Best Diets Of 2024, According To Experts

Whether you’re more focused on heart health, weight loss or simply a more balanced eating plan, choosing the best diet can be a crucial piece of the puzzle in meeting your health and wellness goals. Food is fuel, and it’s important to provide your body with the necessary nutrients. But with the wide variety of diets out there, which ones are the best?

To determine the best diets of 2024, the Forbes Health editorial team consulted a panel of eight nutrition experts—including doctors specializing in nutrition and registered dietitians—to rate an array of diets across a number of metrics ranging from weight loss to heart health. Below are the top 10 diets that received the highest average scores. (However, keep in mind, you should always talk with your doctor before starting a new eating plan).

Methodology: How We Picked the Best Diets of 2024

For our best diets ranking, we surveyed eight nutrition experts, including board-certified physicians, registered dietitian nutritionists and a certified food scientist, who provided scores on diets for the following metrics:

Efficacy for weight loss
How easy the diet is to sustain
Whether the diet is safe and does not promote rapid, unhealthy weight loss
Whether it promotes heart health
Whether it promotes overall health for people with diabetes
If the diet is accessible to different socioeconomic situations

Winners and star ratings were assigned to the diets with the highest average scores across all categories.

What Is the Definition of a Diet?

Simply put, a diet is the foods and beverages you consume on a daily basis. A diet plan is typically designed with a purpose, whether it’s to lose weight, gain weight, control blood sugar or something else, says Lawrence J. Cheskin, M.D., chair of the nutrition and food studies department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

However, not all diets are the same. Some advocate for plant-based or low-carbohydrate eating, while others might cut out red meat or animal products altogether. While a balanced diet of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats and protein is generally encouraged, it’s always best to discuss with your doctor before embarking on a new eating plan.

Why Is a Diet Important?

Following a healthy diet can be a crucial element in leading a healthy lifestyle, with one of the main benefits being lowering your risk of chronic disease, such as diabetes or cancer. Consuming a balanced mix of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, lean meats and fish can help lower that risk. Some of the unhealthy dietary practices to watch out for include a high intake of salt, sugars and saturated fats.

A healthy diet is also an important factor in maintaining a healthy weight. From 2017 to March of 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the prevalence of obesity in U.S. adults was 41.9%, making it a common condition.

Who Should Follow a Diet?

You might consider dieting if you want to lose weight, find yourself making unhealthy eating choices, want to address a certain health problem (such as high blood pressure or digestive distress) or want to increase your nutrient intake to combat health woes like sluggishness or brain fog.

Who Shouldn’t Follow a Diet?

Adolescents specifically should not follow a strict diet that avoids certain food groups or nutrients as it can increase the risk of developing an eating disorder compared to their peers who do not diet. Instead, children and teens should focus on eating healthy foods in appropriate portions and getting regular movement into their day.

Anyone prone to an eating disorder should not follow a strict diet as it’s proven that many people with eating disorders were on a diet at the time they developed their eating disorder.

Different Types of Diets

While it seems the amount of available diets to try are endless, here are a handful of general types of diets that you can get familiar with when looking to start dieting.

Plant-based: Plant-based dieting involves a large focus on consuming vegetables and legumes. Different types of plant-based diets will vary in the amount of animal products that can be consumed. The vegetarian and pescatarian diets on our ranking are variations of plant-based dieting. Another variation is flexitarian eating, which includes consuming reduced amounts of meat, poultry, fish and seafood.
Low-carbohydrate: Many variations of low-carb dieting have been around for decades, but for the most part, this type of dieting focuses on restricting carbohydrate consumption, with an increase in healthy fat intake. Variations of the low-carb/high fat diet, or LCHF, include the Atkins, ketogenic (keto) and paleo diets.
Raw foods: A raw foods diet includes consuming 90% or more of your foods raw. Most forms of this diet exclude foods that have been cooked, heated above 118 degrees Fahrenheit or pasteurized. Common foods consumed while following this diet are raw fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds and sprouted grains.
Intermittent fasting: Intermittent fasting involves fasting for a specified amount of time each day. For example, you might try eating one, 500-600 calorie meal a day for two days out of the week (while eating normally the remaining five days), called the 5:2 approach, or only allow yourself to eat within a certain eight-hour period each day (the 16:8 approach). When fasting, you may consume water and other zero-calorie drinks like black coffee or tea.

What Is a Balanced Diet?

A balanced diet includes a large focus on fruits and vegetables, followed by whole and intact grains, healthy proteins such as fish or poultry and healthy plant oils, like olive oil, in moderation. Staying physically active and focusing on drinks like water, coffee or tea, rather than sugary drinks or an excess of dairy, also contributes to a healthy, balanced diet and lifestyle.

How to Start a Diet

To start a diet, select a plan or come up with your own and figure out how it’s going to fit into your life. Consider what you’ll do differently every day. Then figure out how you’re going to incorporate those changes into your life.

