Low-Fat Diet Food: Fat Fears and Weight Loss
Fat phobia and the obesity epidemic: Is fat the real enemy?
A few years back low-fat diet food started to show up everywhere.
It came from a fat phobia, an unreasonable fear of fats in the diet.
Everywhere you turned you heard nothing but: "Fat is bad." "If you eat fat you get fat."
And so low-fat and non-fat foods sprang up.
There were fat-free cookies and fat-free cakes and fat-free candy and fat-free....
Well, you get the idea. Everywhere you looked labels said "fat-free."
The obesity explosion
And you would think that all the low-fat food would make people lose weight. But at the end of it all there were more overweight people than ever. It was like an explosion! What happened?
What happened is this: When you take fat out of food you have to replace it with something. Food is made of something, and if you take the fat out, there are only two other choices -- carbohydrate or protein. So all the low-fat foods were made with more carbohydrates -- sugar. Sugar, sugar and more SUGAR.
All the carbohydrate caused problems with metabolism. Increased carbohydrates -- sugar -- causes insulin spikes, and insulin spikes cause fat to be stored.
So what happened? If you ate the "diet" cookies you ended up much fatter. Not fair!
Sugar becomes...FAT!
Where did the stored fat come from? It didn't come from eating more fat. It came from eating more carbohydrate.
Your body can store the fat you eat, that is true. But it can also make sugar into fat and store that. It can even make protein into fat and store that.
That is one of the things your body does best -- make food into fat.
It doesn't work the other way. You cannot break down fat and make sugar out of it. When you don't get enough sugar your body can't turn your fat back into sugar.
But it can, and it does, turn your protein into sugar. So when you are starving it turns your muscle into sugar to use for energy. You do not want that to happen.
Ultra low fat diets
If you eat a diet that is too low in fat it can terrorize your metabolism:
- When you don't get enough fat in your diet your body senses it and goes into starvation mode. And in starvation mode you cling on you every ounce of fat in your body. You know what that means.
- Fat slows your digestion -- so it keeps carbohydrates from flooding your blood stream. That's good. When your diet is too low in fat you get wide swings in your blood sugar. That's bad.
- When sugar rushes into your blood stream you release large amounts of insulin -- and too much insulin makes you... That's right -- too much insulin makes you fat.
- The insulin spikes cause you to get hypoglycemic -- shaky, nervous, and HUNGRY -- so what do you do? Doughnuts -- and lots of them!
Ultra-low-fat diets are just like any other extreme diet -- don't get caught in that trap.
So don't be afraid of fat. And don't eat artificial foods if you can avoid them.
Get good healthy fats from lean meats, vegetables and nuts. Use olive oil for cooking. And you will be healthier and you will be able to lose weight.
So come on. Get healthy. It's time, isn't it?
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