5 tips for finding the best diet that works for you

With dieting, the conventional wisdom says a person needs to be in calorie-deficit mode to lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight; if you eat fewer calories, you lose weight.

With dieting, the conventional wisdom says a person needs to be in calorie-deficit mode to lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight; if you eat fewer calories, you lose weight.

But is that view really right? Doesn’t the kind of food you consume (keto, low-fat, vegan, etc.) and how often you eat (time-restricted eating versus six small meals) matter, too?

Many studies have shown the conventional wisdom — calories in, calories out — is mostly true.

“It is not the only thing, but it is the main thing. And it’s mostly diet, not exercise, because exercising makes you hungrier and you eat more calories,” Christopher Gardner, the Rehnborg Farquhar professor of medicine at Stanford University, told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the podcast "Chasing Life" recently.

Gardner, who is also the director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, has spent decades studying nutrition and food patterns. He was the senior author of a November 2023 study published in the journal JAMA that looked at the cardiometabolic effects of a healthy omnivorous diet versus a healthy vegan diet in identical twins, which was made into the 2024 Netflix limited series “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment.”

Gardner said a very methodical and comprehensive analysis of approximately 20 different diets was published jointly by the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology and the Obesity Society in 2013.

“At the end of the day, they said, bottom line is on every one of these diets, people lose weight when there’s a calorie deficit. That was one of the main conclusions, and it was sort of as simple as that.”