GPs approach will work for almost all people, if they actually do it.
Yes, it works, and maybe it works easy & side-effect free for some, but tbh I'd rather be overweight and die 10 years earlier, than live like that.
An important takeaway from all this is that people react very differently to similar regimes, and projecting our own (successful) experience of a regime onto someone else is likely to not represent their experience.