Is All That Fat Really Good For You?

You’ve shied away from eating it and spent countless hours burning it off at the gym. Fat makes you fat…right? Oh, quite the contrary! Healthy dietary fat is the bees knees, but my mindset on this didn’t just change overnight.

I was Head Cheerleader of the low-fat squad; skimmed milk, 0% fat yoghurt, using water to sauté vegetables or 1 calorie oil sprays. So, why the switch?

I finally had to have a very honest conversation with myself, where I admitted that (up until the point I switched over to eating high-fat, low-carb) what I was doing was not working for me. Although I considered my eating style “healthy”; I was obsessive, restrictive, I lacked energy and focus, my skin was always hit or miss and breakouts worsening. By restricting fat and calories so much I would end up on a binge, carb/sugar cravings, (all the wrong food!). Because of this my weight was all over the show, not only on the scales but my face was puffy and the dreaded tummy fat would never budge.

Fat makes up the outside layer of every cell in your body; our muscles need it, our hormones need it and without enough dietary fat we can end up with raging cravings for sugar, and boy do I know about that! When I started to look at eating keto, I was a tad scared. I couldn’t make the commitment to go full keto at first so I just tried high-fat, low-carb.

I’m thinking, if you’re considering it, you’re probably a little scared too. But it’s now time to make fat your new best friend and here are 9 reasons why consuming high amounts of healthy dietary fats shouldn’t scare you anymore.

Note: these 9 reasons consider increasing dietary fat whilst decreasing carbohydrates, the 2 MUST go hand-in-hand.

9 Reasons You Want In On The Fat Party

1. No More “Snack-Attacks”: Increasing fat intake and decreasing carbohydrates reduces the requirement for insulin in our body… Which in turn reduces our blood sugar levels. No more blood sugar high’s and low’s. No more need for hourly snacks. Our cravings are reduced and our life no longer revolves around eating, our blood sugar and energy levels remain stable all day, burning fat primarily for fuel, instead of glucose.
2. Upping your fat intake increases HDL levels – the good cholesterol.
3. Eating a diet low in fat can cause triglycerides to increase. Eating an abundance of healthy fats and decreasing carbohydrate intake can result in triglyceride levels lowering, decreasing chances of heart disease.
4. Maintaining a healthy weight is a whole lot of a heck easier when hormones are balanced. Cholesterol assists in creating hormones, healthy fats balance the right kind of cholesterol, increasing HDL levels. Therefore by eating an adequate amount of fat, we’re allowing the body to balance hormones which helps to regulate and maintain weight pretty effortlessly.
5. Depressive states have been shown to correlate with inadequate amounts of fat in the diet. Cholesterol is a precursor for serotonin; having low amounts of cholesterol in the body means serotonin isn’t produced, which can lead to us feeling pretty down or even experience depression. Eating adequate amounts of fat can prevent this happening.
6. Healthy fats are packed with different nutrients providing different health benefits, so switch them up and add different options to your food.
7. HDL and LDL are two major lipoproteins that enable the transportation of different fat molecules around the body, including cholesterol. LDL particles exist in different sizes; there are the large, fluffy, cotton-ball like molecules, and then there are the small dense, pointy molecules. Think of the small pointy ones as tearing through your arteries – they’re the bad guys. By eating more healthy fats, we’re making lots of the big fluffy LDLs which are good and reduce the risk of heart disease.
8. Caproic, caprylic, and capric fatty acids (MCTs) contain antiviral and antibacterial properties supporting the immune system. They also metabolise into ketone bodies rapidly (which comes with a whole list of its own benefits), they are the brain’s preferred fuel source. The best MCT to take is pure C8 caprylic acid. Brain Octane is the gold standard.
9. Omega 3 fatty acids encourage lipolysis by turning on the right genes that assist in fat burning and turning off the ones that encourage fat to store on there body.

So there we are, 9 big reasons why you want to make best friends with fats and should no longer be afraid. These also work as great responses when people say, “are you sure you should be eating that much fat? Won’t you end up with heart disease.”