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By Matt Fitzgerald Published 1 day ago Cutting out food with no nutritional value is the simplest diet there is.

Ignore the smoke and mirrors. Avoiding junk food is the way to go.

Cutting out food with no nutritional value is the simplest diet there is.

There are a million ways you could change your diet to promote weight loss. The options include eating less carbohydrate or less fat, eating more protein, eating more frequently, eating smaller portions, eating more fiber, going vegetarian, and switching from processed to whole grains, to name a few. But of the million ways you could change your diet to lose weight, which is the most effective? In other words, if you could make only one change, what should that change be?

Before I answer this question, let me first define effective. Obviously, a dietary change must first of all produce weight loss when practiced correctly and consistently to be considered effective for weight loss. But in my view thats not enough. I believe a dietary change must also be relatively easy to practice correctly and consistently to be considered truly effective for weight loss. In other words, a change must work in practice for real people rather than just in theory.

There are many dietary changes that work for weight loss only in theory. The most extreme example is the very low-calorie diet (VLCD). If you reduce your daily caloric intake to the bare minimum required to maintain basic health (which is about 800 calories per day for the average person), you will lose a lot of weight. However, you will also be wracked with hunger all day long. Very few people are psychologically capable of sustaining a VLCD. Thus, its effective in theory but not in practice.

Some dietary changes for weight loss are ineffective in practice because, like the VLCD, they require inordinate willpower. Others are ineffective because they are too complex, too weird, or too countercultural for most people to practice correctly and consistently. Glycemic index-based diets are an example of the too-complex kind, grain-free diets an example of the countercultural kind. Sure, there are some people who get good results from such diets, but they dont work for the majority.

By my definition, the single most effective dietary change for weight loss is the elimination of junk food from the diet. This is true for two reasons. First, junk food really is the reason most of us could stand to lose a few pounds. Its a prosaic fact thats almost disappointing to accept, but its a fact nonetheless. Science and commerce have created a public mindset whereby we want the cause of our fatness to be revealed as a breakthrough discovery and we want the solution to our weight issues to be novel and preferably available in pill form. But this mindset serves to do nothing besides distract us from the boring reality that the difference between our actual and ideal weights is accounted for entirely by fried foods, fast food, snack chips, soft drinks, candy, and other sweets.

The second reason that eliminating junk food from the diet is the single most effective weight-loss measure is that it is simple almost to the point of absurdity. If a person knows only one thing about nutrition, she probably knows what constitutes junk food. The average five-year-old comprehends the difference between food and junk food, and this transparency matters. Studies have found that the more complex dieters perceive their nutrition programs to be, the sooner they abandon them.

But wait a minute: The reason we eat junk food in the first place is that its delicious and tempting. Is a junk food-free diet truly more realistic than any other diet? Let me be clear: I dont believe that any dietary change that has the capacity to yield significant weight loss is easy to sustain. But eliminating junk food is easier than the rest because it is confined to a single change. There is plenty else to eat besides junk food. Eradicating junk food leaves behind all of the true staple foods of our cultural diet.

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The Single Most Effective Way To Lose Weight

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