The classic advice about diets is to never do them. Instead, you’re supposed to make it a lifestyle. Something you can stick to for the rest of your life. A permanent shift in eating habits. I’ve said this before, probably.

And although I believe you need to have a solid dietary philosophy as your foundation and adhere to it for life, I actually think you should be trying different “diets” out. Diets can actually strengthen your foundation. Allow me to explain.

Venturing out into the dietary wilds teaches you something. Your brain discovers how new foods, macronutrient ratios, and eating strategies interact with each other and how your energy levels, body composition, and performance respond. A diet is a chance to get out there and experiment and learn what you’re made of, what makes you tick, what works and what doesn’t.

Now me? I can’t help but tinker and change things up here and there. For instance, the winter months are when I usually run a Keto Reset. Now, this is an actual reset—a plunge into dietary restriction. I go very low carb, eat even more meat, and preferentially select fatty cuts.

The Keto Reset is probably the easiest, least restrictive “restrictive diet” you can do:

It lasts about a month.
You get to eat tons of delicious food.
You become a better fat burner and build (or rebuild) fat-burning mitochondria that will last long after you resume your normal diet.
If you’ve done this already or you’re generally lower carb, keto will be an easy transition and the benefits will start almost immediately. The body has “memory.”

You can even do “cyclical keto,” and make a few allowances for all those Christmas treats you know are gonna be calling your name. Simply buttress the carb intake with intense exercise and you may never even leave keto at all.

And then after a month, I go back to eating the way I was before. I return to normalcy, a better fat-burner and even more metabolically flexible than I was before the “diet.”

And that’s why I recommend “dieting.”

I consider this completely in line with how we evolved. Humans are seasonal, cyclical beings. We aren’t pandas living off a monotonous diet. Our nature is to eat differently throughout the year, to move around the globe and take advantage of the food we find.

What about you, folks? Do you diet like this? Have you tried a Keto Reset? What’s your stance on dieting in the context of a foundational eating pattern? Let me know in this week's New and Noteworthy.

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