Can You Lose Weight from a Low Carb Diet?

That is the question with any diet, isn’t it? Does it really work? Can you lose weight from a low carb diet? The answer is a conditional “yes.”

Water Weight

Most people who attempt to lose weight from a low carb diet experience a loss of several pounds in the first week - this is water weight loss. The higher protein composition of the diet causes water to move out of the tissues and to be excreted. You can lose ten pounds or more because of this initial water weight loss. Most of the time you start to lose weight from a low carb diet with some kind of “quick start.” This is designed to help you lose a lot of water weight quickly, so that you are encouraged to continue with the diet.

Carbs versus Calories

After the first week, weight loss usually slows, and you begin losing real weight, fat weight. One of the advantages of trying to lose weight from a low carb diet is that it helps protect your protein stores so that you lose mostly fat, not muscle.

At the end of the day (or week or month), however, how much weight you lose overall depends on your caloric balance. In order to lose weight, you have to take in fewer calories than you use. You won’t lose weight from a low carb diet unless it is also a moderately low calorie diet.

Risks of a Low Carb Diet

Depending on how low the carb count is, there are some risks when you try to lose weight from a low carb diet. Very low carb diets force your body to burn fat and protein for energy. These are inefficient energy pathways, and they cause certain end-products to accumulate in your body, such as ketones. People on a very low carb diet usually have bad breath due to the accumulation of ketones.

Sometimes, these end products can cause your body chemistry to become too acid, a condition called acidosis. This is a very harmful condition. Trying to lose weight from a very low carb diet can also cause the electrolytes in your body to get out of balance. Sometimes you can have fatal heart rhythms because of electrolyte imbalances. This is more often seen with liquid protein diets, but can occur with any very low carb diet.

You can lose weight from a very low carb diet if you also cut calories and if you include enough carbohydrates to do it safely.