Once you’ve chosen an approach, Dr. Cheskin recommends giving it a road test by trying it for a few days to see if it might work for you. Think of this as the dieting equivalent of dipping your toes into the water before diving in. Once you find a plan that feels comfortable and sustainable, commit to it and take the plunge.

When starting a diet, Dr. Jampolis also notes that it’s important to anticipate challenges you might incur and have a plan to overcome them—such as having healthy, frozen meals ready to go in the freezer.

How to Stick to a Diet

To actually stick to your diet, you need to think about your why. Why do you want to do it? What’s in it for you? And how committed are you to adopting this new approach? Having this information top of mind—or even on a Post-It note—can rekindle your motivation when it wanes.

“A lot of people think of diets as temporary things, but if they go back to what they were doing before, it’s not going to be of long-term benefit,” says Catherine Christie, Ph.D., a registered dietitian, professor of nutrition and dietetics and associate dean of the Brooks College of Health at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida. “Which diet is going to work for you depends on which [one] you can follow and stick with.”

Other strategies to help you go the distance include:

Tracking your progress. “The more self-monitoring you do, the better,” says Dr. Cheskin. If you know what you’re eating each day because you’re keeping a food diary, how much you’re moving because you’re tracking your steps and how much you weigh because you’re tracking it daily or weekly, you’ll be able to see correlations between what you’re doing and how you’re losing weight.

In fact, weighing in at least three times a week, logging food intake at least three times a week and having at least 60 minutes of physical activity a week were among the factors that distinguished participants who lost at least 5% of their baseline weight in a commercial weight loss program from their less successful peers in a 2017 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Creating mini goals. If you’ve set your sights on an ultimate goal, such as losing 10 pounds, create action-oriented stepping stones to help you get there. “Some people do well with an extreme change like following a vegan diet, but most people do better if they can make gradual changes and build on them,” says Dr. Christie.

Such steps might include consuming five fruits and vegetables per day, reducing your meat intake, switching from white bread to whole wheat bread or walking briskly at least four times a week. If you map out specific changes you’re going to make on your way to your goal—and you check those boxes by doing them—you build in opportunities for success along the way.

Sidestepping diet fatigue. As the novelty of the plan wears off, you can keep yourself motivated to carry on. How? By thinking about your potential stumbling blocks (like your sweet tooth) and coming up with satisfying ways to deal with them (such as having roasted fruit or a small scoop of sorbet for dessert instead of a calorie bomb of cake). You can also tune into improvements in how you feel (that you have more energy, for example) or how your health has improved (based on your latest cholesterol and blood sugar levels). “It helps to have some kind of marker—such as blood pressure, blood sugar or cholesterol numbers—to see how it’s working,” says Dr. Christie.
Spicing things up. To keep your meals lively and appealing, change the way you prepare foods. Consider roasting instead of steaming vegetables, grilling fruit instead of eating it raw or using different spices or flavored vinegars to alter the flavors of familiar foods. In fact, Dr. Jampolis notes that some spices like cayenne, cumin and ginger may even help with weight loss.
“Treating” yourself. It helps to reward yourself in healthy ways—perhaps by buying yourself a new blender or pair of exercise shoes—when you achieve certain milestones, such as losing your first 5 pounds or being able to jog a mile without stopping.

How Long Does It Take for a Diet to Work?

“You can tell if [a diet] is promising within days, based on whether it feels comfortable and sustainable,” says Dr. Cheskin. But it may take weeks, even months, to tell if a diet is helping you lose the weight you desire.

Depending on your size, weight loss of half a pound to 2 pounds a week is optimal. If you lose weight faster than that, it’s likely to be water weight, which will get replaced, and muscle mass, which won’t, explains Leslie Bonci, a registered dietitian, owner of Active Eating Advice in Pittsburgh and a Forbes Health Advisory Board member. You want to lose body fat—not muscle—for the sake of your overall health, well-being and metabolism. “It’s more than the number—it’s the composition [of what you’re losing] that matters,” says Bonci.

How Do You Know If a Diet Plan Isn’t Working?

A diet does not work if the weight loss cannot be maintained over the long-term. In fact, losing weight too quickly can lead to muscle loss, which can ultimately impact your metabolism and the rate at which your body burns calories after you stop dieting. Instead, weight loss of up to 1 to 2 pounds per week is often considered manageable to maintain over the long-term.

A diet is also not working if it begins to tip into the dangerous territory of an eating disorder. It’s important to be aware of warning signs that may signal an eating disorder. Among others, these can include:

A preoccupation with food, calories and weight loss
Refusing to eat entire food groups
Making excuses to avoid meals
Developing food rituals
Extreme concern with body shape and size
Stomach cramps
Menstrual irregularities
Difficulty concentrating
Dizziness
Feeling cold all of the time
Problems sleeping

The Pros and Cons of Following a Diet

Following a healthy diet has a variety of benefits and also comes with some risks, depending on what type of diet you are trying.

