How to Reduce Fat in Your Diet

Series Summary

Everyone wants to live a fit and healthy life, but sometimes beginning a new low fat diet can be daunting and even challenging. Changing your eating habits and learning to prepare low calorie, low fat food might be difficult to acclimate to at first, but having a solid knowledge base about the types of foods that you can enjoy without guilt and some inspiration towards creating a delicious menu full of diet-friendly meals is a great start. Healthy snacks, exercise, and a refrigerator makeover are great steps for diet beginners, and this series will help jump start your diet easily. In this free video series on nutrition, dietitian Christine Marquette explains how to lose weight and eat healthy. Marquette begins by discussing how to lose weight and reduce fat in a diet. She then discusses other diet related topics, such as: how to discover if you're anemic, cook for the elderly, become vegetarian and curb an appetite. Marquette also explains how to follow several diets, such as: the raw food diet, skinny bitch diet, the Mayo Clinic diet and the grapefruit cleansing diet. Watch these free videos and learn more about healthy nutrition today.

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette, and I'm a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic, and I'm going to talk to you about how to reduce fat in your diet. Keep in mind that there are two types of fat. There's good fat and there's bad fat. Good fat is plant based fat. Things like nuts, seeds, avocado, olive oil, canola oil. Another good source of fat is seafood. The fat in fish is very similar to plant fats. These types of fats are all known as unsaturated fats. If you're trying to reduce your total fat, you still want to make sure that you're including some good healthy fats. All of these unsaturated fats we've just been talking about, just limit your portion size, so for example, if you're having nuts, limit the portion to a quarter cup each day that you eat them. If you're having avocados limit it to a quarter of a small avocado. If you're having olives limit it to about two or three large olives. The other area for fat reduction is going to be the bad fats. Those are going to be the saturated and trans-fats. Saturated fat is found primarily in animal foods. That includes dairy products like whole milk, whole fat cheeses, whole fat yogurts, so if you're going to use dairy try to use a reduced fat or a low-fat dairy. That will cut your fat intake quite a lot from dairy products. If you're eating meats, make sure that you're choosing lean sources of meats. Really try to avoid the marbley types of meats; things like ribeye, New York strip steaks, sausage, bacon. All of those types of meats have a lot of fat that are actually in the meat where you can't necessarily just trim it off. Other cuts of meats; sirloin, as far as steaks go, pork tenderloins, Anything with loin in the name tends to be a leaner cut of meat, so the fat that's on it tends to be on the perimeter; very easy to trim off, so just make sure you trim off any of that visible fat. If you're eating fish, the fat in fish is a very healthy kind of fat, so you really don't have to worry about trying to remove any fat from fish. Poultry; the skin is where most of the fat is, whether it's chicken, duck, turkey. All of those have the majority of their fat in the skin. The dark meat is going to be a higher source of fat than the white meat, so if you're really, really limiting your fat you want to just use the breast of any type of poultry. That's going to be your leanest choice of meat. So, those are just a few tips for how to lower the fat in your meals."