Eat More Fat to Lose Weight and Improve Health

Eat more fat to lose weight and improve your health. Healthy dietary fats and oils are good for you and are essential nutrients. But not all fats are equal. Learn why you need to include fats and oils in your diet and how to do that.

Lose weight by eating more fat — It sounds crazy, but this really DID work for me!

Healthy fats are essential to a healthy body and they help to keep my skin looking great! The benefits of healthy fats are too numerous and vital to ignore.

While most people are trying to cut back on fat—I am always trying to find ways to get healthy good-for-me fats into my diet.

All fats are not created equal and it’s important to know the difference and to eliminate those unhealthy fats. But good fats? They are good for you!

Good fats improve your health, stabilize your eating, and make you look more beautiful.

Why We Need to Eat More Fat in Our Diet?

Fat helps you utilize body fat: Eating more fat means you can eat less carbohydrates and this helps stabilize your insulin levels. Lower insulin levels allow your body to access your fat stores for energy. Fat is a major source of energy.

You don’t get hungry: Eating enough fat in your diet allows you to feel comfortably full without being stuffed. You don’t need to snack all day because you are giving your body what it needs.

Fat is essential for the body: Fat is essential to the maintaining of the cell membranes and the sheaths on surrounding nerves.

It’s vital for blood clotting, muscle movement, and protecting the body from inflammation. It also assists in absorbing some vitamins and minerals.

Fat is Brain Food: Your brain is at least 60% fat. Who knew? And it needs essential fat to operate at peak performance.

I’m not talking junk food or bad fats here. You can even grow new brain cells! Fat is also thought to improve your memory and mood as well.

Fat Improves Your Skin: The fatty acids you eat can act as a natural moisturizer and help keep it supple.

In addition, fats can contain antioxidants which will help against free radical damage. Fats can also help protect against inflammation.

Why a Low Fat Diet Can Be Dangerous

First of all, let’s talk about fat in general. For the past 50 years or so, we’ve become a nation devoted to low-fat anything.

Yet if you look around, we are the fattest we’ve ever been! And the sickest.

People are still hung up on getting everything as low-fat as possible. But this is WRONG. It’s dangerously wrong. For over 50 years, this bad diet advice has been the norm.

However, the truth is coming out. Dietary fats, even saturated animal and vegetable fats are not bad for you.

In fact, healthy fats are protective. They make you healthier.

Sugar, processed foods, and vegetable oils are the real dietary villains. These are the foods that cause inflammation, insulin resistance, and cause you to gain weight.

Unfortunately, most foods labeled low-fat are often over-processed, low in nutrition, and higher in added sugars.

In an effort to eat healthy, many women eat too many low-fat processed foods that raise their insulin and teach their bodies to live on easy energy.

Your body is meant to use body fat as energy too. Yet, when you give your body too much energy in the form of sugar, breads, pasta, or even low-fat yogurt or oatmeal, it uses what it can and stores the rest as fat.

We were all told that fat makes us fat. It just isn’t so. Fat is not what causes people to gain weight. It is over eating high carbohydrate foods, especially sugar and grain-based ones.

Healthy fats and oils make your food taste good and combined with vegetables and your protein don’t cause you to gain weight.

However, when you combine any fats or oils with foods like pasta or bread, then you will gain weight. The bread, pasta, or rice is what really causes weight gain.

Some Fats are Bad for You

Yes, some fats are bad for you. And bad fats combined with processed carbohydrates can make you fat and sick.

It’s not that fat and oil are bad for us–it’s that some fat and oils have been CREATED in a lab that are bad for us! I grew up with Crisco and margarine. Those are definitely no-nos.

Other oils that are problematic are canola, vegetable, and corn oils.

When people make jokes about fast food burgers or other crappy food, being bad for them, they are right. We all know a bag of Doritos and melted Velveeta is not good for you.

Examples of unhealthy fats are: margarine, corn oil, canola oil, and hydrogenated oils, such as Crisco. These do not act the same in the body as healthy fats and oils.

I don’t even consider them safe to eat. While I don’t worry about an occasional fast food meal for weight gain, I just don’t want that stuff in my body at all anymore.

However, there are many healthy, nutritious fats that should be a part of your diet. Heathy fats fuel your body, provide energy, repair your cells, and help your body function optimally.

