Why You Should Avoid Restrictive Diets Like Keto

There are so many restrictive diets today like keto, the carnivore diet, and many others, that promise to change your life, making you fitter, healthier, and happier. If you want to enjoy cooking and eating, I think you should avoid them completely. Here’s why.

While these diets can irrefutably be good for your health, & help remove bad ingredients from your diet, they’re not great if you like eating a variety foods, cooking the meals, eating with or cooking for friends, or visiting cafes or restaurants.

The main reason most people go on restrictive diets is to lose weight. They’ll cut out carbs completely, or stop eating any fat or sugar. This just shows a complete lack of understanding about what causes weight loss to occur at all.

As we all (hopefully) know, weight loss occurs when your body maintains a caloric deficit. Nothing more, nothing less. Restrictive diets make maintaining this in the long term more difficult than just exercising regularly & eating varied whole foods.

For a balance of health and variety, I vouch for a diet based on an ancestral approach to cooking and eating, focusing on animal proteins, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, grains, legumes, dairy, & healthy fats such as olive oil and butter. You can make so many meals with this!

One practice that I believe people should incorporate more into their lives to make their eating habits better and remove much of the need for extreme restrictive diets is intuitive eating, and certain principles related to it.

Intuitive eating essentially means paying more attention to what your body is actually feeling at any given moment when food may be involved. Focus on when to eat, what to eat, when to stop eating, and the sensations of your body.

If you want to improve your eating habits without overly restrictive diets, my main piece of advice would be to optimise your sleep. Seriously. Having a normal sleeping pattern is one of the best things you can do for your body, both physically and mentally.

Sleep deprivation sabotages your relationship with food, increasing your cravings for highly processed junk foods and exacerbating your focus on negative information associated with yourself and your decision making, leading to negative feedback loops.

I’m not a dietitian, but I am someone who loves cooking and eating a varied diet, has experimented with it a lot, and is reasonably healthy. You I don’t have to limit yourself too much, just eat real whole foods and exercise! 

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