The whole world has gone “low fat” crazy.
Most people think they will lose fat if they just stick to low-fat foods or cut out fat completely.
What they don’t understand is that there is no “direct” relationship between fat tissue in their body and fat calories they eat.
Your body can convert any excess calorie — be it carb calorie, protein calorie, or fat calorie — to fat tissue. Let’s say you are on a 100% fat-free diet, but you eat 2 lbs of sugar every day. You’ll probably get fat after some time, even though sugar contains zero fat calories.
More and more health professionals are arguing that that leaving out most or all fat is not a good weight-loss solution. Firstly, most people couldn`t stick to this type of extreme diet for long. Secondly, very low-fat diets or fat-free diets seem to be causing more health problems like cancer, infection, fatigue and depression, especially in individuals who have insulin resistance.
Here are some common problems with low-fat diets:
(1) Taste — Many people find low-fat diets tasteless and non-palatable, and therefore cannot adhere to them for any length of time. Research shows that dieters can stick to moderate-fat diets more successfully than very low-fat diets.
(2) Insufficient vitamins — Certain vitamins required by your body are fat-soluble. There is a certain minimal fat requirement to ensure that these vitamins are adequately absorbed into your body. Therefore extremely low-fat diets can cause health problems.
(3) “Bad” carbohydrates — When recommending high-carb low-fat diets, the government and researchers assume that most people are getting most of their carbs from carbs of low or moderately-low glycemic index (ie “good” carbs). Unfortunately this is generally not true. Most dieters, unlike bodybuilders and althletes, who follow high-carb low-fat diets get most of their carb calories from eating high-glycemic carbs that cause their blood sugar and insulin to spike up.
To make matters worse, riding on the low-fat craze, food companies churn out high-glycemic-index non-fat carbohydrate foods to consumers. Furthermore, studies found that people subconciously think that they can eat more high-glycemic carbohydrates just because they are low-fat. Even “good” carbs (complex carbohydrates) can cause your blood sugar and insulin levels to go up, if you dont’ eat adequate protein and fat at the same time.
With such excessive carbohydrates in your body, you simply have too much sugar in your blood to be utilized completely for generating energy. The rest is converted into fat and cholesterol. Your body will switch to burning fat for energy when carbs are not available (ie when you are restricting carbs). The fat can come from your food or from the fat on your belly or butt. But with excess blood sugar in your body, it becomes unnecessary for your body to burn fat, thus this does not help you lose weight.
Therefore when you eat more carbohydrates, your body burns less fat to produce energy; the less carbohydrates you eat, the more fat your body burns for energy.
(4) Harm your health - Usually your low-fat diet lacks fat and protein, and therefore your body resorts to breaking down your lean body mass (ie bone, muscle, organs and body fluids, excluding fat) to obtain the nutrients it needs to carry out its various functions.
A low-fat diet can harm your health in the long-term. High blood sugar and high insulin levels (from eating too much carbohydrates) and the breakdown of your lean body mass (from the lack of protein in your low-fat diet) are not good for your health. Studies suggest that these factors can result in serious hormone imbalances in the long run, and can even play a part in health problems such as diabetes and heart disease.
Cutting out fat is merely going to another extreme that will give rise to health afflictions.
Low-fat foods have been consumed in greater quantity over the last decade in the US, and yet our society is still getting fatter and fatter. Well, doesn’t that tell you something about low-fat diets?
Don’t worry yourself too much with “non fat”, “low fat”, “fat” calories or total “carbs”.
If you want to maximize your weight loss, you should really worry about exactly what types of foods that you should combine together at each meal to get the proper portion of fat calories and carbs at each meal. But how do you do this? You can use the new Idiot Proof Diet from Fat Loss 4 Idiots. It’s not based on “low fat” or “low calories” or “low carbs”. It also shows you the right combinations of fat calories and carbs. Numerous users have told their success stories of using this diet.
You can begin this new diet right here:
http://ourbestdiet.com/nolowfat
Next: The best way to lose weight: low-fat diet vs low carb diet
