Women's Health

Weight Loss: Reducing Dietary Fat

Why Do Most Diets Focus on Reducing Fat?

Fat gets a lot of the attention for many good reasons. Fat can raise cholesterol levels in the blood, increasing a person's risk for heart disease.

In addition, some fatty foods (such as bacon, sausage, and potato chips) often have fewer vitamins and minerals than low-fat foods.

Moreover as mentioned, fat has about twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates and proteins. A gram of fat has 9 calories, while a gram of carbohydrate or protein has 4 calories. In other words, you could eat twice as much carbohydrates or proteins as fat for the same amount of calories.

Will I Lose Weight If I Eat Low-Fat Foods?

It's true that a diet high in fat can lead to weight gain. But it takes more than just eating low-fat foods to lose weight. You must also watch how many calories you eat. Remember, extra calories even from fat-free, trans fat-free, and low-fat foods get stored in the body as fat. Many times people replace high-fat foods for high-calorie foods, like sweets, and gain weight rather than lose weight.

To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat. You can achieve this goal by exercising more and by eating less fat and calories.

How Much Fat Should I Eat?

The dietary reference intake for fat in adults is 20%-35% of total daily calories from fat. That's about 44 to 77 grams of fat a day if you eat 2,000 calories a day.

Recently, health experts have started to recommend that people eliminate another type of fat called "trans fat" from their diet. This fat, formed during a process called hydrogenation, coverts a relatively healthy unsaturated liquid fat, like corn oil into a solid one. Although this process gives a food longer shelf life, it also makes the fats act like saturated fat in our bodies, and may be worse when it comes to causing heart disease.

Health experts recommend removing as much trans fat from your diet as possible.

How Can I Know How Much Fat I Am Eating?

Learn about the foods you eat. Fat and calorie listings for individual foods can be found in nutrition books at your local library, on the Internet, and on food packages.

Read nutrition labels on food packages. Nutrition labels show the number of grams of fat per serving and calories per serving. They also show the daily percentage of fat provided in each serving. In other words, if the daily percentage of fat per serving is 18%, each serving provides 18% of the total fat you should eat for the day. Choose a brand that has a lower fat percentage. (The daily percentage value is based on a number of calories listed on the nutrition label, usually 2,000. Your calorie needs may be higher or lower.)