Whenever we want to lose weight we hear “you need to be on a low fat diet for weight loss.”  Although this may be true and will help you lose weight you need to be careful with your diet plan.  This article will help educate you regarding healthy eating that will provide a lifetime of reducing your body fat and keeping you healthy.

If you’ve tried to lose weight before with a fad diet plan you’ve probably experienced weight loss, then weight gain, then loss, then gain again.  Typically those fad diets that take you to one extreme or the other will not work in the long run, only in the short term.  Diets of this nature can also put your health at risk simply by restricing certain nutrients from your daily routine.  

There is nothing wrong with eating a low fat diet but you need to remember that we all need some fat in our diets.  There are different kinds of fats that we consume and this is where many people become confused.  Saturated fat is the bad fat.  This is the stuff that leads to high cholesterol, heart disease, clogged arteries, heart attack and/or stroke.  This is the stuff that you want to stay away from or significantly limit from your diet.  Mono and polyunsaturated fat is the good kind of fat.  This is the type of fat that you want to consume in your diet when possible.  So when you are eating a low fat diet it means reduce the amount of saturated fat that you eat.

Low fat diets for weight loss conflict with low carb diets.  One of the main points of conflict is that low carb diets are higher in fat.  The common belief is that a diet that is higher in fat will predispose you to heart disease.  Research has shown that diets that support lower carbs and higher fat content did not significantly increase someones risk of developing heart disease compared to low fat diets.  The same research found that diets that were high in refined sugars and carbohydrates and lower in fiber did have a link to greater risk of heart disease.  It further showed that to decrease the risk of heart disease a diet that derived fat and protein mostly from vegetables was the best choice.  

A low fat diet for weight loss may be a common method for people to use to lose weight but it may not be the healthiest choice.  You have many options to choose from when trying to drop some pounds.  If you want to maximize your health at the same time a diet with increased vegetables may be of benefit.



By: Peter Harris

We live in a world that has become obsessed with weight loss. Unfortunately, we also live in a world that has a lot of misinformation about how to lose that weight. It also tends to keep us rather busy and most of us grab a sugary snack or order food while sitting in our car at the drive up window. This has led to an epidemic of obesity that is taking place in many areas of the world. In an effort to lose this weight, some of us will restrict the amount of fat that we are eating on a daily basis. If you’re looking for a menu for a low fat diet, you might be surprised with the information that I’m about to give you.

The fact of the matter is, the amount of fat that we are eating on a daily basis is going to affect our weight to a large extent. The fat isn’t the only thing that we need to be worried about, but it is a large part of it because many of the fats that we are eating are not good for us. It is necessary for us to restrict some of the fats that we are eating because they are going to put weight on us rather quickly. There are other types of fats that we should be eating on a daily basis and we should not necessarily restrict the amount of them in our diet. What are these fats and why is that the case?

The first type of fat that you should be including in your low-fat diet is medium chain triglycerides. These were once thought to be very unhealthy and almost everybody tried to avoid them at any cost. The fact of the matter is, this is a fat that is going to help you to burn fat off of your body. Not only that, it is a very pleasant one for you to get. You can either eat young coconuts or simply take a spoonful of raw, organic coconut oil on a daily basis. Believe it or not, this will help to shed the pounds off of your body. You should also be getting some monosaturated fat in your diet. This is found in many vegetable oils but you should be getting these in their raw state instead of after they are processed.

A menu for a low-fat diet should cut out all of the unhealthy fats that you have been eating but you should make sure that you are including some of the healthy fats in order to promote additional weight loss.



By: Peggy Edwards

A new low-carb vs. low-fat diet has come out, and the Dr. Atkins camp is claiming victory, although the low-fat camp of Dr. Dean Ornish is crying foul. But I’ll show you the truth about the results below…it isn’t what you expect!

According to the NY Times “In a tightly controlled dieting experiment, obese people lost an average of just 6 to 10 pounds over two years…the results highlight the difficulty of weight loss and the fact that most diets do not work well.”

The scientists studied 322 moderately obese men and women following one of three diets, either a low fat diet (less than 30% of calories from fat – which really isn’t “low fat” as Dr. Ornish correctly points out); a Mediterranean diet; or the Atkins low-carb diet. (In the interest of full disclosure, the study was partly financed by the Atkins Research Foundation.)

The researchers did not claim one diet to be better than another, although the low-carb and mediterranean diet groups lost more weight (10 pounds) compared to the low-fat group (6 pounds).

In fact, men and women responded very differently to the diets. Women lost the most weight with the mediterranean diet (14 pounds) and the least with

the low carb diet (5 pounds), while the men lost the most with the low carb diet (11 pounds).

The results all clearly all over the board. The researchers concluded the results were modest, but still improved the subject’s health. However, all this information misses the main result of this study.

And despite what the NY Times wants you to believe, it’s not, “diets don’t work”. It’s that, “Dieters” don’t work. After all, if I worked with 322 moderately obese people for TWO YEARS, I’d be ashamed if they only lost 6-10 pounds.

The dirty truth about diets – the politically incorrect truth that no one wants to admit because it takes away all excuses for a lack of personal

responsibility – is that DIETS DO WORK.

On the other hand, I’d bet that almost every subject in that study lied about how compliant they were with the diet they were assigned. But that’s HUMAN NATURE. We all think we eat better than we do.

And that’s how you end up with 322 people dieting for two years, and all they can achieve is an average of 8 pounds of weight loss. It’s not the diets that aren’t working! It’s the dieters that are the problem!

So if you are having trouble sticking to your nutrition, or if you are confused about low-carb vs. low-fat, just take a deep breath and follow my 5 simple rules…

1) Find out how much you are eating now. Use Fitday.

2) If you are not losing weight, eat less.

3) Eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, and good protein sources. Don’t eat junk from a bag or a box.

4) Give yourself one treat meal per week to look forward to – not a treat day, just a treat meal.

5) Plan ahead. Prepare your meals (spend 1-2 hours on the weekend getting your meals and meal plan ready for the week). Identify obstacles and come up with solutions to avoid them.

That is it. Very simple. Most people do pretty well on 1-3 and even 5, but mess up on number 4. I often hear how well someone did all day long, but then while making dinner they snack on upwards of 500 calories of their kid’s treats, or other processed carbohydrates they have lying around the house.

The little things can add up to big time problems. So take a good long look at everything you eat. And all of this can be avoided if you follow rule #5. Combine my five simple nutrition rules with three short workouts per week of resistance training and interval training, and you have a very manageable fat loss plan that can fit any busy lifestyle. You don’t have to be a doctor to figure out how to eat for fat loss.



By: Craig Ballantyne