assuming same calorie intake on both the ketogenic diet and the conventional diet, would the ketogenic diet lose more weight even though the same calories are being absorbed?
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I generally wouldn’t say this, but there are a lot of confusing answers here.
You are actually asking two different questions – your title question is about burning fat and your second question is about losing weight. Those are not the same thing.
What matters for weight loss is what is known as “fat flux”. Take the amount of fat you are eating in a day and add the amount of carbohydrate that you are convert to fat and storing. Subtract the amount of fat you are burning, and that gives you the fat flux. If it is positive, you are gaining fat mass, if it is negative you are losing fat mass.
Note that you could have eat a lot of fat in a day and have a negative fat flux. Or you could eat very little fat in a day and have a positive fat flux.
So it is really all about fat flux and the focus on calories is misleading. The body has no calorie counting function and in fact is is much harder to gain weight eating 1000 calories of protein than it is eating the same amount of calories of fat or carbs, for reasons that I think are pretty obvious if you understand biochemistry. But I digress…
Where keto comes into this is that many people are insulin resistant, which means they have hyperinsulinemia, or chronically high insulin. That makes it hard for them to burn fat and therefore easy for them to have a positive fat flux and gain weight.
Ketosis gets rid of (some people would say “masks”) the high insulin and allows the body to burn fat effectively. Which is good, but remember that it’s about fat flux – burning more fat doesn’t necessarily mean fat loss.
The real advantage of ketosis is hunger control. If the body can burn fat effectively and there is lot of excess body fat, the brain will reduce hunger. For people with a lot of excess fat mass, that reduction can sometimes be significant.
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