I Tried 4 Popular Diets. I’ll Tell You Which One Made Me Lose 27 Pounds.

I almost didn’t write this.

Because honestly, I’m not the “I lost 40 pounds and here’s my secret!” type of person.

I don’t post transformation photos and I don’t have a dramatic before-and-after moment where I look at myself in a mirror and burst into tears.

What I do have, safely kept in my room, is a photo from my friend Giulia’s birthday dinner, taken about a year ago.

I didn’t look terrible. But the woman in that photo looked… tired. Puffy. Like she’d been running on coffee and mac and cheese for months, which – fair enough – she had.

I’m Laura. I’m 38. I work in marketing, I have a toddler who treats sleep more like a suggestion than something he’s supposed to do.

In the last four years, I’ve put on about 25 pounds.

So I did what every reasonable adult does. I googled “how to lose weight” and fell down a rabbit hole that lasted the better part of a year.

#1: Keto

Keto was the first thing that came up. Everywhere. Every Instagram ad. Every coworker who’d lost weight in the last two years. “Just go keto,” they’d say.

So I went keto.

The first two weeks were genuinely exciting. I lost 7 pounds. I was eating bacon and calling it health food. What’s not to love?

And then the tracking started.

If you’ve never done keto, it’s basically a part-time accounting job. You’re weighing chicken thighs, calculating net carbs, checking if your yogurt has too many grams of sugar.

I once spent 15 minutes in the grocery store reading almond butter labels. Fifteen minutes. Of my life.

I have a toddler. Some nights, dinner is whatever I can throw together in the 22 minutes between bath time and bedtime. I don’t have time to track macros.

After about six weeks, I’d gained back 3 of the 7 pounds. I was exhausted from the mental load of it. 

And the idea of never eating bread again (real bread, the good kind!) started to feel like punishment.

My verdict: Keto works fast, I’ll give it that. But the tracking, the cost, and the rigidity made it impossible to keep up for someone like me.

#2: Calorie Counting

After keto, I went back to basics. Calorie counting. Old school. Just eat less than you burn, right?

I downloaded a tracking app, bought a food scale, and started logging everything. 

Breakfast: 340 calories.

Coffee with oat milk: 45. 

That handful of goldfish crackers I stole from my son’s snack cup: probably 70, but I rounded up to 90 because guilt.

The first month actually went okay. I lost about 4 pounds. I felt like I had control.

Problem is, I stopped seeing food as food and started seeing it as numbers. 

A slice of birthday cake at the office was 350 calories I now had to “make up for” by eating basically nothing for dinner.

It messed with my head. I started dreading meals. I’d skip lunch to “save” calories for dinner, then end up overeating because I was starving.

My verdict: Calorie counting teaches you about portion sizes, and that’s useful. But it sucked the pleasure out of enjoying food. Never again.

#3: Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet sounded like a dream after the keto and calorie counting epic fail. 

Olive oil? Fish? Actual bread? Wine? Sign me up.

I read up on it, stocked the fridge with fresh vegetables and good cheese, and spent a Sunday making a meal plan.

And the food really was great. I was eating better than I had in years. I felt less deprived, much more energy overall. My skin looked better. And I was enjoying cooking again.

But after a month, I stepped on the scale and… nothing.

Well, not nothing. I’d lost two pounds. In a month. Two.

The problem with the Mediterranean diet, at least for me, was that it’s more of a philosophy than a plan.

“Eat like the Italians” is great advice until you realize the average Italian also walks 10,000 steps a day and doesn’t eat dinner at their desk at 9pm.

They basically have a full stack of healthy habits to complete the picture.

Me? I live 35 minutes away from my office, car is a must. Plus, everything here is packed with sugar, bread included.

I wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly. I just had no roadmap. And without structure, I was eating healthy-ish.

My verdict: Gorgeous food. Genuinely healthy lifestyle in theory. But as a weight loss plan, it didn’t work for me.

#4: Intermittent Fasting

Spoiler alert: this is the one that made me lose 27 pounds (so far).

Three diets. Almost a year. A net loss of maybe four pounds and a lot of frustration.

I wanted to make sure I was doing things right this time, so I did some research that went beyond an influencer’s post on the latest crash diet.

An analysis published in 2025 found that fasting was as effective as traditional calorie restriction for weight loss.¹

With extra benefits for blood pressure, heart health and bad cholesterol, I might add.

When you fast, your body kicks off something called autophagy, which starts cleaning out damaged cells and replacing them with new ones.²

And a large clinical trial showed that those who practiced fasting lost much more weight than those who just followed standard diets.³

I’m not a scientist, yeah. But when all the biggest medical institutions are saying the same thing, wouldn’t you pay attention?

How I started fasting to make sure I’d lose weight

If I know anything about fasting at this point it’s that there are dozens of ways to do it.

Just to do it. Doing it right is a whole other story.

When I brought up the topic of fasting with a friend of mine, she said she tried it too.

More specifically, she got herself a personalized plan from a company specializing in intermittent fasting programs for its clients.

Color me intrigued, I guess.

I checked the web only to see some people claiming it was a scam, but my friend promised it worked.

I read her version of the program to make sure I would like the product and it honestly looked so professional and well-made that I didn’t have any more reservations.

I proceeded with my order immediately.

I started with a short quiz that asked about my schedule, eating habits, goals and what my typical day looked like

I was genuinely surprised by how relevant the questions were.

What came back was a whole program packed to the brim with recipes, tips, workout routines (optional).

Fully personalized.

I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t even know this kind of customization was possible.

The first week was an adjustment, sure. I read a lot about needing some time to adjust to fasting.

And then, the weight started moving. Steadily, consistently.

After three months, I’d lost 19 pounds. After five months, I was down 27.

I could eat dinner with my family without mentally calculating what it “cost” me.

After spending a small fortune on keto groceries and a food scale I used for exactly six weeks, this program’s cost was ridiculous in comparison.

I’d even looked into working with a nutritionist, the cheapest one I found in my area was $200 a session.

Fasting was more than enough for me, and much, much more affordable.

I know you probably tried everything too at this point. What I can say is that you should absolutely give this a chance.

Worst case scenario, this doesn’t work, but you’ll still have a lot of recipes to use as reference when you need something quick and you don’t know what to make.

(These recipes take 25 minutes max. Just saying.)

Best case scenario, you consistently lose weight, in a way that is healthy and doesn’t leave you covered in stretch marks because of the yo-yo effect.

I’ll leave the link to the company I purchased my program from. Let me know in the comments if you’re gonna try it.