Here is a common question that I receive. And I wanted to answer it in an article because I think most people just don't understand the whole situation about fats and their roles in our diets. It's only because of the not so recent fad that fats were bad.
And if you think about it for a second, this makes sense. After all, we are trying to lose fat, so doesn't it make sense to not actually eat any? Well, as good as that logic may seem, the whole situation is a little more complicated than that, so let me try to clarify it all for you.
The way I see it, there are two types of fats. There are actually more and are classified by a fun process in chemistry known as nomenclature, but I found that really boring in high school, so lets just stick to good fats, bad fats.
The bad fats are the ones we want to avoid at all cost. If you are trying to lose weight, I would recommend that you don't eat any of them at all. You find bad fats in things like french fries, fatty cuts of steak, potato chips, chocolate etc etc. I bet you know what I'm talking about. They're the fats that taste really good and there is a reason for this.
While it's pretty easy to go to the shops and buy as much food as you'd like, it wasn't always that way. Thousands of years ago, food was scarce, so it helped our species to survive. But that was a long time ago so we need to evolve.
And in the other corner are the so called good fats. These fats aren't quite as common in our diets as they should be. Fortunately, it's easy to find sources of these good fats and since fats are more than twice as calorie dense as proteins and carbohydrates (9 calories per gram compared to 4 for protein and carbohydrate) you don't need to eat all that much of them.
Some great sources of good fats include almonds, walnuts, peanuts and even peanut butter. It's better if you can find natural peanut butter as companies these days like to add sugar and bad fats, but even normal peanut butter is ok.
One thing to watch out for is how much you eat. I like to have around 15-20% of my daily calories come from fats. I'll show you how to quickly calculate if you are eating enough or too much fat. If my daily calories are around 2000 and I want to have 20% of those calories coming from fats, then I need to be eating 400 calories worth of fats. And if theres 9 calories per gram of fat, then I need to be eating 44 grams of fat. This isn't much, if you had a handful of nuts, you would probably be well on your way to getting your daily requirement of healthy fats.
So, if you have ever asked "How much fat can I eat if I am trying to lose weight" you can now answer that for yourself. If you are still unsure of the fat situation, go over this article until you are sure of what you are doing.
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