Temporary Diets, Lifestyle Diets: Which Diet Can I Stick to? Article written by the Spencer Brothers on 7/28/2021. This post contains affiliate links, you can find out more in the disclaimer at the bottom of the blog.
Which Diet Can I Stick to?
We hope that by breaking down all of these diets, you may be able to answer the question ‘Which diet can I stick to?’ Always remember the best diet is that one that you can go through with. We have broken the diets into three categories to help you figure out which may work best for you: Lifestyle Diets, Health Diets, and Temporary Diets.
Lifestyle diets are those that were created to be stuck to for the rest of your life. Health diets are those that were developed in order to focus on eliminating adverse affects from either diseases or other foods. Lastly, temporary diets are those that you only have to do for a limited time in order to see results.
Lifestyles Diets
Mediterranean Diet
Focus: Removal of overly processed and refined foods
Diet Style: Geographical, Lifestyle, Heart Health
Brief Description: This diet focusses on eating foods that are popularly found around the Mediterranean region. This consists mostly of vegetables, fruits, olive oil, whole grains, and moderate amounts of healthy protein.
Vegetarian Diet
Macro Focus: Removal of animal based meats (proteins)
Diet Style: Lifestyle, health
Brief Description: Whether done for health reasons or environmental, a vegetarian diet consists of completely eliminating animal based meat from one’s diet.
Vegan Diet
Macro Focus: Removal of any animal product (proteins)
Diet Style: Lifestyle, health
Brief Description: This diet is similar to the vegetarian diet, but takes it one step further to remove all animal based products. This would include dairy, eggs, honey, and any other items that is based on or provided by animals or insects.
Pescatarian Diet
Macro Focus: Protein, only animal based protein is seafood
Diet Style: Lifestyle, health
Brief Description: This diet is just like the vegetarian diet, but allows for the consumption of seafood (Fish, shellfish, etc)
Flexitarian Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of animal based products (proteins)
Diet Style: Lifestyle, health
Brief Description: This is basically a less strict version of a vegan diet. It focusses less on the complete removal of consuming animal based protein, but simply on reducing it.
Nordic Diet
Macro Focus: Removal of overly processed and refined foods
Diet Style: Geographical, Lifestyle, Heart Health
Brief Description: The Nordic diet focusses on eating good, healthy food that would commonly be found in the Nordics (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and Greenland). This is mostly consisting of whole grain cereals, oats, berries and other fruits and veggies.
Atkins Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of Carbohydrates
Diet Style: Lifestyle
Brief Description: Perhaps one of the most famous diets of all time, the Atkins diet focuses on reducing the amount of carbohydrates (especially sugar and white flour) in one’s diet.
Paleo Diet
Macro Focus: N/A
Diet Style: Lifestyle, Natural
Brief Description: The Paleo diet attempts to bring humanity back to the days of good, clean solid eating. It focuses on eating plants, meats, and grains that would have been around during the paleolithic era.
WW Diet
Macro Focus: N/A
Diet Style: Tracking
Brief Description: The WW Diet (Formerly known as Weight Watchers Diet) is a program developed to help someone keep track of what kind of calories one eats during the day. This allows for a variety of food to be eaten, but some foods ‘cost more’ than others and may need to be balance by ‘point free’ foods.
South Beach Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of Saturated Fats and Sugars
Diet Style: Lifestyle, Health
Brief Description: The South Beach Diet was developed to encourage heart health. It does this by reducing saturated fats from one’s diet (such as dairy, fatty meats) as well as most sugars.
Seven Day Rescue Diet
Macro Focus: All
Diet Style: Lifestyle, Health
Brief Description: The Seven Day Rescue diet pushes towards whole foods and grains, while also eliminating all animal products and oils. This was designed to counter the inflammatory effects of many meats and processed carbs.
Dukan Diet
Macro Focus: High Protein, Low Carb
Diet Style: Lifestyle
Brief Description: The Dukan Diet is based on mostly eating proteins while reducing carbohydrates. They claim this combination will have immediate weight loss results.
Trim Healthy Mama
Macro Focus: Balancing/alternating carbs and fats for each meal.
Diet Style: Lifestyle
Brief Description: THM focuses on eating wholesome foods that derive from the earth and if weight loss is the focus then one would separate carb and fat intake meals. It is a diabetic friendly way of eating that has a heavy focus on balancing blood sugar.
