How to Choose a Diet for Weight Loss

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Choosing the right dietary plan for weight loss is highly personal, and what works for others, may or may not work for you. With so many diets out there, how can you choose a diet to follow?

My team and I have supported the weight loss of hundreds of individuals, and based on our experiences, let’s see if I can summarize some of the ways you can use to choose a diet that works for you.

Basic diets

If you’re starting out, I usually suggest first taking a look at what I call the “basic” diets.

I say basic not necessarily because they’re easy to follow, nor are they somehow less effective than more complex diets, but because they’re simple to understand without too much explanation, and they don’t go too deep into these medical hypotheses as to why they work.

These basic diets are also highly flexible, and can be easily combined into other diets later on, making them an ideal starter diet.

Also, not every diet is going to work for everyone, and the key is finding out which ones work best for you. So let’s take a look at some examples of basic diets.

CICO

Despite the sheer amount of diets out there, they all work on one basic premise. That is, to lose weight the amount of calories you eat has to be less than the calories that you use.

This basic premise is the foundation of one of the most basic diets called Calories In Calories Out, or CICO.

The premise of the CICO diet is that if a person consumes fewer calories than they burn, they will lose weight, and if they consume more calories than they burn, they will gain weight.

CICO is kind of the no-bs approach to weight loss. It’s simple, straightforward, and quite effective when done correctly. It’s also quite flexible, and there’s nothing you can or can’t eat, as long as they fit within the calorie limits.

There are downsides to this approach of course. The biggest being that you’ll need to calculate things, and accurately track and log the calories with a food tracking app like MyFitnessPal.

It’s unfortunately quite common for people to eyeball or estimate the calories of what they’re eating, which often leads to underestimations.

For some people, this is extremely tedious, and for others, it triggers a negative psychological response. Some people may become overly focused on calorie intake and expenditure, leading to disordered eating behaviors.

Also calories from different foods affect you differently, and 250 calories from a bagel is not going to be as filling as 250 calories from a steak.

CICO doesn’t technically take this into account, so you might be hungry all the time, and find it difficult to control cravings if you’re strictly doing CICO and your diet is highly imbalanced.

That being said, if you have no foundational knowledge of weight loss, and are a complete beginner, I usually suggest trying this approach first since it keeps things quite simple, as long as you’re willing to do some calculating and weighing of foods.

Literally all you need to do is input numbers and try to maintain a calorie deficit.

Now I don’t usually recommend this approach in isolation in the long-term, as it’s too basic, and I suggest combining it with other dietary strategies once you’ve gotten the hang of it.

Low carb

Another common approach is low carbohydrate diets. These diets reduce the amount of carbohydrates you eat, so avoiding things like bread, pasta, rice, and sugary foods, while increasing the intake of foods that are high in protein and fat.

Low carbohydrate diets may be additionally beneficial to diabetics, by helping to improve insulin levels, and helping to improve metabolism.

Also, going low carb doesn’t require you to log your food intake or do any calculations, since you’ll be following a list of foods to have. Being such a general dietary restriction, it’s also quite flexible, and allows for a large variety of dietary choices.

However this strategy, even if very effective, usually only works at the beginning, and long-term weight loss often requires more careful food selection and tracking later on, especially if you plan on losing large amounts of weight.

Also, low carb diets can be extremely difficult for those who crave carbohydrates, and finding carbohydrate alternatives or ways to mitigate these cravings is important, at least at the beginning when the carb withdrawal symptoms are strongest.

Low carb diets also tend to cause or aggravate constipation in certain people.

Going low carb is another good basic diet for patients who are looking to lose weight and don’t want to do calculations or log their foods, since it can often get weight loss started without the need to do those things.

Keto

Keto, which is a high fat diet, is a specific variation of a low carbohydrate diet.

The core tenant of keto is that the lack of carbs for the body to burn leads to ketosis, in which the body burns an alternative form of fuel called ketone bodies. This shift in metabolism has a number of potential health benefits including weight loss.

High fat diets help manage appetite, and because fat is filling, you often don’t need as much of it to feel full, just that it usually takes more time to feel full, so you’ll really need to practice slowing down your eating if you’re a fast eater.

Again, you may not even need to track or log foods to begin losing weight, although weight loss can stall later on, without the help of careful food logging and tracking.

Keto may also be beneficial for people with blood sugar or insulin issues.

However, high fat diets like keto have some clinicians worried about the possible long-term health risks due to their extreme nature.

