Mini Mikkipedia - How to Spot a Fad Diet Fast

In this Mini Mikkipedia episode, Mikki unpacks the red flags that separate a legitimate nutrition approach from a fad diet dressed up in sciencey language. Starting with a brief history of some truly wild diets, from the swamp diet to tapeworms and the drinking man’s diet, she explains why modern trends may look just as absurd in hindsight. Mikki walks through the common patterns: demonising one nutrient, promising rapid results without trade-offs, relying on testimonials instead of evidence, and having no plan for what happens after the “challenge” ends. This episode gives listeners a practical toolkit for assessing diet claims, asking better questions, and avoiding programs that sell short-term scale drops without long-term strategy. 

Highlights

•  Why fad diets often blame one nutrient for the entire obesity crisis 
•  The difference between fat loss and early water-weight loss 
•  Why maintenance matters more than the “before and after” photo 
•  How sciencey language can hide weak or non-existent evidence 
•  Why testimonials are persuasive, but not proof

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

00:00
Hey everybody, Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia and today I want to chat about the red flags of a fad diet and how to spot them. Quick bit of history for you and I read this in Fat Loss Forever which is Lane Norton's book along with his colleague, can't recall his name. So there have been some funny diets out there, haven't there? Do you know that there was a diet called the swamp diet? Back in the 1700s a physician named Thomas Short noticed that

00:29
more overweight people seemed to live near swamps and concluded that staying away from them was the key to a leaner body. There's also been a tapeworm diet where people deliberately ingested parasites so they could eat what they liked and still lose weight. And also, of course, the drinking man's diet, which placed precisely zero restrictions on how much gin or vodka you could have, but asked you to cut carbohydrate. These are real diets that real people followed. And of course, thinking about them now, a like the cabbage soup diet,

00:58
We laugh because they are obviously absurd with the benefit of distance. But here is the thing, every single diet trend doing the rounds on your social media feed right now may well look exactly as absurd in 50 years time. The packaging gets more sophisticated, sciencey language gets a bit better, the underlying pattern barely changes at all. So today, I just wanna give you a bit of a, I guess a toolkit or some flags to look out for as to whether or not

01:28
A diet is a fad diet or something you should genuinely consider. It's not about is keto good or bad, which is a terrible question by the way, or is intermittent fasting the answer. I want to give you actual red flags, the patterns that show up again and again in fad diets, regardless of what they're called, so you can spot them yourself before you sink another six weeks in a chunk of your grocery budget into something that was never going to work. So one of the most reliable tells is,

01:56
that something demonizes a single nutrient. And look, again, this isn't that there are not really great therapeutic uses for diet, a classical ketogenic diet, or carnivore even for some people. But this can be a pretty reliable tell. Pick up almost any bestselling book of the last few decades and you'll find the same structure. It opens by telling you that calories don't really matter and that everything you thought you knew about dieting was wrong.

02:26
And then it spends the next several hundred pages blaming one specific nutrient for the entire obesity crisis. Sometimes it's fat, sometimes it's sugar, sometimes it's carbohydrate, maybe seed oils as well. That's definitely unpopular. But here's what these foods books conveniently leave out. The nutrient being demonized is almost always one that happens to make up a large share of your typical calorie intake. So when the book tells you to cut it out, of course you lose weight.

02:54
you're just eating fewer calories dressed up as some sort of metabolic revelation. Dietary fat, for example, is particularly calorie dense. So cutting it tends to produce a big effect almost by accident. And that effect then gets attributed to the supposed evil of fat itself rather than the simple fact that you're now eating less, if you eat less when you cut fat. Similarly, with a ketogenic diet for fat loss. For a lot of people, what this does is just when you cut out that entire food group,

03:23
You get rid of a lot of the processed refined foods that drive appetite and drive overeating. So by virtue of that, you're going to lose weight. Intermittent fasting is another good example. And again, I'm not demonizing these approaches in their totality, but the idea that the obesity epidemic is based solely on one thing, I think we need to question and challenge that. And I will also say, of course, food quality absolutely matters.