Health Diets
DASH Diet
Macro Focus: Carbs (Mostly sugars) and Bad Fat
Diet Style: Health, Lifestyle
Brief Description: Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension or DASH diet was developed in order to provide a heart healthy meal plan in order to reduce hypertension. This is done by the removal of highly processed carbs (mostly sugars) and fat (Candy, chips, sodas, etc).
MIND Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of Fats
Diet Style: Health
Brief Description: the MIND diet was designed to boost brain health by reducing unhealthy fats and focussing on clean meats, veggies, fruits, and whole grains
Mayo Clinic Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of Fats and Sweets
Diet Style: Weight Management
Brief Description: The Mayo Clinic Diet takes the food pyramid from the 80’s and 90’s and updates it. It focuses on eating pyramid style in the following order: Veggies, fruits, carbs, proteins, fats, then sweets.
TLC Diet
Macro Focus: Low Fat
Diet Style: Health, Lifestyle
Brief Description: The Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLC diet was designed to reduce cholesterol. It accomplishes this by reducing high fats in your diet
Ornish Diet
Macro Focus: Fat (Reduction of Dairy Products)
Diet Style: Health, Lifestyle
Brief Description: The Ornish Diet was designed in order to reduce the chances of many heart diseases as well as type 2 diabetes. It does this be only allowing a minimal amount of fat during the day.
The Zone Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of Fat
Diet Style: Health
Brief Description: The Zone Diet was developed to provide an anti-inflammatory diet. It does this by reducing the amount of carbs while focusing on eating clean proteins such as lean beef, chicken, seafood, eggs, and plant based proteins.
Lean Muscle Diet
Macro Focus: Unhealthy fats and carbs
Diet Style: Health, Lifestyle
Brief Description: The Lean Muscle diet combines eating lean meats, healthy grains, fruits and veggies with weight lifting processes in order to not only lose weight, but to gain lean muscle.
Temporary Diets
Ketogenic Diet
Macro Focus: High Fat
Diet Style: Temporary
Brief Description: The Ketogenic Diet’s goals is getting your body to use ketosis, burning carbohydrates for energy, in order to burn off fat. There are quite a few side effects for doing this long term, but can provide some quick weight loss and allows maintenance afterwards.
Whole 30
Macro Focus: Removal of processed foods, grains, sugars.
Diet Style: Temporary (30 Days)
Brief Description: The focus of Whole 30 is to consume wholesome natural foods for 30 days. The list of rules are fairly lengthy but, after the 30 days are up one slowly begins to incorporate different foods back into your diet to see how your body reacts to each food. There is an opportunity to learn alot about yourself through this experience.
Volumetrics Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of all macros
Diet Style: Low calorie, possibly temporary
Brief Description: The volumetrics diet has you focus on eating low caloric foods (fruits and veggies) in larger quantities, then also allow reasonable amounts of whole grains. This diet also encourages sparingly eating breads, desserts, and fried foods. Depending on how it is used, it can be used for quick weight loss.
Bulletproof Diet
Macro Focus: Focus on eating healthy fats
Diet Style: Temporary
Brief Description: The Bulletproof diet combines the guidances from the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting in order to create a fat burning, muscle building program.
Elimination Diet
Macro Focus: N/A
Diet Style: Temporary, Health
Brief Description: The Elimination diet was designed to help people listen to their bodies and determine what foods are causing them inflammation or other adverse health effects. You eliminate suspect foods from your diet and see how your body reacts.
Intermittent Fasting Diet
Macro Focus: Scheduling your meals
Diet Style: Temporary, Lifestyle
Brief Description: Intermittent fasting focuses on switching back and forth between eating normally (or healthily) and fasting. This is meant to reduce the number of calories someone consumes during the day while also allowing the body to use it’s stored fat to provide energy.
3 Day Military Diet
Macro Focus: Reduction of overall calories eaten over a short period of time
Diet Style: Temporary
Brief Description: The 3 Day Military is a temporary designed for quick weight loss. It is meant to allow for 1100-1400 calories per day for three days. It focuses on eating foods that are high in proteins and low in carbs. This diet can be dangerous for those with adverse health and shouldn’t be done long term by anybody.
Thank you for reading this Why is Home Cooking Better than Eating Out article. Check out our other articles below:
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–Why is Home Cooking Better than Eating Out?
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