Weight loss myth: low fat diets

Losing weight is one of the great challenges in the United States and many other countries around the world.

As someone who has recently experienced great success with my own weight loss goals, I'm shocked to discover how difficult it is not to fall prey to the multitude of rumors and myths regarding weight loss. I achieved my weight loss with little difficulty, without paying any personal trainers, or buying into any expensive meal programs or other gimmicks. The simple fact is that the knowledge required to lose weight and keep it off is available to everyone -- it's all over the internet for free, but you have to be able to separate the fact from fiction, and that takes some work.

This post will focus on dispelling one particular myth, and describing some of the ways in which this myth can sabotage your weight loss and weight maintenance goals.

The myth is that a low-fat diet can help you lose weight.

Yes, you're hearing me correctly. A low fat diet will not help you lose weight or maintain a low weight.

Of course, there are plenty of people who have gone on a low fat diet and lost weight. This isn't simply a coincidence. Like most myths, this one has a tiny amount of fact that keeps it alive.

That fact is that fat has more Calories per gram than any other food category. That means that it's easy to fit a large number of Calories into a small amount of food by adding only a little fat. This is why low fat diets sometimes succeed: because the person going on the low fat diet is also reducing the number of Calories they are consuming, and reducing your Calorie intake is the only proven method of losing weight through diet.

But there's a reason that low fat diets often fail. There's a reason that going on a low fat diet is a trap. Simply put, if you are unable to lose weight on a 3000 Calorie per day, high-fat diet, and you switch to a 3000 Calorie per day low-fat diet, you will still be unable to lose weight.

The fact that the US government has ordered food manufacturers to list "Calories from fat" on the nutritional information has given me little faith in anything the US government tells me. Fat Calories are no different than any other type of Calorie. If you eat nothing but fat every day, but still eat less Calories than you burn you will still lose weight. (you'll certainly have other heath problems associated with such a diet, however).

To make matters worse, the law says that if the amount of fat per serving is less than .5g the manufacturer can label the food "fat free". This is reasonable if it's a can of soup and a serving size is 1 bowl, but what about mayonnaise, where the serving size is a tablespoon, and the fat free version still has .49g of fat? That "fat free" potato salad at your favorite summer picnic isn't safe to consume in mass, it's got way more than a tablespoon of mayonnaise in it. Maybe that 1 cookie has less than .5g of fat, but if you eat a half dozen of them, well ...

Of course, the real evil here is tricking you into thinking that these foods are good for weight loss because they can claim to be low fat or fat free. The only thing that's really important is how many Calories these foods have, but the "fat free" claim has distracted you from even checking. Oddly, I've even found a few foods in which the "fat free" version had more Calories than the version made with fat. In this case, the manufacturer is really sabotaging your weight loss goals!

There are lots of other reasons to limit the fat in your diet, and if you have issues with heart disease or some other problem, you should certainly try to keep your dietary fat intake under control.

But weight loss/weight control has nothing to do with fat. Nothing whatsoever. And focusing on the fat content in foods isn't going to sabotage you every time, but it will lead to the one little mistake you make each day that puts your Calorie intake just over the top and sabotages your weight loss program over the long haul.

So don't worry about your fat intake. Ignore what you see regarding fat on the labels. Count Calories and you'll get accurate information that will keep you losing weight and keeping it off.

More to come.