Fat In Your Low Fat Diet Plan

Following and sticking to a low fat diet plan is much harder than many people realize.  Often, we see a label that says low or reduced fat and think if we eat that then we are good to go.  Learning to read labels is essential.  Labels tell us how much total fat is in the food that we eat.

An average diet should consume 2,000 calories.  Out of that, 600 calories or about 30% of the calories you take in should come from fat.   Those who dislike counting calories and reading labels may struggle with their weight loss simply because keeping track of the total intake of fat is so crucial to a low fat diet plan.

Most of the foods we eat contain different types of fat.  Some are worse than others for your health.  Our bodies will make fat from an overabundance of calories.  Some fats are derived from plants while others come from animals.  This is dietary fat. Fat is one of three essential nutrients that our bodies need to provide energy, the others being protein and carbohydrates.

Understanding the differences in fat is helpful for those who are trying to lower their fat intake for health or weight issues.  Our bodies need a certain amount of fat.  Fat is necessary for storing energy.  It also absorbs and dissolves some key vitamins that nourish us.  The two types of fats found in food are saturated and unsaturated fats.  They are not however, equally beneficial.

Unhealthy Fats

Saturated Fats are the fats found in animal products such as meat and dairy items.  Fast foods are typically loaded with saturated fats.  Even your favorite baked goods may contain high levels of this type of fat.  Saturated fats are not good for your health and are a known factor in causing high cholesterol by raising the bad cholesterol (LDL) to unhealthy levels.

Trans Fats are a type of fat that can occur naturally in foods but mainly comes from processed foods.  The process, by which these foods are made, actually creates the trans fats. Called industrial or synthetic trans fats, these fats increase unhealthy LDL levels and will decrease good cholesterol, thereby, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Healthy Fats

Unsaturated Fats are found in nuts, olives and fish.  They are liquid at room temperature like oil, whereas saturated fats are solid like butter or margarine. Studies have shown that unsaturated fats are heart healthy and can lower the bad cholesterol (LDL) while actually raising the good cholesterol (HDL).  Unsaturated fats are divided into two categories: monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats.  The differences between the two are in their structure and the number of bonds in their chemical make-up.

• Monounsaturated Fat is found in a variety of foods including oils like olive and canola oil.  Foods rich in monounsaturated fats (MUFAs) help insulin levels and blood sugar associated with diabetes. .
• Polyunsaturated Fat is found in many plant based foods and other oils like nuts, seeds and vegetable oils. Foods rich in polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) improve cholesterol levels and can reduce the risk of heart disease.  Omega 3 fatty acids, normally found in cold water fish, fit in this category and have been shown to be beneficial to your heart as well as lowering blood pressure levels.

A low fat diet plan should consist of a balanced diet with calories from numerous sources including fat.  Foods low in saturated fats recommended.  Smaller portion sizes and frequent healthy snacks will aid your body as the changes to a low fat diet are implemented.

Once you learn to read label and spot the fats in your food, reducing your fat intake will become a much easier task.  Exercise burns off those unwanted fat calories so any low fat diet plan should include a fair amount of activity.

There are many ways to get started with a low cholesterol diet. An easy start would be to change your grocery store habits. When shopping, start paying attention to labels and focus on low-fat foods like lean meats. A terrific next step would be to focus on how to prepare the foods after you get them home. Of course, you should avoid frying your food. Fried foods add unneeded oil and grease, and in most cases, there’s a way to prepare them that is just as healthy, with all of the flavor.

Two healthy ways prepare and cook your food is to try is broiling and steaming. If you broil your meats and dishes, instead of choosing to fry them, you will gain the immediate benefit of a lower fat dish. For instance, if you choose steamed vegetables you will not only reduce the fat levels, but also enhance the flavor and gain the benefit of the vital nutrients that are not lost with frying. It’s like rediscovering what veggies are supposed to taste like.

When steaming vegetables consider selections that are fresh and raw or even organic. Although frozen vegetables are convenient, there’s a loss of both flavor and nutrients. And, to go with those veggies, purchase leaner meats like skinless chicken, fish, or well-trimmed beef. Picking a lower-fat cut of mear will help slash your fat intake and lower your overall cholesterol level.

When you are watching what you eat, your best bet is to count the calories and fat that you eat through every meal: breakfast, lunch and  dinner. Don’t forget that when dining out you should also make good choices. You might be surprised that most restaurants are also happy to make small changes that reduce the fat. Educate yourself on healthy foods, low fat diet plan foods, and monitor your sugar intake. This will improve your overall health and assist you in avoiding the diseases associated with obesity.

