Healthy Weight loss: Understand Diet and Fats

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 | Author: admin

Our diet habit and lifestyles lead to our current body weight and fats situation, and body fats always go hand in hand with obesity. It is normal for obese people to have high percentage of body fats. Surprisingly, some people with normal BMI or slightly overweight also have alarming body fats percentage.

Being overweight always leads to chronic diseases especially cardiovascular issues. In fact, every pound of your body fat contains about 5 thousands feet of blood vessels. If you have 12 extra pounds of fats, your heart will be burdened. It will have to propel blood through some 20 extra miles of blood vessels every 5th of a second. This means the amount of extra strain put on our heart and the circulatory system will eventually cause you some form of diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease as time goes by.

Why a person has overweight and high body fats percentage issue? Does it due to fats we consume daily in our diet? If this is the case, can we stop taking fats in our daily diet? Is that working to reduce our weight and body fats?

Why We Minimize Fats Intake in Diet?
Always remember this weight loss concept for healthy weight loss purpose:
Calories Consumed > Calories Expended = Body Weight Increase
Calories Consumed < Calories Expended = Body Weight Decrease

Your body weight is determined by total calories consumed in your diet and total calories expended in your daily activities. It does not matter whether you consume a lot of fats in your diet, you will not gain weight as long as your calories expended is more than total calories consumed in your diet.

However, we try to minimize fats calories intake in our diet as fats yields 9 calories (generate more than double calories if compared to carbohydrates and protein) of energy. It makes a big difference in total calories intake if you consume fats in your diet. For example, one pound of ground beef contains about 96 grams of fat and only 81 grams of protein for a total of 1216 calories. The same amount of flounder contains only 2.5 grams of fats and 76 grams of protein for a total of 358 calories. Do you see the difference results from the two different diet choices?

Besides, when people keep overeating in their diet, their fat cells grow larger and they also start forming new fat cells and gain weight. When they start on diet for healthy weight loss purpose, the size of the fat cells decreases, but the number does not. That is why we need to maintain a good diet habit from the beginning.

Can We Forbid Fats Intake in Diet?
Actually, we need fats in our daily diet for below reasons:
•   Fats contain some fatty acids, named essential fatty acids (EPA) which are necessary for body health such as manufacture and repair cell membranes, help our cells to get maximum nutrition and eliminate harmful waste products.
•   The fatty layer beneath our skin helps conserving body heat and regulating body temperature. Thus it also provides insulation against cold.
•   Fats placed around our joints helps as a lubricant in allowing smooth movement.
•   Our vital organs like liver, heart and brain are all cushioned by fats to prevent injury.
•   Fats are important in developing children neurological development and sensory system

Which Fats can We Consume in our Diet?
For healthy weight loss and health purposes, avoid saturated fats such as hydrogenated oil and use unsaturated fats like olive oil or peanut oil in your diet. Remember, the right kind of fats, ie monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats which found in fish, nuts, and vegetable oils do not raise LDL cholesterol levels in the blood, and thus is good for health and healthy weight loss too. Anyway, it is recommended to consume less than 20% of these essential nutrients in your daily diet for healthy weight loss purpose.

Conclusion
Fats are one of the essential nutrients that our body needs and uses for energy. So we cannot forbid them in our daily diet. However, don’t make this as an excuse to overeat them although they taste good. Normally, most people consume more than enough fats in the daily diet, including nuts, seeds, cooking oil, salad dressing, butter, fish and some fruits like avocado. And last, always concern about your proportions of essential nutrients in your diet for healthy weight loss purpose.

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