Is Low-Carb The Fastest Way To Burn Fat? 

It's not even surprising that you want to know what is the fastest way to burn fat, considering that your hedonic behavior is so used with rapid gratification.

What you need at this point is a rigorous diet plan that can bare fruit to nourish your motivation, or otherwise you will die on the vine just as you did so many times before.

Without any doubt, a solution always begins with understanding the problem. However, this can be tricky when it comes to losing weight because there is no single approach.

And all seem to be “the best”, according to who are you listening to because they show a different angle or explanation of the same physiological reality: losing weight means reducing calories.

Whether you eat only table sugar or chicken breast with broccoli, this is the reality for all of us. So take a step back to see the forest, and ignore all the fashionable diets that divert your attention from the overall picture.

It's important to note that although calories ultimately determine any weight alteration, some folks seem to respond better to a lower carbohydrate intake.

But does it mean that you should banish from your life all comfort foods, and go paleo? Does it mean that low-carb is the fastest way to burn fat? 

You may also be tempted to fall in the low-carb dogma just because the obesity trend over the years correlated pretty accurately with an increased carbohydrate consumption (dietary fat percentage even decreased slightly).

While this may be caused by a host of physiological and psychological factors, it would be silly to take an association for a causal relation, and conclude that carbohydrates per se bear the culprit for this gloomy evolution.

The effectiveness of a certain dietary macronutrient composition may be influenced by insulin sensitivity/resistance, which is determined not only genetically but also by the level of fatness.

This may be the reason behind the fact that most short term trials (less than a year) found that low-carb diets are better suited for weight loss.  

Nonetheless, the vast majority of longer term studies (at least one year) which are rigorously controlled didn't find any meaningful advantage for the simple reason that insulin sensitivity improved considerably after a few months.

So after all, low-carb dieting is not the fastest way to burn fat because the results netted out.

On a related note, an interesting paper found that “insulin sensitivity determines the effectiveness of macronutrient composition of hypocaloric diets. For maximal benefit, the macronutrient composition of a hypocaloric diet may need to be adjusted to correspond to the state of insulin sensitivity” (Cornier et al., 2005)

The results are thought-provoking because weight loss differences were rather dramatic: the insulin-sensitive group studied lost nearly twice as much weight on a higher-carb diet than on a lower-carb diet, while the results were similar but reversed for their insulin-resistant counterparts.

As mentioned, for most people insulin resistance increases as they put on weight, so if you can barely button up your pants because of your jiggling belly, you know what to do. Give up all bread, pasta and maybe even most fruits for a while.

Of more importance is that carb restriction will allow you to drastically reduce calorie intake, and this will ultimately decide the rate of your progress – at least when you have lots of body fat to lose.

This is also important from a psychological perspective, as your brain encode the information about a reward value (proximity and amount) according to external cues, which plays an important role in modifying the behavior.

In other words, if your diligence doesn't pay back, chances are that your motivation will diminish by the day. Take, for example, most of your gym buddies that run their brains out on a treadmill without any apparent results. At some point they will surely give up for the same reason. Does it make sense?

So my point here is that cutting down on carbs is the fastest way to burn fat for the simple reason that allows you reduce overall calorie intake on a larger scale.

Your results will give you confidence that your effort is not useless. But does it mean that excluding so many tasty foods from your diet is a sustainable lifestyle? Of course not.

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