I’m doing ok so far with keeping to my calorie limit, and carb limit, but I keep overdoing the protein a little, and really underdoing the fat. Today I have 34g of fat left of my allowance. How do I get more fat in my diet?

Take some of your calories in avocado’s, seeds and nuts, and use olive oil in salad dressings or even just a spoonful with any dish. That’s easy. Make sure any dairy you have is full fat, but limit it to smallish portions. Coconut oil is also a potentially ‘healthy’ fat although somewhat controversial. I use it and have no problems but some have a problem with it being a saturated fat. Peanut butter and houmous are good sources as well, although make sure the houmous is either homemade or made with quality oil such as olive oil. It is important to get enough dietary fat to enable the body fat to burn, and it also helps keep you feeling full.

Thanks mixnmatch, I will give some of this a try.
Unfortunately my son is allergic to peanuts and tree nuts, so we can’t have them in the house.
I do eat a lot of cheese at the moment (I love cheese).

Hi CJK – unfortunately cheese is a saturated fat and is only allowed in very small portions i.e. 40 grams in a lunch or on an omelette dinner and only a couple of times a week. I think you are concentrating on micro and macro nutrients too much and making the diet more complicated than it already is.

Follow the advice of MnM and concentrate on good fats so an example (I too cannot have peanuts) of a day would be full fat yoghurt and berries served with chia or linseeds or pumpkin seeds etc. Lunch of avocado salad (see recipe in book) and dinner could include some trimmed lean meat (saturated fat but small quantity). Try using olive oil to dress a salad – I make my own ‘mayonnaise’ using Greek yoghurt, olive oil, lemon juice and a dash of pepper with half a crushed garlic clove. If you are cooking use rapeseed oil which is high in good cholesterol and dont forget oily fish like salmon or mackerel. If you google ’19 healthy fats and high fat foods you should be eating’ you will find a list – but remember fat is also high in calories. Yes it is a balancing act

I know it is easy to grab a piece of cold meat for a snack but you can mix it up by making hummus or a batch or mashed aubergine mixed with olive oil (forgotten the Greek name) which can be frozen in ice cubes makers, bagged up and taken out of the freezer in portions to defrost and use. Dont forget also eggs are a good source of protein and not high in cholesterol as once believed.

Just try to have a varied diet and you cant go wrong.

I don’t think that it is fair to just say cheese is saturated fat – it depends on the cheese. Soft cheese from Teco has 15.8g per 100g, Parmesan has 19.6, but Brie, Camembert, Cheddar. Fetta and Stilton don’t have any saturated fat (there are many other cheeses, of course, these are just the ones that I have checked.
They also vary in calorific content, from 290cal/100g for Camembert to 416 for cheddar. It’s worth actually checking the cheeses that you like and try to find one that strikes the sort of balance that you want.
Mike

Showing how dangerous it is to generalise – I’ve just found another source that refutes much of what I wrote above – something that I have been relying upon all year! More digging needed.
Mike

This is really frustrating, Back in January when I started the BSD (and it has worked very well for me) I checked the calorific content, etc., of nearly 200 different foods that normally feature in my diet (including some with a high ‘Yuk’ feature but included anyway), including eight different cheeses. What is really frustrating is that I have no note of the source I used – but it was basically a single source and I did the checking over a couple of days. The cheeses I mentioned above quite definitely showed no saturated fats, whereas it did show sat fat for Parmesan and soft cheese – but checking several different sources this morning for Brie and Camembert, all show both cheeses as having saturated fat at around 15/100g (numbers vary source to source).
So, I’ll do some more digging, and in the meantime, apologies for a misleading post. The other annoying thing is that this means that I have been consuming considerably more saturated fat than I realised over the last 11 months, although it doesn’t seem to have done me any harm (so far!).
Mike

Oh, and on levels of saturated fat – the American Medical Association recommends not more than 13g per day within a 2,000 calorie diet – the UK NHS recommends not more than 30 with no mention of total calorie intake – so who do you believe?
Mike

Neither of them. Their nutrional guidelines are terrible, as anyone who has gotten the post diabetes diagnosis “eat piles of carbs” spiel knows first hand.

I’m not sure how it would even possible for a cheese to be entirely devoid of saturated fat. Cheese is made from milk fat and since it’s solid at room temperature, that makes it saturated. I don’t pay much attention to the sat fat info on MyFitnessPal because by some fluke cholesterol has never been a problem for me and anyway I’m suspicious that the link between dietary fat and high cholesterol is grounded in questionable science, but I wonder if whatever source was telling you that feta and Stilton have no saturated fat just didn’t bother to fill in that field in the database.

Hi everyone, I have just found out the CJK (the OP) is currently breastfeeding, so most of our advice is rubbish for her. She should be having higher amounts of dairy even if it includes ff cheese. Although yoghurts and vegetables (Kale etc) contain calcium. Just saying we should have all the facts before we can give advice.