Some other ideas:

• Try adding a variety of nuts into your diet. Walnuts, pecans, almonds, and other nuts have been shown to reduce cholesterol. The polyunsaturated fatty acids in them are beneficial to your cholesterol numbers. In fact, the FDA recommends consuming them every day, as they reduce your risk for heart disease. Be sure to avoid sugar-coated nuts, and also watch your overall salt intake. Most nuts are available in unsalted versions.
• Eat more fish! Two to three servings of fish each week will give you the benefits of omega 3 fatty acids. These fatty acids reduce your cholesterol. If you aren’t a fan of fish, consider a fish oil supplement. Make sure the supplement contains omega-3.

Eat Slowly And Often:

Did you know that it can take up to 20 minutes for your body to tell your brain that you’re full? So, whether you’ve eaten 4 ounces of meat, a healthy serving of vegetables and a cup of pasta or rice or whether you’ve eaten double that amount, just twice as fast, your body will send the same message at the same time. What this means is that your body can have the same full feeling regardless how much you’ve eaten but if you’ve eaten twice as much in that time, your body will eventually show the results.

Additionally, eating several small meals throughout the day regulates your insulin and blood sugar, which in turn keep it balanced, keeps your other organs balanced and here’s best part, your body won’t store fat. Did you know that the longer in between each meal your body sends a message to your brain that it’s under attack and it may not get food and so it starts to store what is in there. Eating small meals more frequently can have you avoiding this.

Put Down That Cheeseburger, Pick Up The Vegetables!

A cheeseburger has two problems one is that it’s full of fat, loads of it!  To give you an idea, for a ¼ pound of a beef cheeseburger, you’re eating: 15.75 grams of fat, of which 6.99 grams are saturated, its cholesterol is 76.63 and its carbohydrates are 34 grams. You’re eating 408 calories, which for a dieting person is nearly a third of your intake for the day. It has 1011 grams of sodium, which means you’re going to bloat and retain water from all that salt. The other reason is that it sits in your intestines fermenting for days! This is no lie. This is because red meat in particular is insoluble and the intestines can’t process it quickly. A healthy serving of vegetables and a lean chicken breast will go right through you and combined; have less than 1/3 of the fat, sodium and calories of that cheeseburger.

Drink Lots Of Water:

Water does many things to your body. It aids in digestion; it flushes toxins, sodium and stored fat out of your body. It also gets your other organs functioning, as they should be; which is always good for aiding in weight loss.

Exercise:

Doing 5 45-minute cardiovascular workouts a week will burn fat and calories very quickly. The trick to this is to get your heart rate up at least 25% above what it is when it’s at its resting rate. So if it’s normally about 65, try and get it to at least 85 or higher and you’ll burn fat and calories.
This can be achieved through biking, hiking, running, playing racquetball or any number of exercises.
It’s best when trying to lose weight not to buy into those insane fad diets. Think of your body as your temple that should be respected and it will respect you and help you live into your 80s.

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I will further show that low-cholesterol diets can increase the incidence of heart disease and possibly increase the inci­dence of cancer, that heart disease can be brought on by increasing other dietary factors, including proteins and carbo­hydrates, and that decreasing vital nutrients will cause heart disease.

I will discuss the errors in the experiments that have misled so many. Most previous experiments have either used vegetarian animals such as rabbits which handle cholesterol differently from humans, or haven’t bal­anced the test case diets with nutrients required for the higher-fat or higher-calorie diet.

What the Cholesterol Scare Has Done:

First, let’s consider what the current beliefs concerning cholesterol have done. The cholesterol fear is a part of America you might even feel I am being irreverent by attacking the current belief unless you realize the serious­ness of what is happening. Without supporting evidence, many doctors recommend that cholesterol and fats be re­duced in the diet. After all, they reason, no harm can come from such a dietary restriction. It can even be a method of getting their patients on a weight-reducing regimen. This advice appears to follow the physicians’ maxim, “Guard against doing more harm than good.” But do they?

Over the last twenty years, people have trimmed fats from their meat, eaten less fried foods, and consumed more polyunsaturated fats than ever. Dietary fats has been reduced by nearly one-third of what it was. Our intake of polyunsaturated fat is at an all-time high. Therefore, our ratio of polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats has changed drastically, by 37 percent between 1909 and 1961. In the same period, total calories consumed per day have been decreased from 3,570 to 3,180.

