I was at a meetup a while back, talking with a friend, and one of us brought up that I'd lost quite a bit of weight. He asked how I did it. I told him the truth: I reduced my carbohydrate intake. I stopped eating carbs.
He nodded. He understood — or he thought he did. Because here's what was actually happening in his head: we model each other when we talk, we run a little simulation of what the other person means, and in his simulation he'd quietly swapped my word for a different one. I said carbs. He heard calories.
And it showed. He went on to tell me what he'd been doing — smaller portions, more exercise, hitting the gym — and how he still wasn't losing weight.
That's when I understood what was going on. In his head it was calories, because that's what all of us were taught: reduce your calories, reduce your weight. And that's true. But it's also not true. Because the fat you're carrying right now isn't going to budge by eating fewer calories if those calories still include carbs.
I tried to explain it. I tried to tell him calories and carbs are two different things, and it didn't sink. It didn't hit. Nothing I said in that moment clicked for him.
And that's the thing — he didn't need more explanation. He needed one small fix to the way he was seeing it. I call those stitches. A stitch is a little patch to your understanding: you don't relearn everything, one thing just clicks into a new place and the rest quietly rearranges around it. He needed a stitch, and standing there at that meetup I couldn't find the right one.
So I've been working on it ever since. Here's the stitch.
There's an alcohol version I've used — proof versus volume — and some people get it instantly. A lot of people don't. So here's another one. Scoville.
You might not know the word, but you know what a jalapeño is, and you know what a ghost pepper is. And you know that when you pick up a bottle of hot sauce and the label is screaming freaking hot, deadly hot, don't try this at home hot — you are not reading calories. You're reading heat.
Carbs are heat.
It's a different number on the label. If you want to know how hot something is, you don't look at how big it is or how many calories it packs — you look at the one number that measures heat. Carbs are that number for your weight.
That's the first stitch. Carbs are not calories, and calories are not carbs.
Once that's in — once you see that carbs are the heat — you know what to do next. You read the label. Just differently than everyone else.
You'll see two carb numbers: total carbs and net carbs. Net carbs have their place; they can help you find interesting foods that still fit. But if you're serious about getting your body to flip over to burning fat, without punishing yourself at the gym and choking down every unsustainable thing the internet prescribes, you read total carbs. Full stop.
Because here's the honest version of what I'm telling you: the intelligent way to lose weight — the lazy way, and I mean that as a compliment — is to take carbs out of your diet for a long stretch. Maybe for good.
Yeah. That means pasta. Rice. Potatoes. Gone. None of it exists on a low-carb diet, and I won't pretend otherwise.
So how do I actually live it? I ask. I'll literally type into ChatGPT or Claude: how many carbs in a potato? A normal serving of corn flakes? A glass of orange juice? A cup of coffee? A shot of vodka? Notice I never ask about calories — just carbs. And the answers are genuinely interesting. You can drink a straight clear spirit and it has zero carbs. A hundred calories a shot, maybe, but no carbs. If your goal is to lose weight, the first thing you do is strip the carbs out.
And once the carbs are gone, your body starts doing something genuinely interesting. It changes the fuel it burns.
Which brings me to the second stitch — and the reason the first one even matters. "Carbs aren't calories" is a nice fact, but it's useless until you know why carbs are the number. This is why.
It's called ketosis. It sounds like a disease. Sounds like something you'd want to avoid. It's the opposite — it's an impressive state where your body runs on a completely different fuel.
We've all been taught that everything in your body needs sugar. Glucose. We measure it constantly — pre-diabetes, blood sugar, the whole thing. Lie in a hospital bed and there's a good chance there's glucose dripping into your arm. It's treated as the one essential fuel. But the reality is your body can burn two: glucose, and these things called ketones.
Here's how I picture it. Glucose is the old leaded gas you'd pour into a 1979 Chevy. Ketones are the high-octane, expensive stuff you put in the Lambo. Ever wonder why there are different octanes at the pump at all? The premium stuff just burns cleaner, hotter, better. Ketones are your body's premium fuel.
