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December 2, 2015 By Leanne Vogel October 4, 2018
All of the reasons why you shouldn’t be afraid of eating fat. Why fat eliminates cravings, how to maintain your weight without stressing about it, why fat balances your mood and more.
Fat makes you fat! Au contraire, I say. Fat is good. But I didn’t always believe this. In fact, it took me a long time to get onboard with eating fat. Like, at all.
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I'm ready!For real, I used to pride myself in my low-fat diet. Heck, I used to make hummus with water instead of olive oil. So, why the switch? It started when I realized that (up until the point I switched over to eating high-fat, keto), what I was doing wasn’t working for me anymore.
Fat makes up the outer layer of every cell in your body. Our hormones need it; our muscles need it and (a lack of it) can lead to endless raging cravings for sugar at every turn.
When I was looking into switching over to high-fat, keto, I was scared. And I’m thinking, if you’re considering it, you’re probably scared, too.
Here are 10 reasons (with medical studies listed below in the notes) why consuming high amounts of dietary fat shouldn’t scare you anymore.
For video transcription, scroll down.
What, if anything, is holding you back from eating more fat? Did today’s keto video help?
Hey guys. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why there are dishes all to my right and so I thought I’d take the first couple of seconds to tell you that this is also my blog prop room, so all of the keto recipes that I create on Healthfulpursuit.com, all the pictures that I do, these are all the props that I use for my food photography. So that is why my office has dishes in it. I don’t like to collect dishes, it just kind of happened when I started taking photos of food.
Today I am going to share with you 10 reasons why I am not afraid of eating fat anymore and why you shouldn’t either. I get a lot of questions from friends, family about keto, and I’m sure you do too if you are eating high fat, keto, or even if you’re curious about eating high fat, keto, maybe you have these questions too, like fat makes you fat, and cholesterol will increase when you eat fat and fat has no nutrients, why don’t you eat some grains instead? When I get those types of comments, I always say, “Au contraire, fat is good.”
But I didn’t always feel this way. In fact, I was the girl that sauteed her vegetables in water and used water in hummus instead of olive oil. If I had nut butter, if I bought some nut butter, I would add a bunch of water to it and shake it up, just so that it wasn’t so fatty. So I’ve come from a place where I was deathly afraid of eating fat. I thought that it was the worst thing for my body.
But when I realized that fat makes up every single cell in our bodies, it’s the outer layer of the cell, it also is the precursor for every single hormone. Cholesterol’s all at the top, so you need fat to create hormones, and a lack of it causes a ton of cravings. I know that when I ate low fat, all I did was crave more and more and more carbs and sugary things. So by eating more fat we reduce those cravings for carbs and sugar and all of the things that come along with low-fat cravings.
When I was looking into switching over to eating more fat, I was scared, and I think that probably you’re scared too, and you have some questions. Maybe people are asking you things, and you don’t know how to respond. So here are ten reasons why I’m not afraid of eating fat, why you shouldn’t be afraid of eating fat, and why you get asked why you eat so many fats, you can probably respond with one of these 10 things. And in the notes section below this video, I’ve included all the notes and citations for the medical studies that I used to create this content. So if you’re a little bit curious where I found all this information, go to the notes below, and it will list where I found it so that you can do a little bit of research on your own if you’re interested in that.
Number 1. Increasing your dietary fat leads to fewer cravings and less overeating and allows you to maintain your weight because your blood sugar is balanced. So this means less over eating and less binging.
Number 2. Low-fat diets can make your triglycerides go up and that was my experience too. By eating a high-fat eating style and incorporating more fats, your triglycerides can go down and lower your risk of heart disease.
Number 3. Adequate fat intake reduces your chance of depression, and depressive states are shown to be caused by a low-fat eating style. Why does this happen? Well, cholesterol is a precursor for serotonin, so when we don’t have enough cholesterol, the neurotransmitter serotonin isn’t created, and, therefore, we get all depressed and not feeling so good.
