[Reach]

as soon as your body realizes you're starving yourself it's going to devour everything but the fat.

This isn't technically true. Fat will always be the go to resource for your body when your carbohydrate stores are depleted. However, fasting will cause significant loss of muscle mass in addition to fat.

Metabolism > any other way of losing weight.

Expecting your metabolism to solve problems with caloric excess is simply asking for failure. Variance in metabolism generally accounts for a small (~10%) portion of your variance in caloric usage.

Creating a small, healthy caloric deficit is by far the most effective method of weight loss. This is tried and true.