Can You Lose Weight on a Keto Diet? 

Let’s take a deep dive into ketogenic diets and their $33-billion gimmick. The carbohydrate–insulin model of obesity, the underlying theory that ketogenic diets have some sort of metabolic advantage, has been experimentally falsified. Studies have shown that ketogenic diets actually put you at a metabolic disadvantage and slow the loss of body fat. In fact, if you cut about 800 calories of carbohydrates from your diet a day, you lose 53 grams of body fat a day. But if you cut the same number of fat calories, you lose 89 grams of fat a day. That’s nine butter pats’ worth of extra fat melting off your body each day on a low-fat diet, compared to a low-carb one. It’s about 80 percent more fat loss when you cut down on fat instead of carbs. The title of the study “Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss Than Carbohydrate Restriction” speaks for itself. The low-carb group lost mostly lean mass—water and protein—while the low-fat diet extracted a total of 80 percent more fat from the body than the low-carb diet. This is the third installment of a seven-part series on keto diets. This keto research came from the deep dive for the book How Not to Diet. You can learn more about How Not to Diet and order it here.