Authors: Mary Enig
Eat Fat, Lose Fat (2 page)
Eat Fat to Lose Weight?
Our Eat Fat, Lose Fat program will put you back on the track that nature intended for efficient nourishment. Let go of the notion that you must suffer to lose weight. In fact, starving yourself is counterproductive, since it signals the body to
hold on
to fat. Instead, when you eat sufficient quantities of the right combinations of fats (as outlined in our recipes and menu plans), you’ll notice that you can go for hours without eating and without experiencing cravings, because your body is satisfied and your blood sugar is stable. As a result, hunger pangs disappear and eating sensibly becomes easy!
Nutritional satisfaction signals your body that food is abundant, so it
releases
fat stores. This is the key to weight loss—but that’s not all. On this diet, you’ll be taking in good fats and over time releasing bad ones from your system. It’s like upgrading to premium fuel. Efficient functioning and better health will result.
Through our work at the Weston A. Price Foundation, we’ve heard from hundreds of people who not only lost lots of weight but also healed a wide range of health problems precisely by following the eating programs that we’re offering you in this book. Throughout the book, you’ll find some of their stories in the sidebars. Though we’ve changed names and details to protect their privacy, the actual weight-loss and healing experiences described are all very real.
Along with other healthy fats, coconut oil is key to this diet. Saturated fats, such as those found in coconut oil, butter, cream, and red meat, can be good for you, as you’ll learn throughout our book. And, among all the sources of saturated fat available, coconut is the most readily absorbed and utilized—not to mention the most likely to help you lose weight, which is why coconut is the cornerstone of the three dietary plans you will find in the following chapters.
Both of us bring many years of work in the field of nutrition to the eating program offered here. Aside from being one of the world’s most renowned nutritional scientists, Dr. Enig is the author of the highly regarded professional publication
Know Your Fats
(Bethesda Press, 2000), dubbed the “fat information bible” by Dr. Joseph Mercola, author of the bestseller
The No-Grain Diet
(Dutton, 2004). In the course of studying, lecturing, and teaching around the world for the last 20 years, Mary has both contributed to and kept abreast of all the scientific and medical literature on fats, and she became an early and articulate critic of the harmful type of fats we now know as trans fats. Against much opposition (as you’ll see in Chapter 3), she began pushing for including the percentage of trans fats on nutrition labels decades ago. Mary is president of the Maryland Nutritionists Association and was recently honored by the American College of Nutrition for her pioneering work in calling attention to the dangers of trans fats.
Janet’s Story: Feeling Full
Our
Yogurt-Coconut Smoothie
(for recipe) contains energy-boosting coconut oil and whole-milk yogurt, but when Janet went to prepare it she had neither on hand, so instead she used the low-fat yogurt she found in the fridge. An hour after eating the smoothie, Janet felt hungry and ate a “second breakfast” of French toast and syrup (loaded with high-fructose corn syrup). Good-bye, diet!
The next time Janet prepared the smoothie, she used whole-milk yogurt and added the 2 tablespoons of coconut oil that the recipe called for. Janet felt full after eating only half a serving. When lunchtime came, she didn’t feel hungry. She finally ate the second half of the smoothie at 2 p.m. and experienced no desire for food until evening, when she ate a light but deliciously satisfying dinner of grilled chicken with skin, brown rice cooked in coconut milk, and vegetables with butter.
As founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Sally is a major spokesperson for wholesome nutrition. She travels the world, lecturing and teaching on healthy nutrition and traditional cuisine to thousands of people. We have also coauthored numerous articles on the complex subject of diet and health for various health publications.
Most recently, we have championed the use of coconut oil and other coconut foods. Mary has investigated the metabolism-enhancing properties of coconut oil, which contains special medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs) shown to boost metabolism and stimulate weight loss, according to research carried out in France, Italy, Canada, Japan, and the United States over the past 14 years (Chapter 4 will go into this research in more depth). Meanwhile, Sally has applied her outstanding culinary skills to the discovery of many varied and wonderful ways to enjoy coconut, which you will experience yourself through the many traditional and coconut-based recipes from around the world featured in this book.
