The difference between healthy fat and non-healthy fat

When trying to lose weight, the first thing people think about eliminating from their diet is fat. When you do that, you are actually taking away a key factor that helps you to lose weight! As long as you’re eating the healthy type of fat, in moderation, your body will receive the essential macronutrients for losing weight as well as support for various bodily functions. Even some vitamins need fat in order to be properly broken down and absorbed by the body. By cutting fat out of your diet completely or by focusing on a severely low fat diet, you are doing yourself a disservice.  Creating a healthy diet for yourself by replacing the bad fats with the good fat is a good approach when planning your meals.

The difference between eating healthy fat and unhealthy fat is the way your body digests it and the type of food the fat is coming from. Fats coming from plants and fish are going to be your healthy fats or unsaturated fats. These fats such as omega-3, omega-6, oleic acid, and linoleic acid are good for your body and keeping them in your diet can even help with weight loss. Foods where you will find the healthy types of fats include avocados, olives, nuts, natural peanut butter, and fatty fish such as salmon, tuna, and trout. These foods can even keep you feeling full for longer periods of time after you eat them because of the time they take to digest, which benefits in weight loss. These healthy fats are also shown to help improve brain function as well.

The fats you want to stay away from are trans-fats and saturated fats. The reason for these fats being so unhealthy for your body is due to the process they go through by manufacturers to keep the fat from going bad after being packaged, which is known as hydrogenation. Foods such as french fries, margarine, cake mixes, Ramen noodles, microwaved popcorn, chips, candy, and fried chicken contain transfats and saturated fats. Essentially focusing your diet on clean, unprocessed foods, is the key to long-term health and maintenance of healthy weight.

So remember, when trying to lose weight make sure to eat foods that have unsaturated fat instead of cutting fat out of your diet completely. Don’t let the word “fat” scare you, it is actually vital for your body to have fat in order to function and is extremely important to incorporate healthy fats in your diet.