While there is a risk of missing the forest for the trees, I also think that most diets fail because they're too perfect. You don't need to be perfectly healthy, and you don't need to eat 100% whole foods.
When we get into this sort of mindset that we need to be attentive of absolutely everything we eat then we develop a sort of adversarial relationship with food, and for most people that's just not sustainable. The difference between a successful diet that works and one that doesn't could be diet soda. Sounds stupid, but if you're miserable then your diet isn't going to last. Making better decisions is an improvement, and is MUCH better than dropping the pursuit all together.
There's plenty of people who are very healthy and they eat ice cream, drink soda some times, maybe have cheesecake occasionally. That's part of life, and for a lot of people that's one of the parts of life that makes it worth living. Conversely, there's a lot of people who try something like Keto and then eventually fail and fall into an even worse relationship with food then they had when they started.
When we get into this sort of mindset that we need to be attentive of absolutely everything we eat then we develop a sort of adversarial relationship with food, and for most people that's just not sustainable. The difference between a successful diet that works and one that doesn't could be diet soda. Sounds stupid, but if you're miserable then your diet isn't going to last. Making better decisions is an improvement, and is MUCH better than dropping the pursuit all together.
There's plenty of people who are very healthy and they eat ice cream, drink soda some times, maybe have cheesecake occasionally. That's part of life, and for a lot of people that's one of the parts of life that makes it worth living. Conversely, there's a lot of people who try something like Keto and then eventually fail and fall into an even worse relationship with food then they had when they started.