Eat Fat to Lose Fat

Author: Tommy Leung | 08/13/2008 | Diet, Fat Loss

Once upon a time, the idea of eating fat to lose fat–or weight–seemed like a pretty silly thing to do; oxymoronic, if you will. I had some weight loss talk with co-workers recently and they thought I was out of my mind when I bashed the Food Pyramid–and this newer Food Pyramid–and recommended a much more simpler system of giving percentages to carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

This article explains some more fat fighting tips including using fat to fight fat. My basic nutritional guideline is to adjust the percentage of carbs, proteins, and fats that I consume depending on what I’m trying to do–protein usually gets the largest share of the pie.

The seemingly insane idea of consuming 20% of your diet as fat isn’t so ridiculous when you understand a few things. It is true that a gram of fat has more than two times the calories of a gram of carbs or proteins. Obviously eating a lot of fat is not going to do you much good. However, limiting your fat consumption to some ridiculously low level by replacing it with more carbs is not going to help you either.

Fats take longer to digest and therefore keep you feeling fuller longer–this should allow you to eat less in calories. Your body also has this instinctive survival mechanism to store fat when it believes that a famine may be coming. The likelihood of a famine today is pretty slim but, if you decide to starve yourself, the effect is the same.

Your best bet is not to remove fats from your diet but, to consume more “good” fats–unsaturated fats. You will want to stay away from trans fats which is commonly found in “I can’t Believe it’s Not Butter”–you are better off using the real thing.

Although it is not so blindly simple, at the end of the day it all comes down to one thing: calories in versus calories out. To lose weight you need to expend more calories than you consume but, not by starving yourself. That strategy will only cause you to lose muscle and we wouldn’t want that.

By Tommy Leung