Many different diet strategies or combinations of strategies can provide benefits. Devoting yourself to one is counter-productive. You should take the best ideas from every approach and discard what doesn't work. Approach things from a holistic perspective, not being tied down to any one-size-fits-all scheme. No diet works for everyone. There is a potential for healing with all kinds of different diets. There are many paths to recovery and healing, so we should remain open-minded to maximize our chance of success.
Extreme diets have a very poor record of success. Sometimes they provide good initial results, but in the long run they cause various intractable problems. For example, people stop losing weight on a diet (the plateau effect) or they begin having "detox" more often (one of the more common rationalizations for raw diet failures). We need to see through diet dogma and get to the root of the problem (like hormones). No diet can succeed if it messes up your body's hormones over time, but many diets do that.
Most diets will provide short-term results, but we really should be thinking long-term and asking ourselves how the diet works and whether it will keep working. When you deprive yourself of calories (by restricting macro-nutrients or calories), the body eventually adapts by slowing down its metabolism. You lose muscle, for example. This causes the plateau effect and will make your body composition worse over time. But people fall for the lure of crash diets, rather than eating freely of high-quality foods.
We should try to see the good in all diets, rather than looking for the "best" diet, which probably doesn't exist. Different diets work for different people, but the underlying issue of metabolism can't be ignored. The more you try to restrict calories, the more chance of your metabolism slowing down (or entering starvation mode). You can lose weight on a high-calorie or unlimited-calorie diet of fresh and natural foods.
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