How can diet plans be effective for some but not all individuals?
In: Biology
This is a little bit like asking “why can only some, but not all, people run marathons?” Ignoring that some people can’t walk at all, there are other things that can affect your ability to run a marathon. Some people are just better suited to a different kind of exercise: an Olympic skier is obviously very fit, but the exercise they’re good at is very different from marathon running. Some people have asthma or other medical conditions that make running difficult. Some people simply do not have the time, energy, or inclination to put in the massive amounts of work that goes into running a marathon: you can’t put your free time into training for a marathon if you don’t *have* any free time, or simply less time than necessary to train properly.
Even though there’s nothing technically stopping anybody from running a marathon (other than maybe people who physically can’t run or walk at all), obviously only some people actually do it. If you were to pick a random person and tell them to run a marathon right now, they likely wouldn’t be able to get beyond the first mile or two, let alone finish the whole thing.
So, to answer your question:
* Some diets are better suited for some people/conditions than for others. Someone with high blood pressure is going to need to follow a different diet than someone with a chronic sodium deficiency. Someone with oral allergy syndrome might not be able to eat raw fruits and vegetables, even though generally those things are healthy for most people.
* Some people have medical issues that affect their weight independently of diet. Someone with short bowel syndrome (where you physically don’t have enough small intestine to absorb nutrients normally) may need to eat more than you’d expect for a person of their size, because they’re not getting the same benefits as someone with a healthy intestine from the same amount of food. Chronic sleeplessness can impair your glucose sensitivity, increasing your risk of diabetes and other diseases, even if your diet would otherwise be fine. In general, a very tall and physically active person is going to need a different diet than a very short and sedate person.
* Some people simply do not have the time, energy, or inclination to do the work that goes into following a diet. And it *is* work: most people are not using calipers to determine their body fat percentage (which is one of the things that affects your TDEE), or individually measuring/weighing out everything they ever eat, or completely avoiding any food they haven’t made themselves *because* they can’t weigh it. If your main priority is something like “make food that your entire family will eat, because otherwise that’s wasted money down the drain” or “have a quick snack in between eight hour shifts because you don’t have enough time for more,” other considerations are going to take a back seat.
* And this is all ignoring the inherent “fuzziness” of dieting and food science in general. There is no way to determine the exact calorie count of one granola bar vs. another identical granola bar: the number on the packaging is a very educated guess, but it’s still not perfect. There is no way to determine exactly how many calories you burned on the treadmill today: you can make a good guess, but you’re never going to 100% know for sure. There’s a lot about food science that we just don’t know, or thought we did but it turns out that it was junk. Anyone who confidently says that there’s absolutely no ambiguity or things we don’t yet know in science is lying their ass off.
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