One of the most devastating nutritional lies women have been told is that “fat makes you fat.” I was a teenager when this mantra went mainstream, and I immediately shunned every possible gram of fat from my diet. Fake butter replaced real butter. Boxed fat-free cookies replaced homemade. As a naïve teenager who just wanted to look cute in my cheerleading skirt, I had no idea the havoc I was wreaking on my health by eliminating fat. So why was this advice so incredibly misguided? Because women desperately NEED healthy fats in our diet!
I learned this the hard way when I began to struggle with depression after several months of my low-fat eating plan, but I didn’t connect the dots and struggled for years as a result. While there are a myriad of causes of depression and mood imbalances, adding healthy fats to the diet may be part of the answer for many. They fuel the brain and they are critical for our gut and brain to produce healthy levels of our “feel-good” chemicals.
Fat helps us feel satisfied, so while it does contain more calories gram for gram than carbohydrates, we naturally compensate by eating less of these fat-rich foods. Studies show that incorporating healthy fats in our diet helps us maintain healthy blood sugar balance and reach weight loss goals faster than a high-carbohydrate diet.
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