this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Sugar is bad but carbs are not bad as a whole. They are needed for daily functions and exercise.
Carbs can fit into someones health plan, sure, but the people eating low/no carb diets don't have to worry about gaining excess fat even if they dont count calories.
That is not how calories work. Everything has calories - fat, protein, carbs. If you eat more calories than you can burn, you will gain weight in the form of fat or muscle (if you exercise).
Restricting carbs might help you in eating less overall but not eating carbs is not the cause of your weight loss.
Sadly calories are a useful lie, but not actually how the body works. Calories are how much energy is released in a tiny oven. The human body does not necessarily use everything that has a calorie attached to it.
With carbs, that drive blood glucose, and that drive insulin, eating anything will be used for anabolism (that is what insulin does)
Without carbs, over-eating fat or protein is very difficult - the body will simply be full. This is how people can say you don't have to count calories (useful lie) when eating a low carbohydrate diet. Not eating carbs lets your body function properly, including hunger and satisfaction signals.
There is truth in that protein has an important role in hunger signaling, but it's not being well supported by the other claims you're making.
Fats are very easy to overeat though. I can chug a cup of olive oil in less than a minute and instantly meet my daily energy expenditure. I've never tried this myself because I would miss out on a lot of other nutrients, but I imagine I would be hungry again pretty soon afterwards.
Your body does a lot more with its energy than building new molecules. For example, ATP powers the movement of your muscles. So you could either consider ATP synthesis as anabolism, making this claim a non-sequitur (i.e. how does saying "carbs can be used to move muscle" support the claim of "low carbs will help you lose fat"?), or it's not anabolism, in which case you're just plain wrong.
No, we don't use everything. But it is a useful way of measuring what we do use for the purposes of weight control. It's trivial to verify for yourself. Just count the Calories in everything you eat and see that your weight gains and losses are very closely tied to that number. So it is indeed a "lie" in that sense that the number you see probably isn't actually what your body is burning, and "useful" in the sense that it will tell you whether you'll gain or lose weight. I assume that's how you got to calling it a "useful lie". I just don't see how that justifies your stance that no one should have to count Calories.
This has not been my experience. People doing keto are often suggested to eat butter as a snack to differentiate between hunger and cravings.
Only in the context of carbohydrates. Try eating a stick of butter after you are full. Consider a steak, which is just fat and protein... it starts delicious and wonderful, but quite rapidly it loses its luster and by the end eating the last few pieces can be quite a chore... this is how all food should be, and it can be, in the absence of carbohydrates.
Insulin drives fat storage, eating while insulin is high will encourage significant fat accretion.
Agreed, its strictly true. But its not clinically helpful. Controlling hunger via reducing insulin and eating protein and fat to satiety is far more clinically effective.
People can count calories and see success, but its unnecessary if they are not eating carbohydrates - as the body will self regulate appropriately with hunger and satiety signals. You can eat a gram of uranium, and get millions of calories, but its not useful to the body. We are not bomb calorimeters.