I wanted to write a short series of posts revolving around what makes a diet sustainable enough to be the primary driver for a successful fat loss phase. No matter the goal bodyweight or body fat percentage, you’ll never find yourself arriving there if you can’t adhere to long-term diet modifications that coincide with that goal. Though there are several different ways to manipulate the variables necessary to create a caloric deficit that burns fat and spares muscle, I believe that the steps laid out in this series are helpful in creating a logical progression for a diet that is effective without causing you to be miserable and quit soon after starting.
A Brief Disclaimer on Thermodynamics
If you aren’t well-read in the field of nutrition, but still paid attention in middle school health or biology class, you should at least know that the overarching law governing whether we gain, maintain, or lose body mass is the simple energy balance equation (calories in +/- calories out = energy burned/stored). Any matter, especially bodily tissue, can’t be built from thin air. Likewise, the matter in our bodies can’t be burned for fuel if there is a surplus of energy (calories) coming in.
Although this post will mostly discuss the effect of macronutrients (namely fat), it is important to note that it will be discussed in the context of the effect it has on total caloric intake. If you’re constantly finding yourself eating a surplus of calories day after day, manipulating fat intake to any degree will have zero effect on losing fat, since energy balance is not in a net deficit.
This post assumes that those trying to lose body fat are aware of their caloric consumption and the level they need to be at to create a reasonable deficit.
Disclaimer: The following dietary recommendations are not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for any kind of medical treatment or an alternative to medical advice. Use of the following dietary recommendations is herein at the sole choice and risk of the reader.
Caloric Density
The term “caloric density” simply refers to how many calories are in a set amount of food (measured by weight or volume) and the relative concentration of those calories given the amount. For instance, a pound of chicken breast and a 1 pound ribeye steak are both 1 pound of meat, but the ribeye contains more calories and is thus more calorically dense. 8 ounces of 2% milk is much more calorically dense than 8 ounces of vegetable juice, but 8 ounces of 1% milk is less calorically dense than the 2% milk, and 8 ounces of vegetable oil is significantly more calorically dense than all of them.
Now, you could use caloric density as a comparison between any kinds of foods. You could compare different cuts of beef or different vegetables. You could even compare radically different foods, like a handful of walnuts, a handful of tuna, and a handful of blueberries. The thing is, in this walnut/tuna/blueberry example (don’t eat those together), the context of comparing these foods’ calorie content should take their macronutrient content into account. The walnuts are almost entirely fat, and I’d estimate a handful of them around 140 calories, give or take. The tuna is almost entirely protein, and I’d put it around 60-80 calories. The blueberries are pure carbohydrate – about 40-60 calories at most.
Now, given that these foods are all relatively the same physical volume, why are their calorie amounts so different, especially the walnuts? Because while protein and carbohydrate (the tuna and blueberries) each contain 4 calories per gram, one gram of fat holds a whopping 9 calories. And no matter how you want to label different “kinds” of macronutrients, they all still hold the same amount of calories in relation to what kind of macronutrient they are.
So yes, omega-3’s, monounsaturated fats, and MCTs likely have some health benefits, but they all still contain 9 calories per gram. The fact of the matter is, you can still get fat from over-consuming avocados, almonds, and coconut oil. The widespread propaganda that these fats somehow “cancel out” other consumed fats or actually help burn more fat is just that: propaganda. These fat sources are healthy when consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet, not when they’re needlessly dumped into your coffee every 2 hours because some health guru on social media conjured it up as a pseudo-scientific marketing ploy.
Ultimately calories are calories, including different kinds of carbohydrate and different sources of protein. The important takeaway here is that because fat is inherently more calorically dense by itself, foods with higher fat content become more calorically dense by default.
Satiety & Food Volume
So if we know that to lose fat, we must be in a caloric deficit, and that high-fat foods tend to carry more overall calories, it’s logical to presume that high-fat foods shouldn’t make up the majority of a realistic fat-loss diet. What other considerations must we weigh?
For most of us, eating infrequently is a reality most days due to job requirements or other daily obligations. Just as well, snacking between meals is often the first habit people trying to lose fat eliminate as part of a diet overhaul, namely because it keeps them from grazing on snack food all day, which is usually fatty, calorically dense, highly-palatable food based on convenience and taste (when was the last time you picked up a bag of chips fried in grease and didn’t eat the whole bag?). The thing is, even after eating those greasy chips, you’re usually hungry again in an hour or two, which seems almost silly given the amount of calories they hold. Wouldn’t you rather spend those calories on something that would at least hold you over until your next meal so you didn’t have to go buy a second bag of chips from the vending machine?
This is where the concept of satiety (and on a related note, food volume) come into play. Satiety is a term that refers to how well and how long a given amount of food keeps you feeling full. Foods high in protein and/or fiber tend to do the best job of this, while foods high in simple carbohydrate (sugars) are typically low-satiety due to how quickly sugars are digested since they need minimal breakdown after being consumed.
