Do Carbs make you fat?
Answer: No. Carbohydrates do not make you fat. Too many calories make you fat!
What matters in weight loss isn’t carbohydrates, but calories. Getting a high percentage of your calories from carbohydrate doesn’t make you fat, because weight depends only on how many calories you take in relative to how many you burn off.
Watching calories is critical for weight control. Alas, when people are encouraged to eat more carbohydrate and less fat, some misunderstand. They think they can eat as much high-carbohydrate food as they want, as long as the food is fat-free. So they eat too many fat-free desserts and extra-large portions of starches. As a result, they don’t lose weight and feel that carbohydrates are keeping them fat.
Cutting back on dietary fat reduces total calories more than reducing carbs does. Because weight-for-weight fat contains more than twice the calories of carbs: 9 calories/gram vs. 4 calories/gram.
In addition, fat is more likely to be stored as body fat than are carbs. However, any dieter who reduces fat calories but adds them back in the form of carbohydrate calories is not going to lose weight. As always, calories in must be less than calories out, in order to achieve weight loss.