This eating plan is considered a fad diet. Fad diets often promote quick weight loss that is unsustainable and may severely restrict what you eat. They may be harmful and generally do not have long-lasting health benefits. Talk to your healthcare provider before making any major changes to how you eat.
In the 1960s, physician Irwin Maxwell Stillman created and popularized one of the first low-carbohydrate diets, which he called the Stillman diet. It promises quick weight loss with its heavy emphasis on lean meats and low-fat proteins. However, experts express concern that the restrictive nature of diets like the Stillman diet won’t help you maintain the weight you’ve lost and could also lead to other health problems.
How Does the Stillman Diet Claim to Work?
The Stillman diet is a high-protein and low-carbohydrate diet, but with a key difference from most popular low-carb diets: It’s also low-fat, so you must stick to cooking methods like broiling, baking, or boiling that don’t rely on oils or fats.
The diet works by eliminating nearly all carbohydrates and fat, which may lead to rapid weight loss. Heavily restricting carbohydrates can put the body into ketosis, a state during which the body breaks down fat for energy instead of glucose.
Protein also takes more energy to digest than carbohydrates, so dieters may burn more calories even at rest when following a high-protein diet.
What Can You Eat on the Stillman Diet?
The Stillman diet promotes eating several smaller meals throughout the day with the primary goal being to satiate hunger. In addition to these meals, you drink eight glasses of water each day.
Foods you can eat on the Stillman diet include:
Lean meats, like skinless chicken breast
Seafood and lean fish
Eggs
Cheeses made with skim milk
Spices like salt, pepper, garlic, and hot sauce
Meanwhile, it doesn’t allow for any oils or sources of fat like butter. It also cuts out sources of carbohydrates, including grains, fruits, vegetables, sugar, and alcohol.
Potential Benefits of the Stillman Diet (and Why They May Not Last)
The main purported benefit of this diet is quick weight loss.
According to the only data available — a very small study from the 1970s — 12 people who followed the diet for about a week lost an average of 7 pounds. However, the study classified this weight loss as transient weight loss, meaning that it was likely due to temporary factors like water loss.
The rapid weight loss that typically follows a switch to a strict low-carbohydrate diet is known to come largely from losing water weight. While this approach could help you shed pounds in the short run, rapid weight loss (more than 2 pounds per week) tends to be easier to gain back and can cause harmful side effects including gallstones and constipation.
Potential Risks of the Stillman Diet
As an extreme approach, the Stillman diet comes with more than a few drawbacks, including impacts to physical and mental health:
Nutrient Deficiencies The Stillman diet excludes key, nutrient-rich foods including fruits, vegetables, carbohydrates, and healthy fats. Cutting these foods out in the long term can lead to serious deficiencies in fiber, magnesium, potassium, and many other essential nutrients.
Unsustainable Weight Loss Most diets that promise quick weight loss rely on rigid rules, so they aren’t usually a sustainable weight loss option. Cutting out almost all carbohydrates and fat is likely to make you so hungry that it increases your likelihood of going off the diet, starting a pattern of weight cycling, or “yo-yo” dieting.
Negative Impact on Metabolism Because low-carbohydrate diets limit fiber, they may impact your microbiome, potentially harming your metabolism in the long run. As this diet is also extremely low in fat, it may lead you to consume fewer calories, which can slow down your metabolism as well as your body attempts to conserve energy.
Potential for Disordered Eating Extreme diets, including those that strictly limit carbohydrates and fat, can increase your risk of eating disorders like binge eating disorder, anorexia, and bulimia. They can also impact your self-esteem and body image while increasing stress and depressive thoughts.
Social Isolation Because the Stillman diet cuts out so many food groups, following the diet could cause you to limit opportunities to socialize if they involve food, like parties or dining out, since most won’t provide many options that are both low-carbohydrate and low-fat.