However, fat still has a role in this due to its high caloric density and the corresponding fact that rather small portions of high-fat foods have surprisingly high calorie amounts. To illustrate this, I conducted a comparison between two different foods: peanut butter (predominantly fat) and pasta (predominantly carbohydrate). In this case, I measured out amounts of each equal to 200 calories:
Now, as I said, that’s 200 calories of peanut butter next to 200 calories of pasta. Before I go any further, put yourself in a scenario similar to the aforementioned snack chip binge. If you were hungry and needed to eat something to hold you over until dinner (or for the rest of the night), but knew you should keep it at or under a couple hundred calories for the sake of staying in a deficit, which option would you pick here: a glob of peanut butter or a moderately-sized bowl of pasta?
Given, these two options are purely hypothetical and were chosen based on my own convenience, but you could draw this same kind of calorie/volume comparison with lots of other foods. I realize that not many people just pack a glob of peanut butter as a snack, nor do they indulge in plain pasta noodles, but the visual here drives the point home. You could put that peanut butter between two slices of bread and it would still have much more calories than the pasta, even if you topped the pasta with a reasonable lower-fat sauce. Even in that case, the amount of fat in the peanut butter would still be the culprit.
It’s also worth noting a few things here. I mentioned that carbohydrates usually aren’t very satiating, but protein is. Even though the pasta is predominantly carbohydrate, that 200-calorie portion of pasta actually has a good bit more protein than the peanut butter… which brings me to my next point: peanut butter (or any nut butter) should not be marketed or recommended as a high-protein food, nor should it be made a “go-to” protein source. Peanut butter contains some… er, a little… protein, but look at any peanut butter label and you’ll see that it contains usually twice the grams of fat that it does protein, thus the overwhelmingly majority of its calories come from fat. This, by definition, does not make it a high-protein food, but a high-fat food that happens to contain some protein.
Don’t get me wrong, peanut butter is one of my favorite foods and I eat it often, but I’m always conscious to eat it sparingly when I’m dieting, and I certainly don’t eat it for the protein. As a hypothetical example, let’s say I was dieting right now and wanted to get all my daily protein requirement from peanut butter. That would require 26 servings of peanut butter, which would also bring with it 416 grams of fat and 4,940 total calories. Not only would this not be a caloric deficit, but it would be such a large surplus that I’d likely be gaining at least 12-13 pounds a month. Sound like a successful diet?
I really don’t want to demonize peanut butter (it hurts my soul to think that I am) and it’s all well and fine if you’re vegetarian or vegan and choose not to get protein from meat or dairy, but the high-protein peanut butter (or any nut butter) claim is just mathematically inaccurate and needs to stop. This same argument can be made against any other traditionally thought of “protein sources” that contain absurdly high ratios of fat. So, still enjoy your nuts/nut butters, bacon/pork belly, ribeyes, whole milk, and any other delicious high-fat foods with protein, just have the awareness and discipline to do so in a controlled manner. Fat tends to make anything and everything taste better, but you’ll never be able to eat the volume of food you want and stay in a caloric deficit at the same time if all your protein sources are laden with unneeded calories from fat.
The biggest takeaway here: cutting down on fat ultimately allows you to eat a larger volume of food and still be in a caloric deficit than if you cut down on carbohydrate or protein. If you enjoy losing body fat without having to starve yourself and/or eat tiny portions, it’s a trade-off worth considering.
Self-Righteous Suffering
The last sentence of the previous paragraph brings me to the first of a few points I want to touch on here. Similar to the phenomenon of people who think they can’t train effectively without physically destroying themselves during every workout, there seems to be a growing amount of people (especially on social media) who appear to be in some kind of collective competition over how restrictive their diet is… i.e. how much they can suffer while still claiming to adhere to it. There’s a million of these fad diets out there by now. I’m sure a few have already popped into your head as you finish reading this sentence.
I never really quite understood the logic behind these ultra-restrictive diets, especially after taking my first nutrition course taught by a very thorough professor. However, I think I have it nailed down to two main factors thus far:
- Some kind of virtue-signaling that projects the appearance of toughness and discipline
- Being part of a group identity
You see, many think that if you only eat one or two things and nothing else, or demonize another basic food group or macronutrient that everyone else enjoys, it not only makes you different, but makes you unique, interesting, and just more disciplined than everyone else (clearly!).
Although… I think I would argue the opposite.
We’ve known the fundamentals of nutrition in and out for a long time now. Maybe some of these folks don’t or haven’t been exposed to this information – I’ll give some of them the benefit of the doubt there. But still, the large majority of these people do know better and still choose to pervert the evidence to fulfill the aforementioned appearance of nutritional virtue.
