Low Fat Diet

The Low Fat Diet recommends eating less than 30% fat in your daily diet, replacing fat with carbohydrate.

You also include fruit, vegetable and whole grains.

There are healthy (unsaturated) fats and unhealthy (saturated) fats, so when keeping below 30% fat in your diet, it is important to choose the unsaturated fat products.

• Saturated Fat is present in meats, dairy products, other animal products and many fast food snacks.

By eating saturated fat you increase the cholesterol in your blood, and risk heart disease.

• Unsaturated Fat, for example olive oil and avocados, can be eaten in your diet without introducing cholesterol in the blood.

Nevertheless, eat too much unsaturated fat in your diet and you'll become fat... unless you use the energy it produces.
(Likewise, eat too many low GI (healthy) carbohydrate in your diet, you'll also become fat... unless you use the energy it produces.)

There is also healthy and empty carbohydrate. So if you follow this diet replacing some fat with empty carbohydrate, you will not lose weight and you will introduce unnecessary cholesterol thus risking heart disease.

You need to eat unsaturated fats and healthy carbohydrates (with low GI) for a healthy Low Fat Diet.

Fat makes food taste good. In fact, a reasonably high fat diet, eating unsaturated fat (up to 40% of your diet), has been found to be healthy, even for diabetics.

Losing Body Fat

When following a healthy Low Fat Diet, you lose weight/fat mainly from the LOWER BODY.

Following a balanced, relatively high unsaturated fat, diet, you evenly lose weight/fat throughout your body.

See Mediterranean Diet for information about a healthy balanced diet.

Summary

Unsaturated fat and healthy carbohydrate is essential when you follow this type of diet.

Even a healthy diet (using unsaturated fats and healthy carbohydrates) adds to obesity, unless you utilize the energy produced. Thus the low fat diet seems not to automatically aid weight loss as well as was once thought.