An Overview of 3 Popular Weight Loss Diets

Discussed below are three popular fat-loss programs, Tosca Reno’s Eat-Clean Diet, The Paleo Diet, and The Dukan Diet. Each of these diets has claims of healthy weight loss, sustained weight loss, and increased overall health. Analyzing how these diets compare to each other nutritionally and how each individual diet can support intense training and provide lasting results will highlight the pros and cons of each.

Tosca Reno’s Eat-Clean Diet focuses on eating foods that are in their natural state, meaning that any processed, chemically grown, preservative filled, growth hormone injected foods are off limits. Eating a diet filled with foods that are as close to their natural state as possible helps to remove a lot of unhealthy fats, processed sugars, and white flours. Nutritionally, this recommendation is nothing new and could easily support intense training, as most serious athletes lean towards a “cleaner” living automatically to reap the most benefits from their continuous training. Whether an endurance athlete or power athlete, you could get sufficient nutritional support from this diet. The Eat-Clean Diet is simply a structured philosophy of how to eat to support a cleaner life, eating six small meals a day, avoiding alcohol, sugar, processed foods and focusing on eating fresh made meals. This Eat-Clean Diet, if applied to any average person’s lifestyle, would certainly provide lasting results as the effort to eat clean, even if it is just half the time, is a much healthier lifestyle over all.

The Paleo Diet or the Caveman Diet supports an overall diet consisting of foods that cavemen ate. Basically, if the cavemen didn’t eat it, then you shouldn’t either. That means a diet that consists of fish, grass fed pasture raised meats, vegetables, seasonal fruit, fungi, and nuts. Excluding things such as grains, dairy products, legumes, refined salt, refined sugar, and any processed oils. The Paleo Diet and Eat-Clean Diet are similar in that you are trying to get away from processed foods and get back to eating foods closer to their natural state. However, the Paleo Diet is much more restrictive on what can be eaten. Due to the restrictive nature of the Paleo Diet it would make it very difficult to support intense endurance training as the carb requirement is much higher for endurance athletes and carbs are virtually non-existent in the this diet. Likewise, it would be difficult to support power athletes training on this diet as the number of calories required would be difficult and costly to attain them daily to support that kind of training.  As far as providing weight loss results, anyone who followed the Paleo Diet would certainly see a huge change in their physique and drop weight rapidly, however, due to the restrictiveness of the diet it is unlikely anyone would consistently follow it and that means the results would not be sustainable.

The Dukan Diet is slightly different, as there are stages you follow that each have different nutritional requirements. The first stage, the Attack stage is a protein only diet, consisting of lean meats and non-fat dairy. The second, Cruise stage adds in non-starchy vegetables, allowing you to eat vegetables with your protein most days and a few protein only days still exist throughout this stage. The third stage, known as the Consolidation stage, adds in just a bit more variety, one serving of fruit, two slices of bread, a little bit of cheese, and two servings of starch like pasta or potatoes. Last is the stabilization stage which focuses on maintaining the weight that you have lost, this stage allows you to generally eat what you like, keeping one day of just protein in your week. This diet is all over the place, in comparison to the other two diets, the Paleo and Eat Clean diets are both structured in portion sizes, when and what you eat. The Dukan diet seems to give you a very restrictive diet and no real structure of why you are eating those things, when you should be eating them and what the proportions should be. Due to the strict protein diet it would be very difficult to support any intense training for any kind of athlete, because it would most likely cause fatigue, moodiness, and even muscle mass loss.  As far as lasting results, it is unlikely anyone would stick with the diet to get to the stabilization stage in the first place, and since the stabilization phase states that you can eat whatever you want 6 days a week as long as the seventh day is protein-only, seems unrealistic in balancing out the ability to keep the weight off.

In reviewing all three diets, it seems that the Eat-Clean diet would be the easiest to follow, healthiest choice, and most supportive for anyone looking to maintain weight loss and support intense training.  Due to the restrictiveness of the Paleo and Dukan diets, it is unlikely that individuals would be able to sustain the diet to reap any of the benefits.