So, you think you’re a health-conscious dietitian. You love to cook and cook great food. You love to cook healthy food. You’re eating more healthily. You’re trying to lose weight. But you might be thinking, when you drop a healthy food from your diet, you’re going to feel terrible. You might feel like you’ve cheated. You might feel like you’ve cheated your body.
Drop something healthy from your diet, and you’re probably going to feel awful for maybe a week or two. So how do you know if youve cheated your body? Simple. You’re going to feel like youve cheated your body because you will feel like youve had a “cheat” because you have lost the little bit of fat your body needs to maintain its health.
One of the most common ways to detect a cheat is with a scale, or at least a scale that is calibrated to measure the amount of fat youre actually eating. If youre eating a little bit of fat, you can say to yourself, “I need to lose weight. I need to lose fat.” But with even a tiny amount of fat in your diet, it can be hard to know if youve made that little bit of fat necessary.
What you’re looking for is an indicator of your amount of total fat in the first place. So, if you have a little bit of extra fat in your diet, that would be a good sign that youre eating a bit too little fat, youre eating the right amount of fat, or you’re eating a little bit of fat and youre eating too much of it.
When you’re on low-fat eating, your body is making use of fat for energy, and when you’re not on low-fat eating, your body is making use of fat-burning to get rid of excess energy.
The amount of fat in the diet matters too because it affects the amount of energy you use to get rid of fat. But if youre eating too few fat calories, youre burning all of that energy instead. This is bad because if youre eating little fat, youre only burning a tiny portion of the energy you need to get rid of fat. But if youre eating a lot of fat, youre burning a much bigger amount of energy.
If youre eating too many calories, your body doesn’t have enough energy to burn fat. This can cause you to feel lethargic or fatigued or just plain lazy. So if youre eating a lot of fat but not enough calories, this can make you feel sluggish and fatigued. Or, if youve just had a big meal and overindulged, you could feel hungry for a while afterward.
So here’s a great way to know if youre eating too much fat. Just go out and get some food.
In a study done by the University of Wisconsin, men who ate more than they normally would had a lower incidence of heart disease compared to men who would not eat. Thats because when you eat a lot, youre burning more. And we know that when you burn more calories than you consume, you feel good. So if youre eating, youre feeling full.
After lunch you can go out to the beach with some friends and go to the pool and get some water. You can just hang out for a while and drink some water with friends. But it’s more likely, and more effective, that you actually think about the food you’re eating while you hang out with friends.