Fat has been made public enemy number 1 in the battle for health and fitness. The low fat thinking has lead to a great variety of low fat food. Its so bad that people will not buy something if its not called low fat. Everywhere you look in the market place now there is a low fat version of everything. You can even get low fat ice cream. The unfortunate thing here is that if you are only buying low fat products, you are probably being mislead for a lot the things you buy. That's because you may not understand how certain foods are processed in your body.
Before I expand on this, you should first know what the low fat diet is all about. This diet tells you to eat low fat foods to avoid getting fat. The food companies have jumped onto this line of thinking and so when you go to the supermarket, there's practically a low fat choice of any food you want to buy. But many of them replace the fat with a huge amount of sugars and other refined carbohydrates to keep the taste.
Therefore, if you are following a low fat diet, you are probably eating a lot of refined carbohydrates.
So, what does that mean?
Refined carbohydrates are instantly converted to glucose (which is sugar) so that your body can use it. The glucose gets dumped into your blood stream, so that your blood can take it to all parts of your body, to ensure it will always have the energy to keep functioning. Now, if you don't need this energy right now, your body stores it as glycogen in your muscles. If all of your glycogen stores are already full, then it is stored as fat!
I hope you understood that. Let me rephrase it to be sure.
If you eat a lot of refined carbohydrates, it will eventually turn to fat if you eat more than you need. Unless you are very active, and make use of your glycogen stores, you don't need refined carbohydrates. Even if you are active, you would have refined carbs very selectively, like for example after you've just finished an intense workout.
So although you may be eating what's called a 'low fat' food, it is really anything but low fat.
Now the main exception to this is low fat milk, low fat cheese or low fat natural yogurt. These usually don't have refined sugar. Most of the other types of 'low fat' foods though are full of it.
The worst thing about these refined carbohydrates are that they are very addictive. If you study the role of insulin in your body, you'll realize that your body starts craving for these high sugar foods, often when you aren't even hungry. It's a vicious cycle you want to stay away from. It's a cycle that most obese and overweight people are right in the middle of. There are also other effects of eating too many refined carbs. These include unstable energy levels, mood swings, headaches and onset of life threatening diseases such as heart disease.
So if you've been trying to eat low fat, and don't see any results with your weight decreasing or with your health improving, no matter how little you've eaten, this might be one reason. What you eat is as, if not more important as how much you eat.
So next time you go shopping and you see the "Low Fat" sign on the food, make sure you check the ingredients label to see how much sugar and carbs are in it. Now you know that excess refined carbs are pretty much the same thing as fat, you'll be able to see right through the sneaky companies that try and trick you with this.
