Do I need to cut carbs to lose fat?
No: over a year, low carb and low fat diets produced the same average weight loss when both were built from whole foods.
Cutting carbs drops the scale quickly in the first week, because glycogen leaves with water. That is not fat, and it comes back the moment you eat bread again.
What low carb diets do have going for them is that they remove a lot of easy calories at once. If that fits how you eat, use it. If you train hard, carbohydrate is also what fuels the hard sets and the fast runs, so cutting it deeply tends to cost you in the gym before it costs you fat.
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- Gardner, C.D. et al. (2018). Effect of low-fat vs low-carbohydrate diet on 12-month weight loss in overweight adults and the association with genotype pattern or insulin secretion: the DIETFITS randomized clinical trial. JAMA 319(7). 609 adults, 12 months: no significant difference in weight loss between the two diets, and neither genotype nor insulin response predicted who did better on which.
- Hall, K.D. et al. (2012). Energy balance and its components: implications for body weight regulation. Am J Clin Nutr 95(4). Why: the deficit sets the fat loss, whichever macronutrient it comes out of.