Number 4. Increasing your fat intake helps to increase your HDL cholesterol.
Number 5. Cholesterol is used to make hormones, so in number 4 we talked about he fact that eating high fat helps you balance out your cholesterol and increase your HDL. Well that HDL is then used to make your hormones. A huge piece of this, and I get asked this a lot, is why are hormones important to me if I just want to lose weight. I just want to lose weight. Well, you can maintain your weight a whole heck of a lot easier when your hormones are balanced. So by eating fat, we’re allowing our bodies to balance out our hormones which allow us to maintain a healthy weight quite effortlessly.
Number 6. By increasing our fat, we are balancing out our blood sugar levels and reducing the amount of insulin that our body needs to maintain balance. So by increasing your fat intake, we are reducing the need for insulin. By increasing your dietary fat, we are reducing your carbohydrate intake, which in turn, reduces the need for your body to use insulin that leads to balanced blood sugar, so you won’t be craving things and needing to eat every 2 hours and planning your life around eating and planning and snacking and all the things that I remember that I used to do quite frequently, like every single day. Another piece of blood sugar is that your energy will be completely stable, and it’s not like you’re not going up and down, it’s just even all day long. Imagine.
Number 7, and this goes back to a couple of videos, I will link up to them in the corner all over, talking about cholesterol and also the impact that LDL has on our bodies. So there’s a little bit of a misconception when it comes to LDL cholesterol. There’re 2 main types of LDL cholesterol, the first is big, fluffy ones and the other ones are little pointy B ones, and I imagine the B ones ripping through your arteries, and the other ones just like bounce off. By eating high fat, we’re making a lot of those big puffy LDLs and those are completely safe. So by eating more fats, we’re making more of those puffy ones but not the B poking ones that are known to penetrate the artery walls. So the fluffier the LDL particles, the lower the risk of heart disease.
Number 8. Fats are loaded with nutrients, like vitamins A and K2, and vitamin E, and so I like to switch up my fats, always going towards different fats and I have a bunch of different options, you can get a bunch of different benefits from each one.
Number 9, it’s probably the awkwardest number to show on your hands. Number 9 is that omega 3 fats help to turn on the genes that work with fat burning so that lipolysis action, omega 3 fats turn that on so that we can burn more fat. And while we’re burning more fat, it turns off the genes that store fat.
Number 10 is that fats help us balance our metabolism so that we can maintain a healthy weight and we don’t have to think much about it. A quick note is when we increase our amount of fat by sharing these details with you, I am assuming that you have to reduce your amount of carbohydrates. The 2 go hand in hand. So now you really have 10 reasons why you don’t have to be afraid of fat, that I’m not afraid of fat, and responses that you can use when people ask you why you are eating so much fat.
If you want to learn more about eating high fat, keto and you’re like, “Dude, I want to get in on this fat party,” you can grab a copy of my keto book, my keto program, “Fat Fueled”. I have included a link over here. You can click over there and check out “Fat Fueled” to see if it is right for you. It goes through how to lead a high fat, keto eating style while also having a life specifically geared toward women that want to balance your hormones and get into the ideal weight without going crazy with tracking and all of the things.
So I hope that was helpful for you, and if you want to hear updates from me every single Wednesday on YouTube, you can subscribe to my keto channel. I’ve included a link up here, and you can go there. Also, down below if you’re watching this on the blog, you can just click that, subscribe and I will see you next Wednesday. Bye.
This entry was tagged: eating high-fat, eating keto, eating low-carb, fat-adapted, high fat, keto, keto basics, keto diet, keto life, ketogenic, ketone, ketosis, low-carb paleo, what is keto
Hi! I'm Leanne (RHN FBCS)
a Functional Medicine Practitioner, host of the Healthful Pursuit Podcast, and best-selling author of The Keto Diet & Keto for Women. I want to live in a world where every woman has access to knowledge to better her health.