Satiation: The Key to Weight Loss
When you consistently use coconut oil (along with other healthy fats), you provide vital nourishment to every cell in your body, nourishment that supports optimal function of your nerves, brain, hormones, immune system, and metabolism. But beyond that, you trigger a powerful mechanism that is key to success in permanent weight loss:
satiation
.
How does your body register this? When you eat coconut (and other healthy fats like those found in butter, cream, nuts, meats, and eggs), your body actually produces a hormone in the stomach and small intestine that signals that you’ve eaten enough. When you feel satiated, cravings, and the persistent hunger you experience on most diets, are banished. An added bonus is that many health problems will resolve themselves and you will have more energy and a more optimistic attitude toward life.
Satiation is a truly revolutionary weight-loss concept. By feeding your body the healthy fats it needs, you won’t feel hungry, you won’t need to deny yourself, and you won’t even
want
to overeat empty calories from foods like pizza, sodas, or commercially produced ice cream (which often contains gums, additives, and vegetable oils that negate the benefits of consuming cream).
We know…you’ve heard that saturated fats are unhealthy. Who hasn’t? Read on and you’ll be surprised to learn about research published during the last 20 years in respected scientific and medical journals, like
The Journal of Lipid Research, Reviews in Pure and Applied Pharmacological Science,
and
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
that shows that
just the opposite is true
. Your body needs not only fats, but
saturated fats,
to nourish your brain, heart, nerves, hormones and every single cell. Saturated fats form a key part of the cell membranes throughout your body. When you eat too many unsaturated fats, the kind found in polyunsaturated vegetable oils, these fats adversely affect the chemistry of those membranes.
How does this affect
you
? Overstocked with the
wrong
kinds of fats, and lacking sufficient quantities of the
right
kinds of fats to create healthy cells, your body becomes nutritionally deprived, and a host of health problems ensue. Your energy drops, your nerves don’t fire efficiently, glands malfunction, your hormones and metabolism head south. With cells weakened from lack of necessary nutrition, weight loss is an uphill battle. Exactly what 95 percent of dieters have experienced up until now. You’re tired, you’re always hungry,
and
you gain weight!
Yet, for many people, the idea that your body
needs
fat seems hard to accept, when fat is what you’re trying to lose. If you have flab under your arms, cellulite on your thighs, and a stomach that enters the room ahead of you, can you still be fat deprived? Yes! The fact is that your body’s visible fat stores do not necessarily result from fat consumption. Nor do they indicate adequate levels of fat-derived nutrients. You could be 200 pounds overweight and still be undernourished and fat deprived.
Three Kinds of Fats
While most other diet plans tell you to leave certain foods
out
of your diet—such as fat, dairy, grains, meat, salt, or desserts—the Eat Fat, Lose Fat plan tells you how to
include
all these foods in your diet, exploring the science behind your need for them, how to choose healthy versions of them, and how to prepare them for maximum nutrient benefit and digestibility.
In order to understand how such a diet works, you need to know the differences among the three basic types of fats found in food. Then, you must be aware of the dangers of trans fat: an artificially produced fat found widely in processed and packaged foods.
Fats (also called lipids) are a class of organic substances that do not dissolve in water. They are composed of chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms filling the available bonds and are called fatty
acids
because of their structure. Despite that terminology, they don’t behave like acids in the way that water-soluble acids such as vinegar do.
Saturated Fats
Found predominantly in animal fats and tropical oils like coconut oil and in lesser amounts in all vegetable oils (and also made within your body, usually from excess carbohydrates), saturated fats are structured so that all available carbon bonds are occupied by a hydrogen atom, which makes them highly stable and also straight in shape, so that they are solid or semisolid fat at room temperature. As a result of their unique composition, they are less likely to go rancid when heated during cooking and form dangerous free radicals that can cause a litany of ills, including heart disease and cancer.