Whether or not this worry is well rooted in evidence is another issue. Regardless, it’s important to remember that although a higher fat diet may help encourage ketosis, the keto diet is not the only diet that can generate ketone bodies.

As long as your body is deprived of carbohydrates to burn as fuel, such as in fasting, or a very low carbohydrate diet, your body will also go into ketosis, without the need to have so much fat in your diet.

Again, keto is another good basic diet for patients who are looking to lose weight and don’t want to log or track their foods, since it can often get weight loss started without the need to track.

High protein

High protein is also kind of a variation of a low carb diet. High protein diets help manage appetite, and because protein is filling, you shouldn’t need as much carbohydrate to feel full. You may also not need to track your food intake as much to begin losing weight.

Similar to keto, high protein diets have some clinicians worried about the possible long-term health risks.

Also, your weight loss may plateau eventually, if you don’t track your food more carefully over time.

Nevertheless, high protein diets are another good basic diet for patients who are looking to lose weight and don’t want to log or track their foods.

Intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting is another popular strategy used, and it involves controlling the timing of when you eat, rather than what you eat.

So people will typically only eat within a set time window, usually 8 hours, and fast for the remaining 16 hours. The basic premise is that by limiting your eating window, you end up eating less overall.

Because only the timing is controlled, you technically don’t need to limit what you’re eating. So there are no hard restrictions. Also, setting a time to eat may be easier to follow than having to watch what you eat.

Although it can be quite effective even by itself, it’s usually much more effective when used in combination with other dietary strategies like low carb.

For some people, intermittent fasting by itself is not very effective, especially if you have a habit of overeating or rewarding yourself by eating a lot when you’ve successfully completed a fast.

Some people skip breakfast, but overeat a huge lunch and dinner, and end up eating more overall calories in a day.

So intermittent fasting can work, but if your idea of intermittent fasting is simply binging on whatever you want during the 8 hour eating window, then this strategy is not going to work for you.

That being said, if you are starting weight loss, but don’t want to limit what foods you can eat, or have to log and track any of your foods, intermittent fasting is a legitimate strategy that you can try, as long as you can control impulses to overeat.

Unfortunately, it’s effectiveness plateaus quickly if you don’t eventually control the components of your diet.

Complex diets

You may have noticed that the basic diets I’ve just talked about are based on controlling very large food elements. For CICO it was food calories.

For low carb, keto, and high protein, it was different macronutrients, namely carbs, fat, and protein. For intermittent fasting it was timing.

These are the easiest to understand and follow for beginners since they are huge food categories and offer a huge variety of foods within their rules.

More complex diets include more specific dietary lists, which may not be as flexible, and often have other factors to take into account, making them sometimes more confusing to follow for beginners. Having example dietary plans for more complex diets can be helpful to get started.

Mediterranean diet

An example of a more complex diet, is the Mediterranean diet, which is based on the Mediterranean way of living, and allows for high intakes of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and nuts.

The Mediterranean diet also includes moderate amounts of poultry, fish and dairy products, such as yogurt and cheese, as well as small amounts of red meat.

One of the key principles of the Mediterranean diet is the use of fresh, whole, and minimally processed ingredients, rather than relying on heavily processed or refined foods.

There are many researched health benefits to the Mediterranean diet, including weight loss, and many clinicians like this diet for being more balanced than some of the other diets.

However, this food list is more specific than the basic low carb or keto diets, and as a result, is less flexible. If you don’t like eating Mediterranean-style foods, you’re going to hate this diet.

Also, because the Mediterranean diet focuses on high-quality, fresh ingredients, you might find it more costly to buy and more difficult to prepare these types of meals.

So although I believe the Mediterranean diet is an excellent diet to follow for weight loss, I don’t usually recommend it immediately for someone learning to lose weight, since there are a lot of components to it that are not easy to understand or implement, and can add unnecessary complexity to a weight loss diet.

DASH diet

The DASH diet is another example of a more complex diet. It was originally designed to lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease, but has a lot of good research for other purposes, including weight loss.

The DASH diet emphasizes the consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products, and limits the intake of saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, and added sugars.

The DASH diet also includes moderate amounts of lean proteins, such as poultry, fish, and beans.

Again, the diet is more specific about its recommendations, and includes components that are beneficial for heart health, which is great, but if you’re focused on weight loss, it could be somewhat overwhelming for you.