The National Heart and Lung Insti­tute has shown that there has been no change in the pro­portion of cholesterol consumed over the last sixty years and, further, that polyunsaturated fats were 6 percent of our diet as compared with only 2 percent. Yet, heart disease increases, in epidemic proportions. The gen­erations that ate gravies, fatback, whole grains, and fresh vegetables did not experience coronary thrombosis.

It appears that although the first attempts to reduce the consumption of high-cholesterol foods did not reduce heart disease and, in fact, the atherosclerosis rate continued to increase, all too many people with the blessings of their physicians have become fanatical about the avoidance of cholesterol-containing foods.

There is evidence that “cholesterol-phobia,” the unwarranted fear of consuming choles­terol, has caused unbalanced diets and subsequent disease, even caused or contributed to the heart disease that these diets were, hopefully, to have prevented. People in many cultures eat low-fat diets and still have heart disease, while in other cultures those who eat high-cholesterol diets are relatively free of heart disease. Our forefathers had little heart disease, yet their healthy diets have been changed radically.

Cholesterol-phobia is very much in evidence. Mothers serve with their peanut butter sandwiches water or sodas to their children instead of milk; only one third of American families use butter; cholesterol-free egg substi­tutes and polyunsaturated meats have been developed; for many families bacon-and-egg breakfasts are a thing of the past.

Milk & Eggs Are Two Of Our Best Foods. They are nearly complete foods that help balance and help utilize the other foods in our diet. Even low-cholesterol diets recommended by most doctors contain one egg daily or three eggs weekly. But the cholesterol-phobic tends to remove all eggs from his diet. Although egg protein can be replaced by other food proteins, where will the other trace nutrients (minerals, B-complex, sulfur and selenium compounds) come from in our modern, highly processed food diets?

Physicians, especially cardiologists, feel that, at least, low-cholesterol diets “don’t hurt anyone.” When I asked a number of physicians why they recommend skim milk, they replied, in effect: “It can’t hurt, it’s lower in calories, and it’s cheaper.” Not one of the ten that I asked knew that the fat and cholesterol in whole (cow’s) milk and mother’s (human) milk is essential for the formation of myelitis sheaths of nerve fibers.

What happens to infants getting low-fat formulas when it comes to preventing future heart disease? Sub-optimal nutrition is not healthy; but, equally important, recent research warns us to go slow on high polyunsaturated fat diets for still their reasons.

The incidence of cancer and other diseases appears to increase in laboratory mice on high-polyunsaturated-fat diets. This is not to suggest that poly-unsaturated fatty acids cause cancer, as this is not the case. A certain level of polyunsaturated fats is required for proper nutrition; but if we distort the standard diet radi­cally, we may be more subject to a variety of diseases. Again, there is no evidence that the mice studies apply to humans; but it is a caution sign that suggests we should not experiment with human lives unless we have conclusive proof that the change is for the better.

The standard American diet of the 1850s or -1920s, high in saturated fats, is still today consumed in many countries where the heart disease incidence is low. The point here is that there is reason to question the low-cholesterol diet.

Vitamin B₆, like most of the B-complex vitamins, is used in the formation of co-enzymes that metabolize the fat and sugar in our diet. The large increase in sugar con­sumption has been associated with increased blood levels of triglycerides and heart disease. Vitamin B₆ is also part of the co-enzyme that helps form lecithin in our bodies. Even when we eat lecithin itself, which is a good practice, we still need vitamin B₆ and the trace mineral, magnesium, to help put the lecithin molecule back together after it has been broken apart during digestion.

Choline can be made in the body and is widely avail­able in foods. I recommend taking some extra choline daily: heart disease is such a killer that sometimes it is advisable to forget scientific conservatism and go a little overboard, just to be sure. One of the better sources of choline (which is used in making lecithin in your body) ‘is lecithin itself.

Lecithin is like a detergent, for it keeps cholesterol soluble in the blood; it is widely available in foods, but don’t consider yourself a fanatic if you decide to supple­ment your diet with extra lecithin as insurance. Remember, I said that taking extra vitamin E isn’t insurance; it is a necessity; not taking extra vitamin E is a form of suicide. Taking extra lecithin is not necessary, but is a form of insurance. Later in this article I show how Dr. J. Rinse has improved the health of thousands with lecithin.

