Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently. Too many people go through theses cycles of "I'm going to cut out this, this and this to lose X pounds" and then drop it once they hit their goal or it ends up being too hard. While you might not shed pounds as quickly, if you focus on making sure you get varied, satiating, nutritious food(actually nutritious, not falling for the abundance of marketing out there), then you'll have an easier time resisting the temptation to gorge on treats and getting too many calories.

Language changes over time, and "diet" is very commonly used as shorthand for "restrictive food intake" or "caloric restriction." But a reminder that "diet" is short for "dietary intake", and is not prescriptive. "A healthy diet" is a common phrase for "permanently good eating habits."

The parent used context in an appropriate way that it's safer to assume they meant "dietary intake" than "restrictive food intake."

I think you read "diet" and "exercise" as verbs when I was using them as nouns :) My grammar wasn't great, though, so that's on me.

> Don't "diet". Change your eating habits permanently.

Colloquially the former can mean the latter. But yes, anything that cannot be sustained is doomed to fail.