research behind it. Created by cardiologist Robert Atkins in the early 1970s, the Atkins diet claims to produce rapid weight loss without hunger.
While most of the research on the Atkins diet is older, research on low carb diets in general suggests that they are effective for weight loss for the first 6 to 12 months. They may also benefit insulin and blood glucose levels and risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
However, more research is still needed to determine whether following these diets long-term is beneficial. Maintaining this diet after 6 to 12 months may have fewer benefits, and more research is needed to better understand its long-term safety.
The Atkins diet is associated with multiple negative health effects, including:
- risk of metabolic acidosis (when your body contains too much acid)
- risk of other metabolic side effects
- potential for urinary stone formation due to decreased urine pH and calcium balance
- risk of chronic kidney disease
The South Beach Diet
Like Dr. Atkins, Dr. Arthur Agatston was a cardiologist interested in helping his patients lose weight sustainably without feeling hungry. He liked certain aspects of the Atkins diet, but was concerned that unrestricted use of saturated fat might increase the risk of heart disease. Therefore, in the mid-1990s, he created a lower-carb, lower-fat, high protein diet called the South Beach Diet, named for the area in South Florida where he practiced medicine.
The diet encourages a high protein intake, because protein may burn more calories during digestion than carbs or fat. Protein stimulates the release of hormones that suppress hunger and help you feel full longer.
Although the diet is nutritious overall, it recommends a significant restriction of saturated fat that may not be warranted. It also requires specific planning and may be too restrictive for some people.
While more research on the South Beach diet is needed, potential negative health effects can include:
- increased risk of ketoacidosis
- hypocalcemia (calcium deficiency)
- fiber deficiency
The 5:2 Diet (Intermittent Fasting)
The 5:2 diet is a type of intermittent fasting, also known as alternate-day fasting. On this diet, you eat as you usually would for five days a week and restrict your calorie intake to 500 to 600 calories for two days each week, resulting in an overall calorie deficit that leads to weight loss.
The extremely low calorie allotment on the two “fast” days has led some to classify the 5:2 diet as a fad diet.
The results of a 2022 pilot study with 131 participants suggest that a 5:2 intermittent fasting plus program was more effective in the short term in weight loss than daily calorie restriction for people who were overweight or had obesity. The members of the intermittent fasting plus group were provided approximately 30% of their energy requirements on fasting days (two non-consecutive days a week) and 70% of their total energy requirements on nonfasting days.
The researchers also note that more studies on long-term adherence to the 5:2 diet are still needed. This diet requires planning and counting calories to follow its guidelines, which may not be suitable for everyone.
Intermittent fasting isn’t for everyone. Some of the possible negative health effects can include:
- fluctuations in free fatty acid levels, which can affect insulin levels
- reductions in insulin sensitivity
- increased risk of disordered eating
The Vegan Diet
A vegan diet does not include animal-based products like meat, poultry, fish, or foods derived from animals like dairy or eggs.
It’s important to note that vegan diets can vary widely and may be balanced or unbalanced, depending on the types of foods they contain.
However, research suggests that whole plant-based vegan diets may support weight loss. They may also have additional benefits, including helping prevent and manage chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and hypertension, supporting the gut microbiome (the healthy bacteria that live in the digestive tract), and improving blood glucose levels.
Following a vegan diet may potentially lead to nutrient deficiencies in:
- vitamin B12
- vitamin D
- calcium
- zinc
- iron
- vitamin E
- essential fatty acids
The Paleo Diet
The paleo diet, short for the paleolithic diet, is based on the diets hunter-gatherers ate thousands of years ago.
Paleo has been classified as a fad diet because it restricts many foods, including dairy, legumes, and grains. Critics have pointed out that eating the same foods that our prehistoric ancestors did isn’t practical or even possible.
However, the paleo diet is a balanced eating plan that eliminates processed foods and encourages its followers to eat a wide variety of plant and animal foods. The paleo diet may support weight loss.