03:51
But there's a real difference between this food matters for these specific reasons and this one nutrient is secretly the cause of the obesity epidemic. I do think the second one should make you raise your eyebrows. Red flag two, it promises results without the obvious trade off. If a claim sounds like you get to lose a large amount of weight without really doing the things that reliably produce weight loss, your skepticism should go up immediately. Lose eight pounds in a week, melt that fat while you sleep.

04:21
Eat whatever you want and the pounds will fall off. Oh my gosh, these claims still exist. Just do a simple sort of gut check here. How mechanically is this actually meant to happen? If the honest answer involves water fasting, juice fasting, or drinking a special tea, you're not looking at fat loss. You're looking at water loss and possibly a fairly unpleasant week. Rapid early weight loss is absolutely a real phenomenon and it happens on plenty of completely legitimate approaches too. Like my approach.

04:50
particularly anything that drops carbohydrate intake sharply because that triggers a quick release of water that's been bound up with glycogen in your muscles. And glycogen is muscle carbohydrate stores. The issue isn't that the scale moved. It's when that early water-driven number gets sold to you as proof of some unique metabolic advantage that no other approach has. It isn't proof of that. It is just water.

05:14
The other one I would say in this category is to promise you weight loss without exercise is a big red flag for me. And I've talked a bit about Weight Loss Coaching Works and I know that you walk on that plan, but to undersell exercise and strength training and things like that, that actually help build body rather than just drop off pounds, I think is a real red flag. Red flag three, there's no plan for what happens after. And this is obviously something that hugely matters.

05:44
because it's the one that predicts whether you'll actually keep any progress you've made. Genuinely look at some of the structure of the diets you've come across. There's a clear starting point and a clear, often arbitrary, ending point. You hit goal weight, finish the 30 days, complete the challenge, and then what? Almost nothing gets said about that part because that part isn't what sells the program. The before and after photo is the product. No one's taking an after after photo a year down the track.

06:13
And there's a reason for that. The research on this is genuinely sobering. The majority of people who lose weight through these kinds of structured programs regain it and a meaningful proportion end up heavier than what they started. Because when you lose weight, you lose muscle and fat. When you regain weight, regain fat. A legitimate approach to changing how you eat treats the end of active dieting as the beginning of the next phase, not the finish line.

06:41
If a program can tell you exactly how it gets you to lose weight, but goes quiet and how it keeps you there, that's worth noticing. And for what it's worth, whenever I talk about my Mondays Matter programs, the accelerated program coming up in about 10 days time, and the full eight week program, I never sell it as a one and done. It is always kickstarting a forever approach for you, and which I can of course talk about that in great detail.

07:08
Red flag four, it borrows the language of science without the substance. This one's tricky at a spot because it's designed to be. Words like detox, toxins, cleanse, they get thrown around constantly and they sound clinical and they come with like specialized products a lot of the time too, right? They're almost never defined in any meaningful way. Which specific toxins? Removed by what mechanism? Measured how? The answers are usually nowhere to be found because the term that has been borrowed from real toxicology

07:38
and stretch to mean something closer to foods that I've decided are bad. The same goes for the diets built around something like blood type, where the pitch sounds biologically plausible on the surface, but falls apart the moment you go looking for evidence behind it, which, I might add, happened with the blood type diet. When researchers have systematically reviewed the claims, they've consistently found nothing to support them. What actually explains any results people get from these approaches is a much simpler and much less headline grabbing.

08:06
They end up eating fewer calories or more protein, and that would have worked regardless of blood type. A good rule of thumb, if a claim sounds sciencey, but you can't find independent research backing the specific mechanism, not just a broad idea, be skeptical. Real science welcomes scrutiny. Marketing dressed up as science tends to deflect it. And true story, I contacted, this is sort of a tangent, but I want to tell you, contacted a...

