The only thing that will reliably make you lose weight is putting in less energy than your body consumes. To my knowledge all the dietary fads (low-carb, high-carb, all-starch, interval fasting, ...) have failed to produce any measurable effects in scientific studies.
There are studies for all of those diets that show weight loss results.
"Putting in less energy than your body consumes" is an unhelpful thought that you should stop using. It's both too obvious and also too obtuse. It completely ignores what certain types of foods do inside / to your body. It's possible to gain weight on a caloric deficit and it's possible to lose weight on caloric excess. People who struggle to lose weight while intentionally under eating and trying to exercise more and end up failing, feel terrible about themselves because they believe this unhelpful statement you keep repeating.
The thing is it's hard to measure the inputs and outputs of your body. And with the same inputs, different bodies will produce different outputs.
The thing about scientific studies is they're generally looking for something that works for everyone. If a small number of people in a small study have good results from a fad diet, and they can stick to it, that's good for them, but the study is going to show no significant difference between control and test.
The key is finding something you can stick to, has good results for you, and doesn't cause other problems. For a lot of people, that's easy, and for some people it's hard.
>have failed to produce any measurable effects in scientific studies.
That's not a problem, because scientific studies have also failed to produce any great way of losing weight (including the "sticking to it part"), whereas non-scientific diets have worked wonders for individual people...
My impression is that studies find that any diet can help people lose weight if that’s why they began it - hypothesis is that it’s the change and increased attention that works, not what you change to.
