Most people go through three steps in their understanding of fats and the role they play in your diet.
At first, we think fat is the enemy. Fat has a bad name. If you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get rid of excess fat, so why would you eat it?
Because of how many people think this way, food manufacturers label their products as ‘no fat’ or ‘low fat’ to boost sales.
After that, we usually come to the realization that we need some fat, but we need to limit how much we eat if we want to lose weight. The thinking here is that some fats, particularly saturated fats, must be avoided at all costs. At the same time, we know that we need to get some of our food energy from fats.
Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat
The third step is to know that we need to keep learning about the role fats play in making sure we get proper nutrition. Our overall understanding of all kinds of fats has changed over the past couple of decades. A lot of what we thought about fats when we were growing up is different today.
Even the fact that saturated fats are ‘bad’ fats has been challenged by a 2010 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It found there was not enough evidence to link saturated fats with heart disease or stroke.
So fat isn’t the problem, and the type of fat is at least not as much of a problem as we once thought. That leaves one thing. The problem with fat is how much of it we eat.
Fat is Better than Protein & Carbohydrates
At least fat is better than protein and carbohydrates at delivering food energy to your body. In fact, it’s twice as efficient at doing so.
But that’s the problem, if we ate the same food energy in protein as in fat, double the calories would end up in our system from the fat. And any extra energy that we don’t burn gets stored as body fat.
If you want to make sure you eat nothing but ‘healthy’ fats, the best way is to eat a balanced diet. When you get your nutrition and food energy in the right balance from all the main nutrition groups, you reduce the chance that you’ll compensate for an imbalance by eating too many fats.
But everyone is different and a diet that’s well balanced for one person may not be so for another. That means it’s best to develop a diet that’s designed just for you and your weight loss goals. The nutrition and weight loss councillors at Herbal One know how to develop a balanced diet especially for you using foods that are available at your regular grocery stores.