50+ Lifestyles

Eating Fat WON’T Make You Fat

By Logan Anderson, BA, CPT, CIFT
Owner of All Strong Fitness LLC

Fat is something that often gets a bad reputation. Many of us try to limit our intake of fat, simply because we don’t want to.. well.. Add more of it to our body. Because of this, many people may be cutting back on fat, instead of understanding exactly what we should and shouldn’t do with our intake. Let’s take a look at the basics of dietary fat, and how it could affect your health and wellbeing.

Fat, is simply one of the major nutrients we get when we consume food. Fat is extremely calorie dense, at 9 calories per gram, when compared to both carbohydrates and protein which have 4 calories per gram. In addition to this, there are also a couple of different “types” of fats. To put it simply, monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats are what we consider as “healthy” fats. Saturated and trans fats are what we would consider as the “bad” fats that we would try to limit. Next time you see a food label at the store, look at it and see if there are any of these terms on it.

So will eating fat make you.. fat? It could. As we established, dietary fat has nearly 9 calories per gram, meaning that it is very easy to over consume. For perspective, 1 tablespoon of olive oil (which is all made up of fat) has about 100 or so calories, compared to 4 cups of broccoli which also has 100 calories. If you over consume on fat, which makes you over consume on calories, you will absolutely gain weight. Some other common sources of fat are vegetables oils, butter, dairy, certain cuts of meat, avocados, and nuts.

Some best practices when it comes to fat, is to try to limit your saturated fat to 5-10% of your daily calories. This could be difficult if you enjoy eating full fat cheese, dairy, yogurt, etc. It could become even trickier when you realize your favorite packaged goods also have a large amount of dietary fat. Besides monitoring that, feel free to fill the rest of the calories in your day with a modest amount of other foods (protein and carbohydrate based.)

Fat is not something that you should be scared of, especially if you are trying to lose weight. You should be aware that foods and dishes higher in fat, however, are higher in calories and CAN lead to weight gain if not monitored accordingly. With that in mind, go enjoy a peanut butter sandwich (or whatever fat source you like), keeping the type of fat and calories in check.

Logan Anderson is the owner of All Strong Fitness LLC. For more information, please visit allstrongfitness.org or reach out to
allstrongfitnessllc@gmail.com.