RAE
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
I personally tend to eat a low moderate amount of carbs and am not worried about fat at all. But -- carbs and sugars don't cause weight gain any more than fat causes weight gain. Having a calorie surplus causes weight gain. You could 100% carbs and you would gain weight if you had a calorie surplus, same thing for fat.
But high carbs and sugar cause weight gain if and only if they result in a calorie surplus over time.
We've discussed this on the forum before, and I don't want to get into an extended debate about it now, but lots of studies have shown this to be incorrect, when it is applied to the human body. I copied the text below from something Dr. Mark Hyman wrote, as he says it better than I can:
"It’s true that when burned in a laboratory setting, 1,000 calories of broccoli and 1,000 calories of soda would indeed release the same amount of energy. But sorry, your law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply in living, breathing, digesting systems. When you eat food, the “isolated system” part of the equation goes out the window. The food interacts with your biology, a complex adaptive system that instantly transforms every bite.
To illustrate how this works, let’s follow 750 calories of soda and 750 calories of broccoli once they enter your body. First, soda: 750 calories is the amount in a Double Gulp from 7-Eleven, which is 100 percent sugar and contains 186 grams, or 46 teaspoons, of sugar. Many people actually do consume this amount of soda. They are considered the “heavy users.”
Your gut quickly absorbs the fiber-free sugars in the soda, fructose, and glucose. The glucose spikes your blood sugar, starting a domino effect of high insulin and a cascade of hormonal responses that kicks bad biochemistry into gear. The high insulin increases storage of belly fat, increases inflammation, raises triglycerides and lowers HDL, raises blood pressure, lowers testosterone in men, and contributes to infertility in women.
Next, the broccoli. First, you wouldn’t be able to eat twenty-one cups of broccoli, because it wouldn’t fit in your stomach. But assuming you could, what would happen? They contain so much fiber that very few of the calories would actually get absorbed. Those that did would get absorbed very slowly. There’d be no blood sugar or insulin spike, no fatty liver, no hormonal chaos. Your stomach would distend (which it doesn’t with soda; bloat from carbonation doesn’t count!), sending signals to your brain that you were full. There would be no triggering of the addiction reward center in the brain. You’d also get many extra benefits that optimize metabolism, lower cholesterol, reduce inflammation, and boost detoxification. The phytonutrients in broccoli boost your liver’s ability to detoxify environmental chemicals, and the flavonoid kaempferol is a powerful anti-inflammatory. Broccoli also contains high levels of vitamin C and folate, which protect against cancer and heart disease. The glucosinolates and sulphorophanes in broccoli change the expression of your genes to help balance your sex hormones, reducing breast and other cancers.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is that all calories are NOT created equal. The same number of calories from different types of food can have very different biological effects.
If you still think a calorie is just a calorie, maybe this study will convince you otherwise. In a study of 154 countries that looked at the correlation of calories, sugar, and diabetes, scientists found that adding 150 calories a day to the diet barely raised the risk of diabetes in the population, but if those 150 calories came from soda, the risk of diabetes went up by 700 percent.
Some calories are addictive, others healing, some fattening, some metabolism-boosting. That’s because food doesn’t just contain calories, it contains information. Every bite of food you eat broadcasts a set of coded instructions to your body—instructions that can create either health or disease."
https://drhyman.com/blog/2014/04/10/calories-dont-matter/
https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/ask-the-dietitian-is-a-calorie-a-calorie-2/