Reliance on Ketosis The Stillman diet relies on inducing ketosis, at least in part, for weight loss. Ketosis produces acidic substances called ketones, and if they build up in your blood, they can cause a potentially serious condition called ketoacidosis. Signs of ketoacidosis include fruity-smelling breath, appetite loss, nausea, and fast, deep breathing.
Is the Stillman Diet Right for You?
While some sources recommend the Stillman diet purely as a short-term diet to jump-start the first week or two of your weight loss plan, the limiting nature of this diet isn’t conducive to forming healthy, balanced eating habits for most people.
Because it relies on unsustainable methods like eliminating entire food groups to promote rapid weight loss, the Stillman diet fits squarely into the fad diet category. Such approaches may be more likely to disrupt your relationship with food than to improve your health in the long run.
If you’re considering a diet that cuts out food groups or macronutrients, talk to your healthcare provider first for guidance tailored to you and your specific health situation.
EDITORIAL SOURCES
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Resources
Habib A et al. Unintended Consequences of Dieting: How Restrictive Eating Habits Can Harm Your Health. International Journal of Surgery Open. November 2023.
Irwin Maxwell Stillman. The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet . Internet Archive. 1967.
Rickman F et al. Changes in Serum Cholesterol During the Stillman Diet. JAMA. April 1, 1974.
Oh R et al. Low-Carbohydrate Diet. StatPearls. August 17, 2023.
Diet for Rapid Weight Loss. MedlinePlus. May 20, 2024.
Storz MA et al. Nutrient Intake in Low-Carbohydrate Diets in Comparison to the 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans: A Cross-Sectional Study. British Journal of Nutrition. June 22, 2022.
Is It Bad to Lose Weight Too Quickly? Cleveland Clinic. October 5, 2021.
Barber TM et al. The Low-Carbohydrate Diet: Short-Term Metabolic Efficacy Versus Longer-Term Limitations. Nutrients. April 3, 2021.
Habib A et al. Unintended Consequences of Dieting: How Restrictive Eating Habits Can Harm Your Health. International Journal of Surgery Open. November 2023.
Ghimire P et al. Ketoacidosis. StatPearls. August 8, 2023.
Kayli Anderson has over a decade of experience in nutrition, culinary education, and lifestyle medicine. She believes that eating well should be simple, pleasurable, and sustainable. Anderson has worked with clients from all walks of life, but she currently specializes in nutrition therapy and lifestyle medicine for women. She’s the founder of PlantBasedMavens.com, a hub for women to get evidence-based, practical, and woman-centered guidance on nutrition and cooking, hormone health, fertility, pregnancy, movement, mental well-being, nontoxic living, and more.
Anderson is board-certified in lifestyle medicine and serves as lead faculty of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine’s (ACLM) "Food as Medicine" course. She is past chair of the ACLM's registered dietitian member interest group, secretary of the women's health member interest group, and nutrition faculty for many of ACLM's other course offerings. She is the coauthor of the Plant-Based Nutrition Quick Start Guide and works with many of the leading organizations in nutrition and lifestyle medicine to develop nutrition content, recipes, and educational programs.
Anderson frequently speaks on the topics of women’s health and plant-based nutrition and has coauthored two lifestyle medicine textbooks, including the first one on women’s health, Improving Women's Health Across the Lifespan.
She received a master's degree in nutrition and physical performance and is certified as an exercise physiologist and intuitive eating counselor. She's a student of herbal medicine and women's integrative and functional medicine. She lives with her husband in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where you’ll find her out on a trail or in her garden.
Courtney Telloian is a Wyoming-based freelance writer and editor who covers health, psychology, and lifestyle topics. You can find her published work on Healthline, Insider, Psych Central, and GoodTherapy. In college she minored in Latin, which deepened her passion for language and has made reading dense research papers that much more enjoyable. Her dedication to accuracy and fine distinctions has come in handy over the years as both a writer and an editor, and this is helpful since it makes her annoying in most other settings.
