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TL;DR: As long as you eat the needed amount of fats and proteins, it doesn't matter if the rest of the calories come from fats, proteins or carbs, since they'll get converted to carbs anyway.

Carbs are just (relatively) easy energy. So not eating carbs means your body needs to do more work by converting fats and proteins. That can lead to tiredness and issues with physical performance.

I think its theoretically possible to live without carbs, but it brings no health benefits, because your body then converts proteins and fats to carbs.

The important thing is calories and you can eat a lot with carb-heavy meals. Fat too, since both of those are delicious. (Longer carb chains can be more filling and technically fibers are also carbs I think.)

If you want to loose weight, there are many different strategies, because in the end you have to pick a diet that you are able to follow. (I recommend this playlist by Renaissance periodization.)

The most optimal way (in the spreadsheet sense) would be to calculate how much protein and fat and total calories you need. Then you add the calories from protein and fat and fill the missing ones with carbs. Less carbs has no proven benefit.

There are many online calculators out there, that do this for you.

To loose weight, don't eat less than 500 calories a day less than your maintenance amount. But maybe start with -250 or even -100. It's also a good idea to have "rest" weeks every couple of weeks, where you eat a maintenance amount of calories to relief fatigue and stress.

Cheat meals are a terrible idea. If you loose 3000 calories over 6 days and then go goblin mode on Sundays, you can eat an extra 3000 calories or more no problem, ruining your weeks progress. Instead do the aforementioned rest weeks.

Hope this helps. Its always good to live long and healthy just to make the haters angry :P

I was planning to write up a longer response but the other one you got is very detailed and accurate. But yeah basically cutting carbs just makes you miserable and makes it harder to exercise. The reason it’s a popular recommendation is because it often causes a very dramatic (but very temporary) drop in water weight. So people torture themselves for a month, lose 20 pounds on the scale, and are forevermore convinced that they have “cracked the code” on weight loss. They rarely mention that they instantly regained all of the weight when they inevitably quit the diet lol

It’s sadly very difficult to find good information because of how much noise and misinformation there is out there. I apologize if this sounds conspiratorial, but even primary care doctors are a pretty poor source of info as they receive no special training in weight loss. Whole situation is just a mess tbh

Something cool to check out is the national weight control registry, which is the largest study of people who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off.

http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/default.htm

We can see that most people who are successful don’t rely on some sketchy elimination diet, but rather build a lifestyle around more simple things. Such as having breakfast every day, prioritizing exercise, and keeping an eye on their weight by weighing regularly