On the first order, or to the first degree, what you eat doesn't matter. Being a healthy weight matters, which means eating only enough to maintain that healthy weight and not more. If you are a healthy weight, you can eat anything you damn well please and achieve this first-order level of success. And if a pure-meat diet gets you to a healthy weight wereas no other system worked for you, then an all-meat diet is a reasonable way for you to lose weight. Other than keto's effect on hunger, food choices are mostly irrelevant to weight loss. If you eat extra protein your body turns it into fat... it doesn't go onto your muscles. If you eat extra sugar your body turns that into fat too (but you already knew that).

But on the second order, or to the second degree, people at a healthy weight who chose to eat a significant amount of meat throughout their lives don't live as long as people at a healthy weight who eat little to no meat. The healthy-weight people who live the longest are the pescatarians who are lacto-ovo-vegetarians except that they eat fish. They eat no red meat, no pork, no chicken, only sea-meats and generally only the fishes.

The difference occurs due to atherosclerosis. Meat (not just the saturated fat) and saturated fats (like coocnut oil) accelerate the development of atherosclerotic plaques. This is why you will see very healthy weight body-builders on the carnavore diet kick the bucket at 57 from massive heart attacks, and why people like Ancel Keys and nutritionists that worked with him (Jeremiah Stamler, Henry Blackburn) live to 100.

I'd agree on everything you wrote here.

Only after writing my replies did I scroll further down in your posts to find out that you're coming from the opposite corner as you formerly had lots of meat in your diet.

My perspective was more from the vegetarian/vegan side of things. I know a few people who're eating vegan/vegetarian diets and are struggling with a bit too much weight. My reasoning is that vegans (and vegetarians who don't eat much cheese or other protein rich dairy) are adding another challenge on top for themselves through their diet (in combination with the typical low exercise lifestyle) by skipping on meat. Because they'd basically have to have legumes like beans or lentils as a component of *every* meal in order to get enough protein *without* too many calories, but most people don't do that. Then they end up eating more of the pervasive carb rich foods, because their body basically commands them to ingest enough protein until they have eaten enough of that.

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This reminds me of my childhood. I was raised a vegetarian and didn't eat meat until I was 18 years old. But I ate a lot of white bread and drank a lot of root beer and I started developing a stomach at only 11 years old. Vegetarianism is not a weight-loss diet.