Keep Healthy Fats in Your Diet to Maintain Muscle
There’s a common misconception that fat in foods is what causes you to get fat. This isn’t really true. There are certain types of fat that are bad for you, but plenty are good for you – and even required.
Getting healthy fats in your diet is a very key part of maintaining muscle. The unhealthy fat that most people are familiar with is the saturated fat. Saturated fats are found in foods like cakes, butter, lard, bacon, fatty meat, and all that other unhealthy stuff.
This is the type of fat that you should avoid all together. There is practically no dietary benefit to saturated fats – they just harm you. Even worse for you than saturated fats are trans fats.
Trans fats are mostly artificial, and these are extremely bad for you. It’s recommended that these make up no more than a small percentage of your calories – as in less than about 5%.
Trans fats are most commonly found in fried and baked goods, such as pizza, cookies, fried chicken, doughnuts, etc. These should be avoided in all ways, shapes, and forms. Unsaturated fats, however, are pretty good for you.
Most animal fat is saturated, but the one meat that has unsaturated fats instead is fish. Fish is actually a really good lean meat, and doesn’t contain any harmful fats. Other examples of foods that contain unsaturated fats are nuts, olive oil, and sunflower and flax seeds.
It’s important to note that you can be fooled into thinking that saturated fats and unsaturated fats both provide similar amounts of calories and therefore must be similarly beneficial in health.
In reality, the unsaturated fats are much better than saturated or trans fats. The health benefits of unsaturated fats are plentiful. First, it helps reduce heart disease. Unsaturated fats also help lower cholesterol, which is pretty harmful to your body in high levels.
Their most important function is that they help maintain your body’s cells and keep them supplied with nutrients. This means that the muscle you put on will stay there when you consume unsaturated fats.
Unsaturated fats should completely replace saturated and trans fats in your diet. Your diet should consist of mostly protein, then carbs, then fats. It can be easy to confuse the different types of fats, however, if you don’t know which ones are good and bad.
Make sure that when you consume your fats, that you only consume unsaturated – and not trans or saturated fats. Be wary of any diet plan that puts out a blanket statement for you to avoid all fats.
