The Fat Free Truth

[Carol]

Whenever you come across someone who has recently been enlightened about the weight trouble he or she is facing, you would inevitably notice the habit developed to look at the labels and dietary information of any food item the person would lay his hands on. Any product that screams of being fat free would catch our eye and it would be simply irresistible to let go of a thing that is both delicious and healthy. This is intriguingly embedded in the psyche of ours, to believe what we see and to try to see what we believe.

The rule of thumb that every weight watcher on a diet follows is to consume less energy producing ingredients that could possibly get stored in the flab pockets of our body. And keeping this in mind, people go on to antagonize every form of food that would even faintly fall in the vicinity of words 'fat', 'carbohydrate' or 'sweet'.

And as man has been able to commoditize every form of need, want and desire ever conjured by his brethren, markets have been flooded with products that flaunt 'fat-free' labels. Every weight watcher would swear to have been drawn towards these products since they offer the deadliest combination- hundred percent taste with zero percent guilt. What ensues is the same motivation in the weight loss regime that does not suffer from the impulsive indulgence and disrupted diet plan. But the trouble in this fairy tale like fat drama is ensconced right below that label. Most of the times, the labels that bear 'fat-free' signs are a result of manipulation of food standardization norms and abuse of customer's knowledge.

For the uninitiated, the word fat carries two connotations. Firstly, it refers to the fat we store in the form of flab (the meaning that comes to our mind first). And secondly, it could allude to the food ingredient fat that is most often inculpated for all the embarrassment on the weighing machine. What needs to be understood is that all forms of fat cannot be indicted for causing obesity and storing up in layers under your skin. The fat just carries energy in amounts greater than other ingredients. Layering up of fat is the result of storing of the energy that remains unused in the body. A grave misinterpretation that must be cleared at this point is that by not consuming fat one cannot avoid getting fat.

The food that claims to be fat free would actually be less delicious in comparison to its fat loaded counterparts. And since this could hit the basic motive of selling them like hot cakes, they are made tasty by the addition of more ingredients like sugar and other forms of flavors that interestingly are even more fattening than the fat they substituted. Effectively, you might avoid eating the bad old fat that caused your obesity, but in return more harmful ingredients creep in unnoticed.

To add insult to injury, the 'fat-free' foods sabotage your weight loss attempts by keeping you in oblivion. When you consume food that you know has fat, then you keep a tab on the quantity. But when eating 'fat-free' food, people often let the platters coming and this guilt free binging fattens you up surreptitiously. Avoid getting tempted by impossible claims and remember that to lose flab you have to put in effort. So next time, do not be fooled by the fat free with fat-free.