According to the government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, you should be cutting down your Fat intake, especially saturated fat, and they aren’t wrong. Instead, the government wants you to replace those saturated fats with unsaturated fats. What does this mean? Well your saturated fats are red meat such as beef and lamb, butter, ice cream and lard, so cut those out.

What are unsaturated fats? Those are your avocados, olives, peanut butter, fish and nuts. Easy enough right? Well not necessarily.

Any diet and weight loss correlation is always going to come down to calories. If you eat a lot of calories, you will gain weight. In the same way, if you eat lots of a fatty food, you will gain weight or get fat. With that said, if you cut fat, studies show you will over eat other foods due to the “hunger feel”, which means you will eat more calories, which means you will get fat.

Why? Well fat takes way longer to digest in your stomach than other nutrients such as carbs or protein. This means you are less likely to want to eat if you consume fats. On the flip side, if you are someone who has eaten lots of saturated fats, you’re going to feel that hunger in your stomach and have to eat a lot more unsaturated fats (with more calories) to ease the hunger. More calories, more weight.

So while yes, you should watch your fats for other things such as heart disease issues, it won’t necessarily mean you’ll lose fat.

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