I'm not aware of a formal name for it, but there's certainly a hypothesis floating around that weight loss diets mostly work by altering the way that people pay

I'm not aware of a formal name for it, but there's certainly a hypothesis floating around that weight loss diets mostly work by altering the way that people pay attention to food. That is, the behavioral effects of being "on a diet" explain most of the weight loss while the particular rules and theory of any given diet explain little of the weight loss. It's sort of like the dodo bird verdict [1] for diets. It would be interesting to know if any studies have compared "real" and "placebo" diets to estimate this effect; searches mostly come up with references to a book called "The Placebo Diet" which seems related but I'm not sure it directly addresses the empirical question. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict