Every Diet Kind Of Works. Here’s Why.
Keto. Carnivore. Paleo. Intermittent fasting. Every few years one of these takes over, and every time, people swear by it. The results feel real because they often are, at first. But the reason why is a lot less exciting than the marketing suggests.
Most diets that produce early results are doing the same few things under different names: reducing your options (which reduces calories almost automatically), pushing you toward whole foods, and increasing protein. That's it. There's no metabolic magic happening. When someone switches from a high-carb, processed food diet to keto, they're not unlocking "fat-burning mode," they're just finally eating real food with adequate protein. Of course, the diet gets the credit but it's the basics that actually did the work.
The dramatic early weight loss you see on low-carb diets is mostly water. Here's why: your body stores carbohydrates as glycogen in your muscles and liver, and it holds onto three to four grams of water for every gram of glycogen stored. When you cut carbs dramatically, your body burns through those glycogen stores fast and releases all that water with it. We're talking several pounds in the first week, sometimes more! The scale moves, your clothes feel looser, and it feels like the diet is working.
Well... it is working, just not in the way you think. You haven't lost fat yet. You've just lost the water your body was holding alongside the carbs you stopped eating. The moment you reintroduce carbs, glycogen refills and that water comes back. This is also why people feel like they "ruined everything" after one off-plan weekend. The scale jumps and they assume they gained fat overnight. You can't gain several pounds of fat in two days (1 lb of fat = 3,500 calories!). You just refilled your glycogen stores.
What these diets also have in common is that rigid rules feel really good in the short term. When the list of what you can eat fits on an index card, you stop obsessing over every decision and feel a sense of mental relief. But it usually doesn't last. After a month or two of restriction, the food noise doesn't stay quiet anymore. It just comes back louder, because now you're also managing deprivation, tracking what you're avoiding, and negotiating with yourself about what counts as compliant. It doesn't mean you're a failure, that
A useful question to ask about any eating approach: can I actually do this in December around the holidays? At a wedding? On a work trip? If the answer is no, it doesn't matter what the first six weeks look like.
The diets that last aren't the ones with the best rules. They're the ones built around principles flexible enough to survive real life. It's about eating mostly whole foods, getting enough protein, not skipping vegetables, and not treating every social event like a free for all.