I stayed away from fats for years, believing that butter, avocados, nuts, olive oil were too fattening. What a new day this is for me doing Phase 3 maintenance (no sugar or starches), eating 1500-1800 calories and including good fats! Butter, avocados, coconut oil, macadamia nuts…..what a change for me. For many years I was duped into believing that to lose weight I needed to consume reduced fat foods. For a while, I chose very low-fat foods but doing so did not reduce the fat on my body!
Now I carefully read labels, avoiding sugar, starch, and low fat! And finding foods that are not reduced fat is much trickier than I had expected. The food industry believes they are doing us (the consumer) a service by providing us with low-fat food….and often they reduce the fat and add corn syrup (yuck!).
Today, for instance, shopping at my friendly Trader Joe’s, I wanted to get some plain organic yogurt. I picked up one container, it was low fat; then another, and it was nonfat. Isn’t it strange that we (as a nation) are consuming more and more low fat and no fat products, yet we are getting fatter and fatter? These fat free products have not eliminated the obesity epidemic; in fact, these products are probably adding rather than subtracting weight to our bodies. And people are fooled into believing they are choosing healthy foods because they are labeled reduced fat! Now they even have fat fat Oreos and Pringles! Healthy? Ha, give me a break!
Several years ago Gary Taubes wrote an eye-opening article for the New York Times -- “What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?” (Thank you HcgDieters@yahoogroups.com, for mentioning this!) Although the article is 8 years old, it is fascinating reading and quite pertinent and gives the history of our low-fat diet mentality. I agree with the author that it is carbohydrates that make us fat (especially the starches that most people think they must include in every meal according to our silly food pyramid!).
You can read the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html
Here are some excerpts:
What's forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70's, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat. In ''The Physiology of Taste,'' for instance, an 1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ''stout party'' after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a ''particularly stout party'') potatoes. Brillat-Savarin described the roots of obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ''floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.'' He added that the effects of this fecula -- i.e., ''potatoes, grain or any kind of flour'' -- were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet....
By the 70's, you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates.