Thanks for all the advice, and good sleuthing sunshine-girl!
I am modifying the diet due to breastfeeding, so yes, eating lots of cheese, and having more calories. I’ve been getting closer to my fat target by adding more butter, mayonnaise, yoghurt etc. I have just bought some coconut oil (very expensive!) to try too.

Glad you are able to adjust the diet to your breastfeeding needs but dont go mad on the bad fats. Sorry to say the jury is out on coconut oil as it can increase HDL cholesterol (H for happy to remember it is good) but it also increases LDL (L for lousy as it is bad) – that is my way of remembering which is which. However, you are not like a lot of the people here, you just want to lose weight after having a baby so you shouldn’t be too worried about diabetes or cholesterol or blood pressure etc like a lot of us ‘oldies’. So just do the best you can for you and your baby and the weight will come off – we are not all Victoria Beckham. Breastfeeding is the best thing you can do for your baby and the hormones released also help you lose weight. Such a beautiful time – my baby is 40 next year. 🙂

Esnecca
I’m sure that you are right – and being new to checking all this at the time I blindly accepted it without applying common sense!
Mike

For breast feeding, don’t overdo the dairy products, i.e. cows’ milk products.
It’s something to do with the type of protein in cows’ milk being less digestible (something to do with casein) than sheep and goats’ and some of the protein you eat gets into your milk unaltered.
I have personal experience of this so know it to be true. Basically, if your babe’s poo goes back to (or stays as) that watery with bits consistancy of the first few days, cut down on the cows’ milk and products.

From the research I’ve been doing into ultra-low carb/ketogenic diet experience and experiments around the world the good fat/bad fat thing appears increasingly to be BS or at least reversed from prior thinking. From what I’ve read:
1. Trans fats are unequivocally bad (we all know that)
2. Polyunsaturated fats are looking increasingly bad – highly processed vegetable fats etc.
3. Saturated fat is looking increasingly like the gold standard in fat (butter, OO, meat, cheese, cream, eggs etc.)

As far as I can see the tested logic is that
A) cholesterol is far from the villain it was made out to be (by statin pushing pharma and their doctor lackeys) – e.g. molecule size is critical in determining the danger of LDL cholesterol as a marker of coronary danger and if you have low TGs, it typically means even your LDL is not ‘dangerous’ at any level.
B) saturated fat DOES NOT contribute to arterial plaques, furring arteries etc. The original research behind the old sham of fat in becomes fat inside has been refuted… we now know that carbs turn to fat and drives high triglycerides etc.

The n=1 evidence is common across the web. The US ketogenic movement is militantly pro saturated fats to the point that they swap methods for accessing beef tallow and other large quantities of animal fats (begging butchers for fat trimming etc.) so that they can fry and cook in them.
People are doing 30 days of eating basically just bacon (US streaky/belly kind, not the UK back bacon) and coming out with better blood stats than when they went in in BG, insulin, TG, cholesterol etc. Crazy I know but thousands are doing it with positive results (apparently because US bacon has a good ketogenic macro balance between fat/protein (as do eggs) and high sodium levels are needed for ketosis). Speaking of eggs… a 5 day ‘egg fast’ is increasingly common where people eat about a dozen eggs a day for 5 days (done many different ways usually) and lose weight, maintain ketosis and improve metabolic markers.
All the keto diet advice I’ve seen is largely focused on saturated fat for calories to satiation and the forums are full of people who have reversed their T2D under medical supervision, though often not with the support of their doctors who still believe in the SAD until they see the evidence.

It is a lot and often seems counterintuitive but the grand conclusion I am drawing is that saturated fat is not to be feared and that the fear-mongering is about as solid as that which gave categorical advice to eat ‘healthy’ grains and low fat diets.

TL/DR – look up recipes for keto ‘fat bombs’ if you struggle to add enough fat to your low carb diet, drink Bulletproof coffee if you want and don’t fear saturated fat.

Capnbob – very interesting and informative post. I have also heard that the molecule size of LDL is important. The large fluffy LDL molecules that result from eating saturated fat are harmless but the small dense molecules that result from eating bad carbs and sugar are the dangerous ones.

Many years ago (in the early 80s) I was told by a Research Scientist (he was a fellow parent at the children’s swimming club) that they had just discovered that the dangerous fats were trans fats but that there was so much money to be made out of them that there was no hope of getting them banned even though they were so harmful. It is such a shame that the manufacturers are so powerful.

He said that the best thing we could do for our families was to make sure we didn’t feed them trans fats. I am a little ashamed to write that I didn’t really believe him. I was a young mum and must have been very stupid because I didn’t think trans fats could be that harmful – I thought that if they were dangerous they wouldn’t be in our food – would they!!!

Thank goodness that lots of manufacturers are removing trans fats from products now. But very sad that people – including me – have been eating it over all these years.