Dietary Fat and Weight Loss

Fat in your food often makes it taste better and gives it a better texture, but it can make you really pack on the pounds. Fat contains nine calories per gram, whereas protein and carbohydrates both contain four calories per gram. 

Essentially, what this means is that smaller amounts of food that is high in fat contain many more calories than larger amounts of food that are low in fat. In order to stay on your diet and keep yourself losing weight, you'll want to eat foods that are low in fat as much as possible, saving fatty foods for special occasions. Eating low fat foods allows you to eat more and get the same amount of calories, which helps you feel full and prevents hunger cravings that can lead to you cheating on your diet.

In order to minimize the amount of dietary fat you eat, you should do most of your cooking at home. When cooking at home, you have full control of what goes into your food and the method in which it is cooked. 

Low-fat cookbooks are a great source of information on how to cook with little added fats; many conventional cookbooks care little for the nutritional content of their foods and overuse vegetable oils, butter, and cream in their recipes. It's possible to cook great-tasting food that is low in fat. 

If you have to add fat to a dish, it's best to use a heart-healthy vegetable oil such as olive oil that is high in monounsaturated fat as opposed to something like butter which is high in saturated fat. Eating monounsaturated fat lowers your cholesterol, while eating saturated fat will raise your cholesterol. 

You should still keep in mind that olive oil is still entirely fat, and will add a large amount of calories to the food you make, so you should still use it sparingly.

Although you don't have the same degree of control over what goes into your food when eating out as compared to cooking at home, you should still be conscious of your dietary choices. 

When eating out, stay away from fried foods and creamy sauces, both of which contain loads of fat and calories. If at all possible, see if you can find out the nutritional information of the menu items that appeal to you before you order it to see how much fat and how many calories are in the dish.

With the recent popularity of low carbohydrate diets, many nutritionists have been quick to vilify the concept of eating a low-fat diet, pointing to the sharp rise in obesity that occurred when eating a low-fat diet was popular and low-fat varieties of snack foods lined supermarket shelves. 

Many manufacturers of low-fat foods have added additional sugars to them to make them more palatable, so it's still important to read nutrition labels to make sure the food you are consuming is actually low in calories. Eating fewer calories is the only way that you will actually achieve safe, steady weight loss week after week.

Mike has been writing articles for a couple of years now. His latest passion is on Depression and Exercise. Come check out his site at www.completehealthsense.com.