Monounsaturated Fats
The monounsaturated fatty acid most commonly found in our food is oleic acid, the main component of olive oil and sesame oil, as well as the oil in almonds, pecans, cashews, peanuts, and avocados. Your body can also make monounsaturated fatty acids from saturated fatty acids when it needs them for various bodily functions.
Chemically, monounsaturated fatty acids are structured with one double bond (composed of two carbon atoms double-bonded to each other). Because this bond causes the molecule to bend slightly, these fats do not pack together as easily as saturated fats, so they tend to be liquid at room temperature but become solid when refrigerated.
Like saturated fats, however, monounsaturated oils are relatively stable. They do not go rancid easily and hence can also be used in cooking.
Polyunsaturated Fats
Polyunsaturated fatty acids have two or more double bonds. The two polyunsaturated fatty acids found most frequently in our foods are linoleic acid with two double bonds (called omega-6) and linolenic acid, with three double bonds (called omega-3). (The omega number indicates the position of the first double bond.)
Because your body cannot make these fatty acids, they are called “essential” and must be obtained from foods. Polyunsaturated fatty acids have bends or turns at the position of the double bonds and hence do not pack together easily. They remain liquid, even when refrigerated.
Unpaired electrons located at the double bonds make these oils highly reactive. When they are subjected to heat or oxygen, as in extraction, processing, and cooking, free radicals are formed. It is these free radicals, not saturated fats, that can initiate cancer and heart disease. As such, industrially processed polyunsaturated oils, such as corn, safflower, soy, and sunflower oils, should be strictly avoided.
The Dangers of Trans Fats
Manufactured foods, such as baked goods, some frozen foods, margarine, chips, fast-food fries and countless other products, contain rearranged fatty acids called trans fats, which are produced artificially by bombarding polyunsaturated oils with hydrogen, a process called partial hydrogenation. This process makes the normally twisty polyunsaturated fatty acids straighten out and behave like saturated fats in foods. As a result, trans fats have a longer shelf life. They pack together easily so they are unnaturally solid at room temperature and can be used as spreads and shortenings. Because they can be made so cheaply and because their inclusion helps packaged foods to last nearly forever, the food industry prefers to use trans fats made from cheap soy, canola, corn, or cottonseed oil rather than more expensive animal fats or tropical oils.
For years, as you will read in Chapter 2, medical experts, government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, and medical organizations such as the American Heart Association (AHA) urged Americans to abandon traditional saturated fats in favor of partially hydrogenated oils in order to reduce the risk of heart disease. These organizations boosted margarine, for example, as healthier for the heart than butter.
Yet a large body of scientific research now demonstrates what Mary Enig’s work showed long before the medical establishment was willing to acknowledge the facts: that these altered fats, which people are still told to eat to reduce their cholesterol levels, actually
increase
cholesterol and also the risk for heart disease. For example, the Nurses’ Health Study, a long-term study of over 80,000 female nurses carried out by researchers at Harvard University, reported that substituting 30 calories of trans fats each day for 30 calories of carbohydrates increased the risk of heart disease by a factor of nearly two. The director of the study, Dr. Walter Willett, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, claimed that saturated fats also increased the risk, although much less; but other commentators on the overall study, such as J. Salmeron in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
, 2001, found no correlation between consumption of saturated fats and heart disease.
Trans fats also compromise many bodily functions, including hormone synthesis, immune function, insulin metabolism, and tissue repair. What’s more, they promote weight gain. In fact, a person whose dietary fats are mostly trans fats is likely to weigh more than a person who does not consume trans fats, even if their caloric intake is the same. (One type of trans fat, called an isomer, occurs in small amounts in butter, beef, and lamb fat. But this isomer does not cause health problems. It is actually converted into a substance called CLA, which protects against weight gain.)