08:34
In fact, I posted about a company who had made these claims that collagen was as good as whey at improving muscle protein synthesis. They had a published report on their website and they said this is a study. They detailed the study. They showed these astronomically amazing results, 43 % increase in muscle protein synthesis. And then they referenced a 2015 unpublished study or still in review.

09:03
study and I'm like, well, this is clearly BS. And they saw me tag them on social media and came back and said, we stand by our marketing claims. And I'm like, well, this is wonderful. Can you please send me a link to the study and clarify why if this was conducted in 2015, it still isn't published in 2026. Tumbleweeds, they totally ghosted me. This is a well-known Australian brand that is all over my Facebook marketing.

09:30
I'm not going to say it on air who they are, but um I can absolutely tell you if you want to ask me. Anyway, so yes, this is an issue. People get very sciencey and they just expect that you're not going to ask them questions. And to be fair, it's not your job as a consumer to understand the science. And company with integrity will help translate that for you and will be real about it. Anyway.

09:53
Red Flag Five, it relies on testimonials instead of evidence. Every fad diet book and program is going to be full of success stories, dozens of them, often with names and photos, all glowing references. What you will essentially never see is a fair accounting of the people who tried it and it didn't work, or who lost weight and then gained it all back 18 months later. Testimonials, clearly a cherry picked by definition, they tell you a program worked for someone, which is meaningless on its own because almost any sufficiently restrictive approach

10:22
worked for someone for a while. And this is worth holding onto as a general thinking tool, not just for diets. A useful question to ask of any big claim is simply, where's this independent confirmation? Not, did this work for the person in the testimonial? But if I looked at this rigorously across many people over a long period of time, would it hold up? Anecdote is the weakest form of evidence there is. It's still evidence, but it's not strong and fad diets run almost entirely.

10:52
on it. Red flag six. This is a quick gut check, but if you want one fast filter, you can apply to anything in your feed. It's this. Search the name of the product or program alongside the word scam. See what comes back. Blunt, but it works more often than you'd think. If the top results are full of people describing the same disappointing experience from some Reddit thread, that's data. Occasionally you get a genuinely good approach to get some fairly drag through the mud.

11:20
but you'll usually be able to tell the difference between a handful of grumbles and a wall of consistent specific complaints. And the thing is, that, you know, none of this is about shaming people who try these approaches because genuinely all of us have. I don't know a single person who's wanted to lose body weight who hasn't been on or at least seriously considered some diet that in hindsight didn't hold up to scrutiny. These things are designed by people who understand persuasion extremely well and they're aimed at a moment where you're often

11:50
feeling frustrated, time poor, and just want something to work on. This also isn't an argument that there's one correct way to eat and everything else is nonsense. There is plenty of genuinely different approaches. Lower fat, lower carb, more moderate plant-based can all produce real health benefits. My Monday's Medicare program that utilizes a protein-spering modified fast is an effective rapid fat loss tool. All of these are largely because they produce a calorie deficit in their own way.

12:18
and because shifting towards whole foods in a way from heavily processed ones tend to help regardless of the specific framework laid on top. So the next time something crosses your feed, promising you rapid, easy results, run it through this list. Is it blaming one nutrient for everything? Is it promising an outcome with no real explanation of the mechanism? Does it have anything to say about life after the program ends? Does it undersell exercise? Does it tell you that it's easy? Does it go,

12:46
quiet right when that question matters most. Does the science language actually hold up if you go looking for it? Is there evidence testimonials or is there something more rigorous behind it? And you don't need to have nutrition qualifications to ask these questions and demand answers, quite frankly. You just need to know that these questions are worth it and now you do. All right, guys, thanks for listening to Mini Micropedia. Next week, I'm going to dive into why protein-spearing modified fast is not a fad diet with

13:16
very clear science reasons behind that and the invitation to join the Accelerated program and that's kicking off next week. However, for this week, you can catch me over on threads, X and Instagram @mikkiwilliden , Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website, mikkiwilliden.com. Click on the Monday Matters link there, pop it in the show notes too and pop your name on the wait list to be the first to hear about the Accelerated program.

13:45
Alright guys, see you later.