Isn’t that still with the goal of consuming less energy? We can treat a calorie as some strange artefact, but burning is the best way to break all bonds and release energy, and water is a common substance that holds heat well. It’s all basic thermodynamics. Any diet that works is some variation of eat less, move more. It isn’t just you whose metabolism and hunger change with weight, it’s everybody. And it goes both ways. If you start to gain weight, your metabolism speeds up. And the longer you’ve been at your current weight, the more your body resists change.

But regardless, whether it makes your body burn fat more easily so you don’t stay hungry or whether it burns a different kind of energy, it’s all an alleged trick to make calorie dense foods make you lose weight. I appreciate that it may work for you, but I’ve seen it not work enough that I wouldn’t recommend it.

And final thoughts. Sometimes I might have to limit myself to stay healthy, but I really like not having to ever give anything up, just to have everything in moderation.

Yeah, I understand it. And I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit (the goal of any diet) instead of feeling weak and hungry, you’ll feel mostly normal. But I just don’t buy it because even with this supposed biologic hack, I’ve seen plenty of people it hasn’t worked for. Carbs and protein both have 4 calories per gram, fat has 8. When animals want to gain tons of weight, ex. hibernation or whales building blubber, they eat tons of fat.

Even the “bad” diets of the 90s didn’t want to cut fat out, they just wanted to reduce it. But with keto, supposedly even just a few carbs will make your body seek energy there and not enter ketosis, so lots of people try to avoid literally any carbs at all, and if they don’t lose weight, they blame it all on that one 100 calorie slice of wonder bread. It gives the diet a strange cult-like quality where you can almost always blame it not working on people not adhering to it strongly enough.

If it works for you, especially if you do it in a more sustainable way, who am I to tell you how to live your life. But for most people I’ve seen, it doesn’t, so I’m still a skeptic.

This type of stuff is unironically going to shorten the lifespan of millions of people. The keto diet is so absurd. If I wanted to invent something that technically followed the rules but was wildly unhealthy, I doubt I could come up with something as absurd as the chaffle (a waffle made of cheese), but I know people who’ve actually eaten them. Once I was visiting my family and started snacking on some chips, but something felt off, so I checked. It was literally just melted crispy cheese. We’re going to be the first generation to have a lower lifespan than our parents.