Pros

Some diets will lower your risk of developing a chronic disease. Sticking to a diet that’s rich in fruits and vegetables can reduce your risk of developing heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity and some cancers down the road.
A healthy diet that’s low in fat can also prevent undesirable weight gain. This includes swapping out animal fats like butter for unsaturated vegetable oils, like olive oil.
Arguably the most important benefit, consuming a well-balanced diet helps you feel better and improves your overall well-being. When you’re consuming the right foods, you may find that you’re better equipped to manage stress and have more energy to do the things you enjoy.

Cons

A recent study found that popular diets may be ineffective for weight loss in the long-term for most people, with any benefits diminishing and ultimately disappearing at the one-year mark.
Restrictive diets also aren’t realistic for most people to stick to. What has been shown to be more effective are positive lifestyle changes that can be sustained longer term rather than following a specific diet plan for a set amount of time.
Dieting can also negatively impact a person’s mental health, causing the harmful mindset of food being a reward or punishment and assigning moral value to the biological need of consuming food. Dieting in an extreme manner can lead to metabolic issues, hormonal and menstrual changes, lower bone density and unhealthy changes to a person’s body composition.

What Is the Safest Diet to Follow?

The safest diet is one discussed with a doctor that includes all needed nutrients and contains enough calories for weight loss to be approximately 1 to 2 pounds per week. As reflected on our ranking, safe and effective diets often recommended by experts include the Mediterranean diet, DASH diet and flexitarian diet, which emphasize moderation (and not total restriction).

Setting realistic and healthy goals helps keep a diet safer, as trying to lose weight too quickly can cause health problems such as loss of muscle, water and bone density. Losing weight too quickly may also cause:

Diet Plans to Avoid

It’s advisable to stay away from any diet that:

Restricts calories too severely
Restricts entire food groups or macronutrients, like carbohydrates
Causes rapid weight loss of more than 2 pounds per week
Promotes the use of pills or supplements that make outlandish claims
Directs users to not exercise

How to Determine the Best Diet For You

The first thing to consider when deciding on a diet is: What’s my goal? Am I trying to lose weight or body fat? Or am I trying to improve a specific aspect of my health or my life? A 2014 study in Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine found that examining the intersection of life goals and dietary goals can have an impact on your ability to achieve and maintain diet-related changes^[10]. Once you know what your desired outcome is, it’s time to delve into the details.

Dr. Cheskin says to determine if you’re likely to stick with a diet, it’s important to “know yourself—the more you can be introspective, the better.” After all, a 2018 study in JAMA Network found people achieved similar weight loss results on a healthy low-fat diet and a healthy low-carbohydrate diet. So the diet that’s likely to work for you is the one you’re most likely to stick with^[11].

To that end, ask yourself the following questions:

Does the diet have foods I like to eat?
What is it about my habits and preferences that might make this particular approach work for me?
What am I going to change to help me lose weight or lower my cholesterol or my _____?
Are the foods on this diet affordable?
Do I have time to shop for and prepare the recommended meals?

“The practicality of what you’re choosing is really important because there are still only 24 hours in a day,” says Bonci.

It’s also wise to consider your dieting history, including what has worked for you and what hasn’t—and why. “There are very few people in this world who haven’t been through this a few times before,” Bonci says.

There may be valuable lessons in your previous experiences. If you were tired and miserable on a low-carb approach in the past, you should probably look at a different one. On the other hand, if you were successful with a plan that included mini meals throughout the day, that approach might be worth trying again.

Also, think about what’s realistic for your lifestyle. While a rigid, calorie-cutting plan may be appealing initially because it takes the guesswork out of what to eat, it may be hard to stick with it for an extended period of time.

“If there isn’t some flexibility built in, it probably won’t work for you in the long term because life throws us curveballs,” says Dr. Cheskin. “It should be adaptable to different situations and personalities.” In other words, it needs to be a plan you can live with.

It’s also important to consider a particular diet’s safety and effectiveness. For example, is there research or science behind the diet? Or is it based on unproven assumptions? Look at statistics or clinical studies to gauge its success for other people, Dr. Cheskin advises. In general, experts say that a healthy, sustainable weight loss plan should include:

A healthy number of daily calories. That means no less than around 1,500 for women, or 1,800 for men—although that number varies based on factors like your weight and activity level.
A variety of foods from different food groups. Think fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, lean protein and healthy fats, says Dr. Cheskin. The diet should include appropriate proportions of macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins and fats) to provide your body with energy, as well as sufficient micronutrients (like vitamins and minerals) for optimal function. It shouldn’t rely on supplements to provide these nutrients, says Dr. Cheskin, because that suggests the plan is nutritionally unsound and not sustainable.
An afternoon snack. Snacks “keep people fulfilled,” says Dr. Cheskin. “Part of eating is not just to fill the fuel tank; it’s also the pleasure of food.”