Diets You've Tried and Your Critiques

Stuff I tried: IF, South Beach, extreme restriction, Eat to Live, juice "fasting," low fat vegetarian

What worked: Counting calories and consistently hitting my calorie goal. Lost 40+ pounds and have been maintaining since late 2015.

I did juicing once. How awful.

Buying a food scale changed my life. Also reading the experts and success stories. I’m a big fan of “I’ll eat it if it fits into my calories”.

I have never really tried any diet. I was a chubby kid then an obese teen/adult, and when people talked about different diets it just made me feel vulnerable and purposefully ignore any discussion of it.

In my twenties I had a period of eating mostly omelets and beans and I lost about 40 lb. I couldn't afford all that much food and I liked eating that, so it kind of worked. Then I married my first husband and we ate all of the food (mostly in restaurants) so, yikes...

At 30, I was up to my heaviest & I decided I was going to get serious about losing weight and started eating very very little (cucumbers for lunch with a small portion of hummus) but I would always wind up eating way too much later in the day when I became uncomfortably hungry. I did a lot of exercise along with this, and lost about 40 lb but it took me over 4 years...that was depressing.

I tried eating pescetarian with more fruits & vegetables in my diet. I only lost about 6 lb in a year of that and returned to eating meat along with the increased fruit/veg.

Finally in 2013, I started counting calories and (fairly quickly) lost the 90 more pounds I wanted to lose & have maintained by doing this.

It's not just about weight for me. If it were, I'd still be on Adderall, that's the most effective weight loss habit I've ever engaged in.

Diets I've tried are as follows: Keto, vegetarian, cabbage soup diet, calorie counting, IF, and various other meal plans.

For non-drug induced weight loss, it's calorie counting every time. The problem is that I'm not really able to calorie count if my emotional state is out of whack. I lack the energy, motivation, discipline to do it.

For my emotional state, Keto works the best. IF is a close second. I'm clear headed, focused, disciplined, calm, reasonable, stable. It hasn't been studied well so I've no idea what is happening here. It could be that I have allergies/tolerance issues. I could be reaping the neurprotective benefits of Keto that are known about but poorly understood. It also could be something about altering the gut biome. But it happens, it's noticeable, and not just by me.

So, calorie counting with Keto and IF is the best possible way for me. It isn't easy but neither is how I feel/look when I eat a lot of carbs or how terrible I feel on every psychotropic medication I've ever tried. Turning down cupcakes is the hardship I choose out of the many available to me.

I can't really isolate effects of diet, though. Everything is so interdependent. Changing my diet changes so much in my life.

I've lost weight twice. First time (in 2002), I learned to cook well, started making my own meals regularly, got back into exercise (after blowing everything off for a stressful job), and mostly relied on writing down what I'd been eating, seeing where the extra calories were from and eliminating snacking and mindless eating. I learned a bunch about nutrition during that experience, read a number of books, including Walter Willett's, as well as some anti dieting books like Laura Fraser's Losing It, and a bunch just about food and cooking. Started going to green markets, getting a CSA, so on. Nutrition and exercise became hobbies.

I kept it off for over 5 years, but then had some struggles with depression, started eating more and exercising left and struggling with emotional eating. Gradually regained until January 2014, when I decided enough was enough. Then I used MFP, again focused on eating just regular meals, no snacking, no mindless eating. I already had pretty healthy eating patterns and cooked from whole foods. I did get back into exercising regularly again -- basically biking and running plus some swimming, various race goals.

I've never done a named diet, although I did experiment with paleo for a while when losing this last time (I lost most of my weight just eating based on what I consider a healthy eating pattern but eating all foods). I tried out keto at maintenance for a couple of months, but that was mainly just as another experiment.

My mom had tons of diet books (like the Beverly Hills Diet) when I was growing up and I was fascinated with them but could never actually follow a named diet, I get rebellious and skeptical quite easily (which ended my flirtation with paleo too).