So maybe it’s not that their hyper-restrictive diet strategy is superior (it never is when calories and macros are equated in studies by the way). Maybe it’s just that putting some thought and analysis into what they’re doing is too much work and nixing foods that the rest of the population enjoys and depends on accomplishes their dream of being a lazy diet hipster.
Now, all I’m trying to get across in this post is how helpful it can be to cut down on fat intake first when dieting, not to cut out all fat entirely. Ironically, there are a ton of gurus out there would rather start by cutting carbohydrates drastically or entirely, or just putting people on some “specialized” diet they created that involves never eating half the foods you enjoy eating.
Why the unnecessary suffering if you can get to the same goal by taking logical, progressive steps that are much less noticeable in terms of changing habits?
If your goal is to diet in a way that actually leads to sustainable long-term habits, it’s advisable to always start with the minimum effective change that yields the least noticeable difference to you. In this case, you could swap out fattier cuts of beef for leaner cuts, swap whole milk dairy products for reduced fat versions, or eat more egg whites than whole eggs. This way you’re still getting to eat the same kinds of foods in the same relative volumes, usually with identical protein content as well.
“So now I can eat ALL the desserts!?”
By now, this post is probably sounding a little pro-carbohydrate, so I wanted to address a misconception that people have about certain foods. Most folks seem to hold the belief that all the sweets and desserts under the sun are pure sugar i.e. carbohydrate. Although these foods are typically labeled as “junk foods,” the instant rebuttal to the lower-fat strategy is something like:
“So you’re telling me that I can just eat a bunch of sweets and desserts and still lose weight!?
Well, no.
These foods are still generally not a good idea to be consuming in excess while dieting because of their high caloric density – not necessarily because of their sugar content. Now, if you didn’t sleepwalk through the first part of this post, you’ll recall that there is one macronutrient that has the most prominent effect on caloric density… FAT.
The fact that most people fail to realize with most sweets and desserts is that a large amount of their calories, if not the majority of their calories, come from fat. Cookies and cupcakes may contain a lot of sugar, but they also require a lot of butter/shortening and/or oil to make. Ice cream (at least the most delicious kind) is made with full-fat dairy ingredients. Fried sweets like donuts are even higher in percent fat content.
This combination of sugar and fat is what makes these foods taste so good, and there’s nothing wrong with consuming them in moderation, but my point is that their high sugar content shouldn’t be demonized any more than their high fat content. So please, don’t go running to the donut shop after starting a low-fat diet thinking you’re in the clear.
Also, a side note for the coming rebuttal:
“But what about insulin!?”
Research continually shows that insulin has no overarching effect on weight or fat gain when a calorie deficit is sustained. Enjoy some treats now and then whenever you’re able to make the numbers fit your deficit requirement. Life’s too short to hate/fear ice cream.
And please keep carbohydrates in your diet around strenuous workouts, even if you’re at very low calories. Remember that insulin has the same capacity to facilitate glucose and amino acids into muscle cells as it does for fat cells. Don’t do silly things that cause you to metabolize muscle when dieting when it really isn’t necessary and can be easily avoided.
A Quick Note on Alcohol
Similar to ice cream, life is also too short to hate or fear a good drink now and then. Counting alcohol calories is often a point of confusion for most people, especially when you start trying to estimate calories in mixed drinks that have a lot of different ingredients. In terms of alcohol itself though, it carries 7 calories per gram – not as dense as fat, but still containing more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrate. This should also be accounted for when dieting, no matter how little or large your tolerance for alcohol is.
Another interesting speculation on alcohol is the belief that it gets automatically stored as body fat. However, some recent research is beginning to show that’s not exactly the case. Instead, it appears that the alcohol itself isn’t automatically stored as fat, but rather acts as a suppressant for fat burning and/or a facilitator for fat storage. This means that when you’re consuming substantial amounts of alcohol, any dietary fat you’re consuming along with it has a very high probability of being stored and not burned. This was terrible news to me when I first read up on this topic in college and immediately started thinking about all the deep-fried bar food I’d been wolfing down late at night on the weekends. At any rate, just something to be mindful of.
Recap
- Calories still matter more than any other factor when it comes to dieting for fat loss.
- Fat contains more calories per gram than protein or carbohydrate, making high-fat foods high in calories by default.
- Because of their caloric density, most people find it difficult to stay in a caloric deficit while eating high-fat foods.
- Decreasing fat intake provides the biggest bang-for-your-buck when dieting – you can cut more calories out by modifying food choices while still eating the same kinds of foods in the same relative volume. This has a profound positive effect on adherence to a diet.
- Decreasing fat intake isn’t an excuse to eat a ton of sugary junk foods – they often contain just as much fat.
- Research shows that alcohol may act to promote the storage of dietary fat, so be aware of what you’re eating if you’re enjoying a night out while dieting.
Strength Scrolls 