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TAKE ACTION
Before we can begin, we need to grasp an understanding of the
problem.
Two out of three Americans are overweight. The primary cause is that we eat more and exercise less. There
is no doubt that the more advances we make that enhance our lifestyle the heavier we become.
Wait a minute! What about
all those low-fat foods that we eat now? How come I reduced fat in my diet but I’m still gaining
weight?
It’s a simple answer. A few
years ago we all became aware of the detrimental effects of fat in our diet. What did we
do? We began to concentrate on lowering cholesterol and taking fat out of our
diets.
This is a good thing.
However, The National Center for Health Statistics studied eating habits of 8,260 adult American between 1988 and 1991. Their research showed that Americans had significantly reduced their fat intake but still packed on the
pounds.
How can this happen? There
is no mystery. In the process of counting fat grams, we stopped counting calories! Many of us bought in to the theory that if it’s “low-fat” it won’t make us fat.
WRONG!
You can’t forget about counting calories. If you eat more calories than you need the body will store them as fat. It doesn’t matter whether the calories are from fat or carbohydrates.
One school of thought believes that eating small amounts of fat can
actually keep you from over indulging on total calories. The theory is that dietary fat causes
our bodies to produce a hormone that tells the intestines to slow down the emptying process. You
feel full and therefore are less likely to overeat.
Adding a little peanut butter to your rice cake may satisfy your hunger
for a longer period of time, thus preventing you from eating more than you need.
Here’s more news that is surprising. Tufts University scientists put 11 middle aged men and women volunteers on a variety of average, reduced and
low-fat diets.
The results? Extremely
low-fat diets which provided only 15 percent fat from calories (this is a diet near impossible in real life) did have a positive effect on
blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
However, a reduced-fat diet (much more realistic) only affected those
levels if accompanied by weight loss.
In fact, they concluded, cutting fat without losing weight actually
increased triglyceride levels and decreased high density lipoproteins (HDLs), the “good” cholesterol that helps protect again heart
disease.
We can deduce, therefore, while excess fat isn’t healthy, fat is also not
necessarily a bad thing. Without some fat in our diet, the body won’t make nerve cells and
hormones or absorb some of the fat soluble vitamins.
Okay, so how can you determine your ideal weight? Just how much fat and how many calories should you consume to reach and maintain a healthy
weight?
One answer won’t work for everybody. So you need to do some figuring to determine how much fat and how many calories you can have. First, you need to determine your ideal weight. Here is a
simple method to determine what that weight should be:
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