Eat Fat Lose Weight

It wasn’t too long ago that leading health experts believed that fat was all-around bad news for your health. But—thankfully!—an emerging body of research is proving the opposite to be true: certain types of fat actually improve our health. Most of this “healthy fat” science focuses on two main categories of unsaturated fats—monounsaturated fats (MUFAs) and polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs). PUFAs, which include omega-3 fatty acids, help regulate inflammation and appear to play a role in everything from heart health to mood and happiness. MUFAs may reduce bad cholesterol and increase the good kind. MUFAs also appear to target and shrink dangerous belly fat linked with metabolic disorders. These good-for-you unsaturated fats are critical for your head-to-toe health—and here are some clues that you might need to load up on more good fats in your daily meals.

It sounds completely counterintuitive, but you need to eat fat to burn fat. Katherine Zeratsky, RD, a registered dietitian at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told Fitness magazine that eating a small amount of unsaturated fats at each meal will help you feel more satisfied over a longer period of time, and therefore consume less overall. When it comes to the low-fat vs. low-carb weight loss debate, the latest science squarely favors low-carb diets. A randomized study from the National Institutes 
of Health recently found that low-carb eaters lost more weight (about eight pounds) than low-fat dieters over a 12-month period.

If you leave the dinner table only to feel pangs of hunger again soon afterward, you might not be consuming the right kinds of fat to help fill you up. A 2009 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition measured the effect of eating different kinds of fats on satiety and food intake, among other things. Fifteen subjects consumed different kinds of fat at their meals or none at all. The results showed that participants who consumed unsaturated fat felt more full after every meal. Of course, eating more fiber or loading up on lean protein can also help ward away hunger longer.