I want you to start seeing fat as a food, as a nutrient, and as an essential part of your daily diet. The right fats are great for your health.

What Are Healthy Fats?

You may have heard in the past that oils such as canola corn, cottonseed, vegetable, soybean, peanut are good.

They are not. They are highly processed, come from questionable crops, and can have a detrimental effect on your body.

Forget your bottles of yellowish golden oils. They are bad stuff.

The good news is that good fats actually taste much better. They each have their own flavor and you can choose the best one based on what you are making.

I love coconut oil with curries. I love olive oil with chicken. I love butter with my eggs. Lard, duck fat, and tallow are all making comebacks in the healthy fat department.

In addition, foods such as nuts, eggs, olives, and avocados also have great fat content. These all make wonderful additions to your meals, not only providing great flavor but an extra boost of healthy fat.

Is Saturated Fat Bad for You?

Crisco and the margarine that was popular when I was a kid truly is horrible stuff. But butter, coconut oil, and fat from quality meat sources are fine as fat sources.

They are not the reason people get fat, have heart attacks, or suffer from disease. Sugar and foods that act like sugar in your body are the real reason women gain weight.

The average American is eating over 100 pounds of sugar a year and it has a significant correlation to cardiovascular disease.

Can you eat too much fat?

You could and the result might be unexpected trips to the bathroom. But if you are sticking with adding a couple of tablespoons of healthy fat to your meal, you shouldn’t have any problems.

If for some reason, you have a dietary reason to limit fat–that might be different for you.

Here’s my experience. I rarely overeat it. When you are eating real food, you don’t tend to overeat the way you do when you are eating processed food.

If I’m having a piece or two of chicken with a couple of vegetable sides, I usually don’t overeat. And that is not because it doesn’t taste good.

When you are cooking and garnishing with fat—your food tastes delicious! It satisfies your mind and your body in a way that processed food never will.

What is Real Food?

I don’t want to assume everyone has the same idea of what Real Food is. For me, it’s meat, eggs, vegetables, fruit, some dairy, and healthy fats. Other people include grains, beans, and dairy as well.

To be truthful, I do eat some rice and corn, mostly when eating out. I do like chips and salsa and sushi occasionally. But for the most part, I do stick to the basics I listed above.

Why Do Doctors say to eat low fat?

Doctors are not very educated in nutrition—it’s hardly addressed in medical school. In my experience, doctors tell people the same old bad advice—eat low fat, lots of grains, and avoid red meat.

But you can tell just by looking around that the current way of doing things just isn’t working! People are fatter and sicker than ever.

This advice leads to weight gain and disease. That’s the part of research that you rarely hear about. This advice doesn’t do what it’s intended to do and catastrophically has led to a very unhealthy population.

It’s kind of a funny world where people think you’re the crazy one because you actually eat meat, vegetables, and fruit.

Fat tastes great!

For clarification, I am not drowning all my food in fat. I do use a good amount of it, but my taste buds and body know when enough is enough.

Here’s what is not yummy—a dry chicken breast and steamed broccoli. Sure if that’s all there was, I’m sure I could get it down.

However, some delicious roasted chicken with a buttery side of broccoli is way better and I think better for you. If you are vegetarian, there are many excellent vegetarian sources of healthy fat too.

How to Get Started Eating More Fat

As you begin to explore adding healthier fats to your diet, start with ones you are more comfortable with.

Start eating avocados, nuts, eggs, and olives regularly. Swap out your unhealthy oils such as canola with olive or coconut oil.

Starting cooking your chicken with the skin on. As you do this, reduce processed and low-fat foods in your diet.

Adding healthy fats to your diet can make a difference in your skin, your health, and your weight.

I really encourage you to do your own research so that you can be comfortable with a diet that has enough of the right kind of fat in it.

It is truly one of the best things you can eat for your wellbeing and overall health.

Be brave and eat more fat!

These are books that I highly recommend. These are affiliate links. You can read my full disclosure here.

I am a fan of eating fat and have been for years. I am currently reading The Big Fat Surprise and it is blowing my mind. The author spent 9 years, going over the research about fat in our diets from the past 60 years!

Another influential book for me is Gary Taubes classic, Why We Get Fat. This book makes a case that fat does not make us fat in an easy-to-understand way.