re: Biology, Chemist and Biochemist OTers: Help me understand weight loss.

Ketosis (which is a high fat diet) uses fat as energy. All the other diets uses glucose as energy.

So if you are on a diet to lose weight ketosis is best. It keeps your hormones in great shape, because hormones are from fat and you won't lose muscle because muscle cannot break down into ketones but it can break down into glucose. Fatty food is hard to break down and burns quite a bit of energy trying to process it. It is why if you eat a fatty food you will feel warmer because your expending energy trying to digest it. Les Stroud even pointed out eating straight fat right before sleeping is great help to keep warm when he was survivormanning it up in some cold area. Ketosis gives the benefits of fasting while still eating. It theoretically may be impossible to get cancer while in ketosis since you will have no glucose for the cancer to use (this is a big leap of faith but it is known to help treat cancer). What I've read says no one can get approval to do an actual study with human subjects on whether a ketosis diet can treat cancer.

In all the other diets fat is typically the last thing to lose because it is the hardest thing to breakdown into glucose. Sugar is inflammatory for your whole body. Cancer runs on glucose. Literally almost everything bad healthwise comes from sugar and grains. If you aren't using the energy immediately it turns into fat because it takes no energy to breakdown sugar and grains.