Low Fat Diets
The first thing you should know about today’s Low Fat diet is that it is quite unlike the ones that were followed in the 80s when they started exploding in popularity. As was the case with clothing fashions in that decade, we’ve learned from our mistakes and have made a lot of change since then.
It was at that time that low fat and no fat products started to appear on supermarket shelves, which made it easy to cut back on some fats. That said, since we didn’t yet understand the benefits of dietary fats to our diets, they were all treated equally and that lack of understanding wreaked havoc on our health and our ability to shed the pounds.
That is no longer the case. A low fat diet is now a fantastic option for people like you who want to enjoy proteins and carbs but know they can save a ton of daily calories by scaling back dietary fat intake. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that you’ll be attempting to eliminate all fat from your diet like the old-school diets used to recommend. Instead, you’ll be limiting your fat intake and focusing on consuming mainly the types of “good” fat that will help to support your body’s overall health and nutrition as well as the weight loss process itself.
Weight Loss Support
How To Follow A Low Fat Diet
Following a low fat diet isn’t typically a weight loss strategy on its own. Usually, it is a component of a calorie counting strategy in which you watch your overall calories while focusing on cutting back primarily on your fat intake to keep that calorie number where it should be.
The reason is that unused calories from food will be stored as body fat, regardless of whether the source was carbs, proteins or dietary fat. So while it may be easy to think that as long as you don’t eat anything deep fried, you can eat mouthfuls of jelly beans all day, that’s not exactly the case.
To be able to lose weight, you need to make sure that the number of calories your body burns all day – through regular body functions such as breathing and digestion, as well as by way of exercise and activity – exceeds the number you’re eating. This forces your body to look to its fuel reserves, your body fat, to give your cells the energy they need.
What makes a low fat diet an effective part of this strategy is that fats are very high in calories. In fact, they contain the most calories among all the macronutrients.
Experts recommend that the majority of healthy adults consume about 20 to 35 percent of their daily calories in the form of fat. A low fat diet usually sticks to the lower side of that range, depending on which one you’re following. That said, the total number of grams of fat you’ll be eating every day will depend on your daily calorie limit. For instance, if you were to follow a 2,000 daily calorie strategy, you’ll be eating around 44 to 77 grams of fat each day. If your calorie limit is lower than that, your allowable dietary fats will be lower, too.
Furthermore, because you are reducing the number of fats you’ll be eating, it’s important to focus on getting the right amounts of the healthiest kinds of fats. It might be tempting to try to speed up the process by eating even fewer fats than recommended, but try to resist attempting it. The reason is that many nutrients – some of which are critical to your metabolism – are fat soluble. Without a bit of dietary fat, your body won’t be able to absorb those nutrients and you can risk deficiencies, a less effective immune system and slower weight loss.
So go ahead and drizzle a little bit of balsamic vinegar and olive oil on your huge lunch salad. It will help you to absorb the nutrients you’re eating in all those veggies and fruits. Just don’t overdo it!
Losing Weight On A Low Fat Diet
A healthy low fat diet for weight loss will usually encourage you to eat lots of plant foods such as vegetables, fruits and whole grains. You’ll also have a certain amount of animal based foods as well, such as low fat dairy and lean meats. This will help you to balance your nutrition while keeping your fat and calorie intake under control. Look to the fish and (skinless white meat) poultry sections of your supermarket when you’re selecting these foods. Try to keep your daily portions of those foods down to around 5 to 7 ounces.
Other great protein sources that help to keep your fat calories down include tofu, peas and beans, low fat milk (such as 1%), low fat cheese, or canned tuna packed in water, not oil. Aim for a twice per week serving of foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as ground flaxseed (your body won’t digest the seeds when they’re whole), walnuts and salmon.
When you’re preparing low fat diet foods, you’ll learn to pick up habits such as removing skin from a chicken breast before cooking it, as well as baking, broiling and grilling meats instead of frying or deep frying them. Using herbs, spices and lemon juice instead of butter, cream or cheese based sauces and dressing can also go a long way toward slashing the dietary fat you eat in a day.
For many of us, this type of strategy can take a bit of adapting – particularly if you’re used to answering “yes” when you’re asked if you want fries with that – but in the end it can teach you a lot about your foods and will help you to effectively control your calorie intake in a healthful way.
Low Fat Diet Reviews
Review: The Sleeping Beauty Diet
The Sleeping Beauty Diet is a drastic fad diet that is more than a little bit risky to follow but that continues to come back into popularity every now and again after disappearing for some time. It becomes exceptionally popular for very brief bursts before disappearing into obscurity once more, giving people enough time to forget about it before it shows up again.
Review: V8 Diet
The V8 Diet is a type of eating plan that is based on drinking the brand’s vegetable juice as a component of an overall calorie reduced diet. This eating strategy hasn’t been laid out in a way that is entirely clear to many dieters.
Review: Park Avenue Diet
The Park Avenue Diet is a type of weight loss plan that uses a very low number of calories over a short period of time in order to try to drop the pounds very quickly. This strategy was developed by Dr. Stuart Fischer.
Review: Enzyme Diet
The Enzyme Diet is an altered form of the VLCD (very low calorie diet) that was originally developed by Dr. Charles Jenkins, Chef John Bartilomo, Dr. John Sklare, and Jennifer Ferniza.
Review: The Master Cleanse
The Master Cleanse is a short-term cleansing weight loss diet that also goes by the name “The Lemonade Diet”. This strategy permits only liquids throughout the length of the diet and is meant to function as a detoxification process for the body in order to kick off a new diet or jumpstart one that is already in progress.
Review: 24 Day Challenge
The 24 Day Challenge is a diet program that is meant to help people to reach important weight loss goals within a span of twenty four days. It was created by Avocare, which is a company that has been developing health and nutrition supplements for around two decades.