So why aren't we taught this in school? Why am I the one telling you — and am I blowing smoke?
I'm not blowing smoke — and I'm not going to hand you a biology lecture about oxygen and efficiency, because honestly that's not where I live. Where I live is two acres.
A good chunk of that property has to be cut with a string trimmer — all the ins and outs around the fences, the trees, the posts, everywhere a mower or a tractor just can't reach. I'm not out there making it pretty, I'm knocking down a field. And I'll be straight with you: I have never, not once, been able to do the whole property in a weekend. One tank of gas in the trimmer and I was done — exhausted, back screaming, couldn't go another step.
Now? I do the entire thing in three tanks, in a single day. The only thing that stops me is water — if I don't hydrate I'll gas out, but if I keep drinking, I finish the whole property in one day. And here's the part that still gets me: no muscle pain the next day. No recovery. There was no recovery needed, and that never used to be true.
That's not a study I read. That's my own two acres.
So where do these ketones come from? Fat. And the liver is the factory. When your body is starved of glucose, the liver starts pulling fat out of you and converting it into energy — into ketones. That's what being in ketosis actually is: your liver, running in that direction, turning fat into fuel.
Run it the other way and you get the problem everybody knows. When you're not in ketosis, your liver does the reverse — takes glucose and turns it into fat. That's the midriff. The belly. The beer gut. And beer's the perfect example, because a beer is basically a loaf of bread in a glass — all those carbs, all that sugar, straight into your bloodstream. And that sugar has to go somewhere. Your muscles will burn it — if you happen to be at the gym. But you're not doing squats between pints. So your liver makes the call: store it. As fat.
You're not a bear. You don't hibernate. You don't need to be carrying that. Way back, our ancestors benefited from packing on fat to survive stretches when food was scarce. But if you're on the internet reading this blog, you ain't one of those people.
So what do you actually aim for? Zero.
I know how that sounds, but stick with me, because the target matters more than the number. A normal diet runs a few hundred grams of carbs a day — most people never count, and eat far more than they'd guess. "Low carb" means under 50 grams a day. That's the line you're trying to get under.
But when you're just starting out, you don't aim for 50. You aim for zero. Here's why: at the beginning you're eating carbs you don't even know are there — hiding in the sauce, in the "healthy" snack, in the drink you didn't think about. Aim for 50 and you'll blow past it without noticing and land at 100. Aim for zero and you'll still miss — you can't actually hit zero — but the miss lands you somewhere real. Maybe a hundred at first. The point is the direction. The longer you aim at zero, and the more you learn about what's actually in your food, the closer you creep to under 50 — and then you're there.
That's the whole trick: educating yourself on what you're eating. And there's one rule you can't break. You can't cheat. One cheat flips your liver straight back the wrong way, right now, and it takes a while to climb back to where you were. So aim at zero, learn as you go, and don't cheat.
So there it is. Two stitches. The first: carbs are not calories — they're the heat, a different number on the label. The second: your body has a second fuel, and it only reaches for it when you take the carbs away. Pull one thread — cut the carbs — and both come true at once. Your body stops storing and starts burning. And you might just find yourself finishing two acres in a day.
Now — getting into ketosis is one thing. Staying there without it wrecking you is another, and that's a stitch for another day. The switch has a cost on the way in: the fog, the headaches, the misery people quit over. Almost all of it comes down to water and salt — you have to supplement both as you cross over, and keep your hydration up, or the headaches will find you. Get that right and something strange happens: the hunger just leaves. That constant "feed me" your stomach yells all day goes quiet on its own — the same satiety people are now buying with Ozempic, except your body does it for free once it's running on fat. That's the real unlock. But that's the next stitch.
This is not medical advice. I'm a network engineer, not a doctor. Possible side effects of this article include: sudden clarity, unexplained energy, aggressively reading food labels in public, mowing two acres and feeling weirdly fine about it, and never looking at a beer the same way again. Do not operate a string trimmer while emotional. Consult a real doctor before doing anything some guy on the internet tells you.