Even the healthiest among us want to lose weight, or at least avoid fat. The best way seems to just be controlling your appetite, right? The problem is, very few people know how to go about that. But how much thought could it possibly require?

What if the answer wasn’t eating less but eating better? What if the way to be less hungry and even lose weight is to eat more… fat?

The fallacy of “eat less fat, be less fat”

Why would you need to eat food with fat in it, anyway? There’s non-fat milk, low-fat cookies. The things you really want to be eating are usually available in “diet” form. Just eat those and avoid things like cottage cheese and avocados. In fact, dieting is pretty easy when you look at it like that.

However, anyone who is struggling with their appetite but thinking a low-fat, diet-food alternative will help them get control of their weight again (or even lose weight) is in for a rude-awakening. In fact, those same items are more likely to have higher amounts of sugar in them. That might not sound like a bad thing to someone trying to take the edge off their sweet tooth, but keep this in mind… sugar intake can lead to more hunger.

If you’re looking to lose weight and beat hunger, low-fat alternatives may not only be unsuccessful, it may have actually driven our nation’s rise towards obesity. The ultimate irony to our modern obsession with weight-loss, the answer to our question, “how have we gotten to be so fat?” may simply be that we sought to avoid fat to begin with. After all, obesity rates began skyrocketing in the late seventies… at the same time the campaign for low-fat alternatives began.

“I don’t worry about fat, I worry about calories”

Fair enough. Many people find weight loss simplicity in counting calories.

Fat is the most calorie-dense of nutrients. So, of course, if something has more fat it will have more calories. So if you eat things with fat in them, you’re going to hit your caloric limit sooner!

Sure. But fat plays its own role in nutrition. So to sidestep it in order to avoid a few extra calories is to miss out on a source of sustained energy for your body. While you want there to a deficit between how many calories you take in and how many you burn, being hungry is bad.

According to Dr. John Briffa, routine hunger weakens your will power to control your appetite. So maybe you’re eating things with less fat, or twenty percent fewer calories, but when you find yourself eating twice, it’s no longer beneficial. Fats help the body to feel full and seek to eat less. Calorie deprivation may more quickly trigger the body’s starvation mode, making it less willing to shed pounds despite your famished efforts. It’s even speculated that the absence of fat intake may cause your fat cells to swell.

Why you were encouraged to avoid fat

It’s commonly known that avoiding consumption of fats help you stay slim and avoid heart disease. Saturated fats raise your cholesterol and high cholesterol leads to heart disease.

Except the traditionally accepted belief that saturated fat leads to heart disease was based on correlational data. It was concluded that since saturated fat raises cholesterol, and people with heart disease tended to have high cholesterol, that cholesterol was in fact causing heart disease. And some modern studies seem to cut ties between dietary fat and cardiovascular disease.

While saturated fats may in fact raise cholesterol, even cholesterol isn’t as simple as “good or bad”. Saturated fats found in items like avocado bolster good cholesterol, which in turn insulates against heart disease. In fact, studies have actually indicated that milk-fat and other dairy sources may be beneficial to avoiding obesity.

So, even if you’re trying to reduce your appetite to lose weight, you should know that not all fats are equal.

But, what’s wrong with low-fat, diet snacks?

As people were told to avoid fat, companies were encouraged to begin making food with no fat in it. To compensate, they instead started creating items with more carbohydrates and sugar. Carbs, like fat, aren’t necessarily bad, either. However, these weren’t complex carbohydrates like you might find in yams. These are the kind that burn off quickly. Imagine you’re given a budget for a project and you spend it all within the first thirty minutes of getting it. You’re going to need more money soon. That’s why you don’t want to eat anything that is digested too fast. Once it’s gone, you’re going to find yourself looking for a snack all the sooner.

Fats digest slowly, meaning it’s longer before your stomach is once again empty. However, they also trigger the release of a hormone called cholecystokinin, which delays gastric emptying and suppresses appetite.

Eating should be purposeful. You should be getting rid of hunger and fueling your body. Diet food often does nothing to fuel your body and pushes back your hunger, making it worse when it returns. In response to the “low-fat” and “diet” initiatives, the nation’s beltline increased even further. Dependent upon destructive solutions, people didn’t realize that what was meant to help them lose weight was actually fueling sugar addiction.

So what CAN you do to lose weight?

Don’t make the mistake of vilifying fat. It’s a vital part of nutrition and taking the edge off of your hunger. By putting the right kind of fat in your diet, you’re actually reducing your risk of becoming fat. Avoid, instead, the low-fat diet alternatives. Go back to enjoying the food you love and take control of your hunger again.
 
 
About the author

Edgar Den Uijl writes for Libbera, which is a supplement that fits meets your lifestyle. Libbera’s clinically proven blend will help you to meet your goals while assuring that what you put in your body is only the best. Free yourself from the past.