Fat

OneofGodsfav

Can anyone tell me what is a good way to keep my total fat number down? I went over it today.

kommodevaran

Why on earth would you want to keep it down? Keep it up! Your total calories is what's important.

diannethegeek

If you need to watch your fat for medical reasons, then you'd want to increase foods high in carbs and protein. Without knowing what you're eating or how high your fat levels are or how low you need to keep them, it's hard to be any more specific. Look through your log and find which foods you're eating that are high in fat and eat fewer of those, I guess.

If you don't have a particular reason to watch your fats, though, and are just going by MFP's defaults, a lot of us treat fat as a minimum to try and go over every day instead of a maximum to stay under. Fat does lots of good things for your body, so it may not even be a problem unless having higher fat numbers is causing other problems?

jemhh

First, make sure that your goal is reasonable, meaning that you aren't aiming at too low of a number. I like .4 grams per pound of bodyweight as a starting place. Then once you eat that for awhile you can move it up or down based on preference. (This assumes you are using the MFP standard goals right now and haven't changed anything.)

Second, plan, plan, plan ahead. Tonight sit down and pre-log what you plan to eat tomorrow. If it takes you over your goal, make a few changes. That could mean reducing your serving sizes or picking lower fat alternatives. These are a few changes I make if I need to cut back on fat grams:

- Use 2% or fat free milk instead of whole milk. I actually keep containers of all 3 in my fridge and mix and match. So I might use 1/4 cup of fat free and 3/4 cup of whole milk, for example.
- Reduce the number of eggs I eat in a meal or change sizes of eggs
- Change the way I cook eggs (e.g., boiled or soft boiled eggs instead of scrambled means I don't need to use oil too cook them)
- Eat chicken breast instead of chicken thighs (or maybe half and half instead of all breast)

These are just a few ideas of how I stick with my fat goal. You will have to look at what you like to eat in order to figure out exactly how to meet yours but hopefully this helps.