Diet is probably the most unnecessarily confusing part of health and fitness. You’ll hear one person swear by a diet for health and weight-loss, only to hear the exact opposite kind of diet doing the same wonders for somebody else. John tells you going vegan brought him his Adonis-like figure. The following week, Steve tells you doing a carnivore diet brought him his Adonis-like figure. What’s going on here? How can they do completely opposite things and get the same results? Does everything work? Does nothing work? Who is Adonis? Most diets fall into one of a few big categories. Let’s have a look at some of them.

“They Ate This Way Back Then” Diets

            One of the most popular categories of diet, these diets say that because people in whatever time period they’ve cherry-picked ate that way, that’s how we should eat. Mediterranean diet? Eat like Italians in the 1960’s. Paleo diet? Eat like cavemen. Raw food diet? Eat like we did before we discovered fire. You can see the problem here, I hope. The recommendations are based speculating about what people or animals ate, then modeling our behavior on that. What gets forgotten is that just because people ate like that back then, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to eat. In caveman times, people walked everywhere. Does this mean we should abandon cars, planes, horses, and boats and simply go back to exclusively trudging from point A to point B? Also, nobody seems to be able to agree on which “back then” is the right one. The 1960’s? The Stone Age? Pre-Stone Age? Personally, I’m waiting for somebody to tell us we should be eating like Devonian tetrapods. After all, we evolved from them, didn’t we?

Elimination Diets

            “Carbs are bad!” No, wait. “Fat is bad!” No, no, that’s not right. “It’s gluten that’s the demon molecule!” “Meat is bad!” “Plants are bad!” Whenever you see a diet that says something like that, you’ve found an elimination diet. According to some proponents of these diets, if you simply remove the unholy food or molecule, you can eat whatever you want and stay healthy. This is the food equivalent of telling somebody “As long as you don’t spend money on designer clothes, you can spend it on whatever you want!” Sadly, finance doesn’t work like that and neither does food.

Fasting Diets

            This encompasses everything that says “Don’t eat for X hours, then eat a lot.” This has been going in and out of style for decades now, the two most recent versions being the Warrior Diet and Intermittent Fasting. Some adherents saying that you can eat what you like as long as it falls into the eating window. A common protocol is only eating within an eight hour window during the day.

            “I’m doing intermittent fasting. If you wake up at 7, don’t eat until 12. Then you can eat between the hours of 12pm and 8pm. It’s really great.”

            “So you eat at 12pm and again in the evening. How is that different from just skipping breakfast?”

            “It’s just…different.”

I understand that there are lots of ways to make your eating windows. Some advocate for 8 hours of eating per day, some for 4, some for every other day. Still, they’re all kind of the same. Don’t eat for X time, then eat lots.

“Buy My Product” Diets

            These are easy to spot because they have, obviously, a product’s name attached. The Slim Fast diet, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, GOOP, Nutrisystem, Special K diet, and the Subway diet all fall into this category. Usually what these offer is food that is already figured out for you. Just follow the protocol (which means eat their food) and you’ll drop weight. All you have to do is never, ever leave them. Kind of like a psychotic significant other with severe attachment issues.

Pure Sorcery Diets

            Oh boy, here we go. We’ve gone off the deep end with these diets. This is where you’ll find things like the Blood Type diet, Master Cleanse, the DNA diet, Macrobiotic diet (it’s about balancing your yin and yang,) and Fletcherism (chew all your food until it is liquid, then wash down with water.) If people are telling you things like “it’ll balance your acidity” or “it’ll open your chakras” or “it removes toxins,” then you’ve stumbled upon sorcery. If I want sorcery, I’ll go read Harry Potter not buy a diet.

            There is absolutely no shortage of misinformation, false promise, and just plain nonsense floating around out there in the diet-sphere. Some of it is benign, some of it is just plain lunacy. Though it’s good to know what the bad and the ugly are, how can you tell which diets are good? What should you know when considering whether or not to try a diet? In the next article, we’ll cover just that. You’ll get some basic guidelines and questions to ask to figure out whether you’re dealing with the real thing or just another snake oil sales pitch.