Top Diet Trends of 2023 & 2022

One reason Plenity is one of the fastest-growing weight loss aids is that even though it looks like a pill, the company behind it was able to get it classified as a medical device rather than a drug.

The FDA approval process for medical devices allows approval in cases where a device shows equivalent functionality to an existing treatment, which is a much cheaper and faster approach than the oftentimes billion-dollar investment of a full clinical trial.

Plenity is a diet pill that helps users feel full. It got approved because it was submitted to the FDA as having the same function as gastric bypass surgery, in which part of a person’s stomach is closed off, or removed to make the actual stomach smaller.

Plenity's active ingredients, cellulose and citric acid, expand in the stomach and make patients feel full earlier. So in a sense, this regulatory decision is not as strange as it looks: gastric bypass and Plenity both help people lose weight by giving them less room for food.

The surgical weight loss industry generates $6 billion each year in revenue, but the potential market is larger—many people either don't want to spend money on surgery or worry that it's too drastic. Part of this market size is because obesity has been rising for decades, both in the US and abroad. Obesity is not only a problem on its own, but contributes to other health complications too like heart disease, diabetes, and injuries from falls.

Plenity is part of an accidental arms race: food and entertainment companies make money from a high-calorie, sedentary lifestyle, and there’s less revenue in promoting moderation. This has been part of why the average weight has drifted up over time, and Plenity is one of many companies trying to tackle this problem as it gets more acute. Like blue light glasses, which help people feel better about their screen time instead of actually reducing how much of it they get, Plenity lets people keep eating until they’re completely full, and just changes when that is.

There’s a supply and demand mismatch—and thus a market opportunity—in the business of helping people reach their ideal weight; but not with weight loss. In fact, Google queries for "how to lose weight" overshadow those for “how to gain weight” by only to 6:1. However, the weight loss industry is far more than 6x more competitive and saturated than the weight gain industry: in fact, there are almost 3,000% more apps for losing weight than gaining it.

Companies like Noom, with 45 million users, have been able to build up a large following by helping users lose weight. The company uses an effective signup flow which encourages users to set a deadline, such as a wedding they’ll be attending or even just “summer”, which helps the app not only tune the weight loss program, but also the email drip campaigns. Noom’s focus though, is exclusively on losing weight—even if users sign up and express the intention to add a few pounds of muscle, the signup workflow uses copy about weight loss.

The weight-gaining market is not only more ripe for opportunity but also more fragmented than the weight-loss market. Some customers are trying to add muscle mass, and look for products like whey protein. Others want to add weight more generally, and they increasingly turn to appetite-stimulating supplements or weight-gain syrups.

Some of these products are carb- and vitamin-rich meal shakes that just add extra calories to diets, but some of them include medications that are used off-label to stimulate appetite. These weight-gaining shakes have health risks, and are often marketed illegally.

Media attention often drives new diet trends. When celebrities were mediated through magazines, TV, and movies, they tended to be thinner, but many popular influencers have a different body type—one popular weight gainer brand, "slim thicc," is named after the body type exemplified by Kim Kardashian, Nicki Minaj, and other celebrities. With more diverse celebrity body types, there's a wider dispersion in diet products that allow people to achieve them.