Any diet that hyper-focuses on a singular concept such as ketosis, plant based, or paleo ultimately ends up facing the same challenges: What do people do when they stop losing weight? - Do they Keto/vegan/paleo harder? (to borrow from L. Norton) This is where energy content and calories become a necessary metric for understanding and taking control of bodyweight.
Many people don't realize that any structure that limits dietary choice results in weight loss, and most people overeat on easily accessible, shelf-stable, carb dominant, convenience type foods that wouldn't normally fit into a keto type diet plan. So we eliminated the foods you overeat on, and you lost weight.....go figure!
Of course, if the goal is just being healthy, then that is cool, but we can't then make the leap and say that it is mechanistically unique - that is to say, it is not biologically or chemically more effective than any other diet, this just happens to be one of the ones that limits their trigger foods.
Someone who has never actually formally followed a diet plan, but who's always been insecure about their weight, will get excited about losing 1-2lb, while others need to lose 5-10lb to get excited. In reality, your weight could fluctuate by that much in a day just due to changes in hydration. This is why I, and other experienced diet coaches, do not fuss about daily weight changes. We much prefer to get a weekly average, and then compare weekly averages to see the bigger trend.
Just for example I lost 60 total lifetime pounds from 228 to 168, and I look completely different - total body re-composition, not just fat loss. As I've said before, losing fat isn't hard in an absolute sense, because of it's simplicity. Eat less than you were before and you will start losing fat right away. But gaining muscle is a process that takes years of hard labour - voluntarily mind you.
People fail to grasp this on the whole, and they conflate a successful diet with one that
- doesn't make them feel completely awful,
- eats up their muscle mass,
- leaves them only with the energy to train like a kitten, and
- really only removes the obvious junk from their diet, that if they would have just done in the first place they would've gotten the same result as the fad diet
Just as a workout should give you more than it takes from you, I truly believe people would be happier, more motivated, and more fulfilled if they treated their diet the same way. Taking an overly or unnecessarily restrictive approach is unlikely to check those boxes, and as I've said before, diets are not effective due to what makes them different, but by what makes them similar - a caloric deficit.
By the way, have you downloaded my FREE COOKBOOK yet!????