High-Fat Diets Won't Improve Your Metabolism and Help You Lose Weight
Now that you know the basics of the keto diet, it's time to explain why diets high in fat, such as the keto diet, won't help you lose weight. Dr. Arad referenced a study he helped conduct in which people ate either a standard American diet (low in fat and high in sugar) or a ketogenic diet (low in sugar and high in fat) to see which would result in greater weight loss.
He said one of the hypotheses was that when you eat more fat, your metabolic rate, which is how many calories your body needs to perform functions that keep you alive (like breathing) would be higher. The caloric intake was the same for all participants; one group just ate a greater amount of calories from fat. The researchers believed that eating more calories from fat would result in greater calorie burn due to the body working harder to process the fat and, as a result, they would lose more weight.
"We found that wasn't the case," Dr. Arad told POPSUGAR. "When people say, 'I'm eating more fat and therefore I'm losing weight,' that doesn't seem to be the mechanism for that," he said. Eating a high-fat diet more than likely won't help you lose weight, but Dr. Arad did say that it will increase your satiety, help you feel more satisfied, and take your body longer to digest it. "A lot of people make a claim that when you eat more fat, your energy expenditure, your metabolism, is going up, and because of that, you're going to be losing weight," he said. According to Dr. Arad, that doesn't seem to hold true.