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Comment by ysleepy | Hacker News Reader

The body is very efficient in storing fat, more than carbs or protein. But burning fat is inefficient. But this is just from the top of my head.

I think its just a lot easier to eat a lot of carbs. Fats and protein make me much more saturated more quickly.

I don't think there is some magic formula.

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> burning fat is inefficient

Huh? The body is perfectly happy to burn fat. You just have to give it the right conditions. In fact, the body can get practically all its energy from fat, it's called ketosis. You can achieve a state of ketosis either through a high fat, low carb diet or fasting.

Yup. I've been doing a ketogenic diet the past 6 weeks and it's pretty awesome.

In general your body doesn't take the fat you eat and store it as fat. It takes the excess sugars and stores them as fat.

Maybe we have differing ideas of "general" but in healthy non-overeating people, the fatty acid profile in the body is reasonably close to the dietary profile. There is some conversion like elongation and desaturation of essential fatty acids and you can also find some short-chain fatty acids from fermentation in the gut, but it takes excessive amounts of carbohydrates for de novo lipogenesis. Also, what else would the body do with dietary fat other than storing? A fatty meal would quickly overwhelm the capacity of the blood if there was no mechanism to quickly dispose of dietary fat.

Storing fat? ... You know have to burn the the fat to be able to store it? The fat doesn't have some other pathway from stomach to body fat - all the 'fat' you carry has been burned to get there. So whatever you have been overeating will be the cause.

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