What is the best diet for weight loss?

The carnivore diet is the most effective diet for weight loss.

Question: What is the best diet for weight loss?
Position‹2 of 6›: Eliminating carbohydrates is the best way to lose weight
Argument‹4 of 6›: The carnivore diet is the most effective diet for weight loss.

Looking for a change? Why not eat literally nothing but meat!

The argument

The carnivore diet, much like it sounds, encompasses eating only meat. That includes seafood, and sometimes eggs and dairy. It is a high-protein diet, rather than a high-fat diet like keto. (Both are very low-carb.) Many people don’t snack on this diet because of how full the protein keeps them, which restricts calories. They also frequently end up lowering calorie intake because of the extremely restricted diet . This results in maximum weight loss by practitioners of this diet. The reason eliminating carbohydrates leads to such dramatic and consistent weight loss is that it forces your body to use fat for energy. Carbohydrates become a sugar once digested, and the body will use them for fuel. Once you eliminate them, your body has to use its fat reserves for fuel, thus producing weight loss.

Context

With skyrocketing obesity rates, the race is on to find the most effective diet that people can stick to. With so many diets out there, dieters are often at a loss about which one to choose. This argument seeks to finally settle the debate so that people can take control of their health.

Premises

[P1]The carnivore diet is a high-protein, very-low-carb diet of only meat that keeps people so full they snack less and cut calories. [P2] Eliminating carbohydrates forces the body to burn its fat reserves for energy instead of the sugar that carbs become. [P3] This restricted, low-calorie approach produces maximum and consistent weight loss. [C] Therefore, the carnivore diet shows that eliminating carbohydrates is the best way to lose weight.

Counter-arguments

The carnivore diet is ridiculous for several reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t just eliminate carbohydrates, it eliminates everything. For example, leafy green vegetables and nuts are both carbohydrate-free foods. Furthermore, we don’t have the right digestive tract to exist only on animal products, so the diet isn’t nutritionally sound . Even if one does manage to subsist off of only meat, there’s no guarantee that you’ll end up consuming fewer calories. And too many calories will prevent any and all weight loss, so the diet as is may not be effective at all.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise identifies the wrong variable. What it describes — high satiety and a severely narrowed range of foods — is a mechanism for eating less, which any restrictive diet produces, so it supports calorie reduction rather than carbohydrate elimination as the operative factor. [Rejecting P2] The metabolic account is not what the evidence turns on: the body draws on stored fat whenever energy intake falls short of expenditure, on any diet, while a very high intake of protein and fat itself supplies energy that spares those reserves. Eliminating carbohydrates is neither necessary nor sufficient. [Rejecting P3] "Maximum and consistent" is asserted without comparison, and trials setting low-carbohydrate approaches against others generally find differences that narrow over time with adherence doing most of the work. The diet also excludes carbohydrate-free foods such as leafy vegetables and nuts, so it is not even a clean test of the position it is offered to support.