Choline is one of the components of lecithin, but vita­min B₆ is needed to put the components together. Another important component of lecithin is linoleic acid, an essen­tial polyunsaturated fatty acid. The best sources of linoleic acid are wheat-germ oil, whole milk, nuts, seeds, eggs, soybeans, and, of course, lecithin itself. You can only make as much lecithin in your body as you have the least available components and co-enzyme to make the whole lecithin molecule. Relying on one source of choline and another source of linoleic acid may not give you an opti­mum balance. Incidentally, one of the problems with drink­ing skim milk is that the linoleic acid has been removed.

Another is that skim milk doesn’t have cholesterol, which is needed by infants to make myelin sheaths for nerve fibers. Nature has always provided ample lecithin in the same foods that contain cholesterol, which may partly account for the reason that eating high-cholesterol foods has not been found to cause heart disease. Lecithin also increases the capacity of bile salts to remove cholesterol. Three times more of the lecithin-cholesterol complex than cholesterol alone can be incorporated into the bile salts.

Dr. C. Pries of the Gaubius Institute hi Leiden, Holland, has analyzed the blood of 48 men between forty and sixty years of age. Half of them were known to have atherosclerosis, the other half were free of symptoms. Those men having a lecithin content of 36 percent or higher in the blood fats showed no atherosclerosis, whereas those with 34 percent or lower all had the disease. Dr. Pries concluded, “One should, based on the results of our investigation, increase the phospholipid percentage of the blood and the lecithin percentage of the fats.”

By now you know that I don’t stress blood-cholesterol level at all, but you might be interested to know that several of the B-complex vitamins have been shown to lower high blood-cholesterol levels to some degree. Over a thousand scientific papers have been written about nicotinic acid alone, which is one of the three natural forms of vitamin B niacin and niacinamide are the others. Nicotinic acid was found by Dr. Mark C. Altschule to speed normal oxidation of cholesterol to its degradation products. Dr. Altschule and Dr. Abram Hoffer  have published extensively on the action of nicotinic acid and niacin on blood-cholesterol levels.

1. Non Fatty Fish: This is a good source of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids that is high in nutrients and has no carbohydrates or fat. Grilled or broiled salmon, cod and  perch are great tasting and good for you but low calorie and highly nutritious, which makes them some of the best diet foods.

2. Low Carbohydrate Fruits: Since fruit includes natural sugar, which can also convert to fat, some fruits are not as high in natural sugars as others are. Citrus fruit, such as grapefruit halves can be eaten with artificial sweetener, lemons can be baked with fish or added to artificially sweetened tea. Avoid bananas and fruit juices since they are higher in calories.

3. Green Vegetables: Broccoli, Cabbage, Kale, Lettuce, and Green Beans are high in Vitamins A & C, and high in fiber, yet low in calories and carbohydrates. A lettuce salad is always good with low calorie dressing, and cooked or raw broccoli, kale, and cabbage are good in soups and green beans are especially tasty with mushrooms and onions, which bring us to the next best diet foods.

4. Mushrooms, Onions, Celery, Carrots and Green Peppers: These are low calorie, contain vitamins and minerals, great for snacks or flavoring in soups, salads, or as a topping for fish, chicken and low fat beef.

5. Poultry, Such As Chicken Or Turkey: Great protein, low fat, and carbohydrates, baked, broiled, boiled, or grilled. You can slice and add to a salad or add to vegetables for a hearty stew.

6. Eggs: A good source of protein and low in carbohydrates. You can make omelets or a Frittata by adding chicken breast, vegetables and serving with salsa. Boiled eggs are a great low calorie snack and one of the best diet foods.

7. Cheeses: While these are higher in fat, they are nutritious, flavorful and low in carbohydrates. Great to add to eggs or make a lettuce wrap with sliced broiled chicken or salmon.

8. Brown Rice: Brown rice is lower in carbohydrates than white rice and adds fiber, which is filling. Make a stir-fry with vegetables and chicken or turkey, add to vegetable soups, or stuff peppers with rice, egg, ground turkey and top with cheese.

9. Non Fatty Beef: While beef has a higher fat content than fish and chicken, it is a good source of protein, iron and flavorful, especially when topped with onions, mushrooms, and green peppers. Avoid fatty beef like hamburger. Grill a steak and serve with eggs, or make a vegetable beef stew, lettuce wrap, add to stir-fry or slice and top a salad.

10. Jell O Especially Sugar Free: This has been one of the best diet foods forever, and it is high in protein, good for your hair and nails, and you can add fruit for a great dessert. You can top it with Lite Cool Whip for a sinfully tasting and low calorie treat that you can have everyday!

The 10 best diet foods can be used in combination to keep your diet from being boring, yet still give you a tasty and filling low calorie meal.

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