Low carb, low fat, high protein, alternate day fasting, cutting out ultra processed food, eating multiple small meals a day, time restricted feeding, Keto, Paleo, you name it, what do they all have in common (besides energy balance)? They all rely on some variation of the 3 and only 3 ways to cut calories.

Although all diets claim to have their own “special secrets”, “magic recipes” and/or fancy narratives on how and why they work, they all use some combination of portion control, food frequency, and energy density to reduce the number of calories you eat each day.

We have 41 different well studied diet types, and yet, they all depend on just three calorie cutting methods. In today’s episode, The Nutrition Grouch discusses how to utilize these three strategies in establishing your nutrition rules and controlling your food environment to create a diet that you can stick to for the long term.

Only you can decide what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. There’s just too many variables and too many decisions to be made for someone else to tell you how to do it. It’s daunting and difficult to start. But it’s worth it. You get out, what you put into it. Take the time to start building a solid diet foundation today.

Some of the topics in today’s episode include:

• The 3 and only 3 ways to cut calories (1:50)
• Fad diets are a one trick pony (4:02)
• Fad diets: an overly crude and blunt instrument for a complex problem (4:43)
• People hate uncertainty, fad diets solve this (5:46)
• Food logging: you ate what you ate, big deal, please don’t take it personally (7:29)
• Fad diets are a “quick fix, get rich quick scheme” often ending in ruin (8:54)
• Should you build your house on sand or stone? (12:20)
• Fad diets are fool’s gold (13:30)
• The portion size, food frequency, and energy density of breakfast tacos (14:07)
• My reluctance to use reduced fat and/or artificially sweetened products (24:49)
• Food logging sucks but you have to do it (28:10)
• Weight loss should be psychology based, not math based (33:27)