What's bad about low-fat?  You eat lots of lovely fruit and tangy plain
yogurt instead of ice cream.  Not using butter on your bread isn't such a
hardship when it's really good bread.  You use mustard and ketchup in your
sandwiches but not mayonnaise.  You leave the cheese out of your chili but
you add peppers -- yumm!  You make oven fries with Pam and Mrs. Dash
seasonings instead of deep frying.  You can still have wine and beer and so
on (7 calories a gram instead of 9 for fat but it's still empty calories so
watch it).  I have a ton of low-fat recipes that taste great.

You're not losing flavor unless you are using the wrong recipe book.  So
what's the problem?

Low fat diets have been found to play a role in reducing heart disease
in men, according to the research Ornish did.  I believe MacDougal found
the same thing.

In practice they turn out to be suboptimal for three reasons: they make
it hard to feel satisfied on a meal without fat, so you keep eating.
Fat lowers the glycemic index of things so you stay sated longer and so
don't get the munchies as often.  And the third reason is that you are
less likely to store the food as fat because your body uses it to do
metabolic things that just wouldn't get done if you didn't have the fat
in your diet.

Low-fat diets also reduce your metabolism.  If your goal is to burn more
calories than you consumed then you have to look at both sides of that
equation simultaneously.  You have to eat less calories and/or burn more
calories and hold both ideas in your head at the same time:

You can eat less calories to burn LESS calories (the typical low-fat
way), but this leads to lowered lean muscle mass and a subsequent
slowing down of the metabolism which leads to rebound weight gain (when
you stop depriving yourself) as well as all the ailments associated with
yo-yo dieting.

You can eat LESS calories to burn MORE calories (eating in such a way to
increase your metabolism a bit and have energy so you can get some
exercise).  This is the golden mean most of us are aiming for: less
calories, but not so much less that we feel deprived.  This is how we do
the long-term transformations.  We do this by smart eating.  It's tricky
to work out because it typically involves making substantial changes in
the way you eat (or you wouldn't have gotten fat to begin with.)  There
is a fair amount of experimentation and listening to your body in this
stage.

And then when you're good at this, you can eat MORE calories to burn
EVEN MORE calories: this usually involves weightlifting, that is,
gaining some lean body mass.  It probably also involves some metabolism
repair work like doing high intensity interval training.  This method
takes some work to get it right, but the payoff is being able to eat
like a normal person without fear of gaining 10 pounds over the
week-end.  :-)

I could give you a ton of books and NIH research and website after
website, but I really highly recommend you start by reading everything
in Mistress Krista's Eating section at
http://www.stumptuous.com/weights.html

Keep an open mind about the terms "low" and "high".  Over and over again
Krista keeps coming back to the idea that you get the macronutrients
rather balanced.  Low-fat means substantially less than 33%, high carb
means substantially more than 33%.  "Eat a balanced diet" means
something different that I used to think it did: I used to think it
meant eat a variety of foods from the food pyramid or from the four
basic food groups or whatever.  It doesn't really: it means eat a fairly
balanced macronutrient load.

The best tool I can give you (besides knowledge) is www.fitday.com.  Log
your food in there for a while and see how the macronutrient breakdown
shows up.  It will be very illuminating, I assure you.

If you're anything like me you'll get a few lessons on portion size, on
actual macronutrient breakout and how many calories you're really
eating.  I frequently find that I have to adjust the calories UPWARDS.
Don't go below 8x your weight in calories (if you're a woman) or 10x
your weight in calories (if you're a man) without a pretty darn good
reason (and medical supervision.)

Dieting (as I use the term) is NOT about deprivation, it's about
learning to eat.  When you *get* it you'll discover that all the diet
books converge and are really aiming you in the same direction: eat to
fuel your body with good food.

Good luck!

Dally

I have found the keeping it off phase much harder.  I stuggle to
keep off half of my best loss.  But that's still better than before
I started.  Day after day I have to make the good choices and the
result isn't more loss.  That feedback of the scale being lower
than last month makes the losing phase so much easier.

They aren't bad for everyone.  What's bad for everyone - The idea that
one type of diet is better than all of the others therefore folks should
not try various types to see what works for them.

Low fat diets are bad for a few people.  Same as other types of plan,
about the same failure rate too.

But there is a general objection to low fat plans: Once the medical
folks started stressing low fat as the one and only right answer, an
epidemic of obsesity occured.  It's easy to blame this on low fat,
but realistically the problem is really view one type of plan as the
only right answer.

Low protein plans lead to more lean loss compared to medium and high
protein plans.  To the extent that low fat plans are low protein,
the objection applies.  Are low fat plans actually low protein when
folks follow the directions in the books?  No.  It's more a problem
of what goes wrong when folks don't follow the directions.  That
problem, too, is shared by other plans.

But there's a wide belief that just plain cutting total fat intake
works, so plenty of low fat folks don't get the book and there isn't
all that much pressure to do so.  Just plain cutting fat is
perceived as safe for everyone.

With any plan it needs to be done carefully.

I think it's important to understand what we mean by "lowfat".  Dally,
I think, eats around 30% of her calories from fat, as do I.  That is
lower in fat than the average American diet, and considerably lower
than the very low-carb diets like Atkins and South Beach.  

It's generally recognized now that some level of fat -- particularly
of the good fat found in fish, nuts, olive oils, etc. -- is important
to a healthy diet.  These are important for mental function, skin and
hair health, and are generally thought to be important for helping
avoid various diseases.  Dietary fat also helps with satiety --
avoiding hunger -- while dieting.  Very low fat diets can compromise
one's health and are also harder to stick to.

Compounding the "bad rap" that very low fat diets have gotten is the
one-time plethora of lowfat food products that added lots of sugar and
weird additives to compensate for the lack of fat.  Of course, now the
pendulum has swung the other way and there are lots of lowcarb foods
that have lots of fat and weird additives to compensate for the lack
of carbs :-).

Anyway, I'd recommend keeping fats at at least 25% of your calories,
making this up of mostly good fats.  

Chris
262/141/ (145-150)