Other diets

Generally speaking, the 5 basic diets I just talked about: controlling calories, limiting carbs, high fat, high protein, and intermittent fasting, are the most common ways to achieve longer-term weight loss. Many effective weight loss diets are simply variations of these basic diets in some way, shape, or form.

Now you might be wondering about some other diets, like for example a vegetarian diet. In our experience, simply implementing a standard vegetarian diet is often not enough to affect weight loss.

I’m not saying it’s a bad diet or anything, but some diets are just not focused on weight loss, and implementing a vegetarian diet by itself may not realistically help you lose much weight.

You’ll often need to combine a vegetarian diet with one of the basic diets I talked about, and do something like a low-carb vegetarian diet, or a calorie controlled vegetarian diet to achieve a significant amount of weight loss.

How to start choosing a diet

There are many more types of diets, and there really is no best way to start choosing. But there is a best time to start, which is right now.

If you’re completely lost as to where to start, I usually suggest seriously trying one of the basic diets.

Once you’ve found a basic diet that works, you can seek out more basic or complex diets to combine with it.

For example, you could start with a low carb diet, and once you get the hang of it and are losing weight, you could add on the Mediterranean diet, and start focusing on fresh veggies and meat, while minimizing the whole wheat and legume components of the Mediterranean diet, since these are sources of carbs, and you’re still trying to focus on low carb to lose weight.

When you get the hang of that, you could then add on Calories In Calories Out, and start tracking the calories and weight of your food, so that you continue to lose weight.

Over time, you should start to understand what foods are more beneficial for your weight loss, and what foods you should stay away from, without the need of a diet to follow.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to combine more diets or go more complex, and there’s no need to change your basic diet if it’s still working for you.

Just that if you do decide to change it, then you already have a good foundation on which to build these changes.

Also, if you have some experience losing weight, I strongly suggest drawing from those previous experiences.

If the Atkins diet worked well for you in the past, you could start with a low carb diet, since the Atkins diet is just a branded low carb diet.

If Weight Watchers worked really well for you, you could start with CICO, because Weight Watchers is essentially a fancy CICO diet that’s been simplified.

The best diet?

The truth of the matter is that there is no one best diet that’s the most effective for everyone.

Any diet claiming to be the best or most effective diet for everyone is just being disingenuous because that would be like saying everyone losing weight is the same, and has the exact same needs.

Also, there is likely no one single diet that is perfect for you either, and you’ll likely need to change your diet over time to fit your changing needs and requirements as you lose more weight. Finding a diet that works for you is a continuous journey, much like your weight loss journey.

In my opinion, the more time and effort you put into learning about yourself and your food is more important in the long-run, as it helps you to make small discoveries along the way that can feel like game changers, as well as eventually create a specific diet that works for you.

Strictly following diets can help more in the short-run, kind of to get you started, since it gives you a framework to work off of.

But without more knowledge about your food and how your body interacts with it, you can really only work within that diet’s framework, and if you don’t continue to follow that rigid framework, you might just fall off your diet.

Another problem with following more complex diets right off the bat, is that some diets claim to work under a particular theory which may be misleading or incorrect, and if you view all the food you eat under that incorrect theory, you’re going to be hamstrung when trying to make better dietary choices.

So whenever you choose a diet to start, always remember that these are guidelines, and you need to tweak and make changes to the diet to make it the best diet for you.

Learn more about

• Intermittent Fasting for Weight Loss
• How To Start Your Weight Loss Journey
• What To Eat To Lose Belly Fat – Protein and Fat
• Foods To Avoid To Lose Belly Fat
• Other foods for weight loss

See also

• 
  The Glycemic Index Diet: an overview
  The Glycemic Index diet focuses on foods that are lower in glycemic index and load, which can help with diabetes and weight loss.
• 
  Low FODMAP Diet: an overview
  The low FODMAP diet aims to reduce certain types of carbs that can cause bloating and gas. It can sometimes help reduce symptoms of IBS.
• 
  Paleo diet: an overview
  The paleo diet replicates our ancestors diet with wild game, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, while avoiding dairy, grains, and legumes.
• 
  Anti-inflammatory diet: an overview
  The anti-inflammatory diet focuses on eating foods that have anti-inflammatory properties, and avoiding pro-inflammatory foods.
• 
  Gastric Balloon Diet Plan
  Once you have a gastric balloon, properly transitioning from liquids on day 1 to 3, to solids by day 14, is key to success on your balloon.