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Jack comments on Solved Problems Repository - Less Wrong
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As far as I can tell, ketogenic diets solve the problem of fat loss. I know, anecdotes are not data, but it's worked wonders for everyone I know who's tried it (myself included).
This is the sole reason I'm posting this. Keto works for very many people. The short story of keto is that your brain can only eat certain kinds of chemicals. Glycogen from eating carbohydrates is one of them. Ketones generated from fat is another. Your body will preferentially use the first over the second, since turning fat into ketones is expensive. So if you eat few enough carbs (<30g per day is the figure I remember) and plenty enough fat (2:1 fat to protein is what I heard), your body will eventually start doing chemistry that turns dietary and body fat into ketones.
There's some more practical advice about how to induce ketosis quickly (muscles store glycogen, so exercise helps) and how to make low-carb versions of foods you enjoy, but that's pretty much the gist of it.
Ketogenic dieting has been very effective for me. But I'm not convinced that this story about the body learning to turn body fat into ketones is actually how it works. My sense is that a super low-carb diet may just a good way of keeping appetite down and maintaining a caloric deficit. At the very least, that seems to be part of why it works so well: high fat low carb foods tend to be much more satisfying per calorie than foods heavy in carbohydrates. E.g. A Starbucks blueberry muffin is 380 calories which is like eating ten strips of bacon or 5 hardboiled eggs or more celery than you could possibly eat in one sitting. Whether or not the chemistry stuff is actually true keto is a good way to feel satisfied on a lower number of calories.
I wonder if a diet that was actually optimized for high satisfaction/calorie would be a) different and b) more effective.
I think it depends on the person. A meal without enough carbs just doesn't feel ‘complete’ to me, and it'd take lots of willpower for me to not eat anything else for a while (but I'm mostly thinking about stuff like pasta or rice or potatoes or bread or fruits, rather than muffins); OTOH I can go several days without much proteins before starting to crave for them. And eating ten strips of bacon without anything else in one sitting would feel very distasteful to me. But I know there are people for whom it's the other way round.