Why is it important to make a tailor-made diet? Because it has long been scientifically established that people do not respond to diets in the same way. Neither as weight loss, nor metabolically ( source ).

To make you understand why a tailor-made diet is so important, I will tell you this anecdote.
Sixteen years ago I joined two different gyms within a year.

The gyms had been chosen at random, the intent was to lose weight a size that I had taken and that I did not know how to dispose of. When I signed up, I was both asked why I wanted to start a training program. The answer, the same in both cases, was: I would like to lose three kilos.
And in both cases, in addition to the training program, I was offered a weight loss diet, which I, foolishly, accepted to follow despite not having requested it at all.
I was not given any dietary advice, beware. Anyone can give you those.
I was prescribed a diet complete with sheets, days of the week, calories, foods, weights. Beyond the illegality of the thing, it was the papers that hit me. Pre-printed.

CASE HISTORY N.1

Personal trainer number one was a very, very underweight woman.
She was not one by constitution, she had become one, she told me.
She prescribed me a starvation diet. Breakfast with a jar of low-fat yogurt. No bread, no pasta, no sweets, no seasonings throughout the day.
For lunch a plate of unsweetened vegetables, for dinner one hundred grams of fish or meat with vegetables, in the afternoon a kiwi. In short, a diet of perhaps six hundred calories, with one day off, Sunday.
Plus the gym every day, for an hour and a half per session. I was hungry and in pain everywhere. Consider that at the time I could have been 25 years old. I was a young subject, with no health problems, without real overweight.
Should I have reported her? Probably yes. But I didn’t know that at the time and I trusted it.

I ran out quickly, I was tired, I couldn’t train. I lost little weight, I think half a kilo, and when, after about ten days, I went back to eating normally, I even got a little more.

She, the personal trainer, scolded me saying I didn’t have enough motivation. When I once heard her tell another customer that in the morning “even that yogurt seems too much to me, I can’t eat it, but how can you say you’re still hungry?”, I immediately understood that I was dealing with a person unfortunately sick and I left.

CASE HISTORY N.2

The second personal trainer was a bodybuilder by contrast. It seems absurd, I swear it’s the truth: he had given me a diet of 1800 calories (more than double the first), because it was the same diet with which he had lost thirty kilos.
Too bad it was a giant of one meter and ninety. But it had worked with him, so he prescribed it to everyone: men and women, highs and lows, active and sedentary. All the same diet.

Again not a tailor-made diet . 

I tried it for four days, but I couldn’t find the menu. Meat every day, for lunch basmati rice first and roast slice second with broccoli or cauliflower. Protein dinner: fish, rice cakes and vegetables boiled with lemon juice and spices. I didn’t like meat for lunch, after pasta. So I forced myself, but the result was not what was promised.

Again: he marveled because I couldn’t lose weight. I think I lasted a month and lost a pound, but I was always bloated. Try eating broccoli every day and then let’s talk about it.

TO MAKE A TAILOR-MADE DIET, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO RELY ON CASE.

Moral of the story: I went to a dietician, he prescribed me a tailor-made diet after evaluating my age, weight, body mass index and my basal metabolic rate, and I dropped the famous three kilos in just a month. Obviously without giving up training but finding a gym where no one gave diets to anyone else.

The story has another moral: you don’t have to believe anyone who has managed to lose weight, thinking, like the philosopher in the second case, that if it went well for your friend, it will work for you too.

There is a science of nutrition, and people who improvise and shoot random diets can only make your situation worse. While having a tailor-made diet means having a nutritional plan that is truly designed for you.

Today, there are many doctors and nutritionists who are interested in your preferences, your digestion, your sleep or work problems. The more you communicate these details to your doctor, the more confident you will be of getting the perfect diet.