Customer Reviews

Eat Fat, Lose Fat

5 star:		(83)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

*****
This book has been my dietary bible since reading it a year ago. It is a sourcebook for people wanting to eat a traditional diet, which is a diet solidly grounded in current dietary research, not unproven theories of the past. Look past the gimmicky cover here, as this is not a book about fads. It is a book about coconut oil as the foundation for an overall diet that is health-enhancing.

"Eat Fat, Lose Fat" is part of the growing body of literature supporting the eating of "real food", which is food that is healthy, tasty, not disease-promoting, slow, of exceptional quality, nutrient dense, organic, vital, traditional, local, seasonal, and clean. "Real foods" are the opposite of "fake foods", which are foods that are processed, dead, fast, nutrient poor, chemicalized, devitalized, rotten, spoiled, dead, old, or contaminated with antibiotics and growth hormones. It is based on scientific studies published in journals such as the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Lancet, and even JAMA. It is also based upon looking at the dietary practices of people of different cultures, a fascinating anthropological study that illuminates how indigenous people throughout history instinctively knew things that we are just now "discovering" with modern scientific methods.

The authors are Mary Enig, a world-renowned biochemist and nutritionist who spearheaded, with her research over 25 years ago, the recent move against trans fats at last, and Sally Fallon, The book is written in an interesting style, and is full of facts, explanations, how-to's, tips for

Chapter 1 sorts out the facts versus the fears about fats, debunking fat myths one by one, citing recent studies. The authors explain contradictory findings and flaws with past studies. One surprising fact is that most studies done in the past with coconut oil were done with fully hydrogenated coconut oil, a far cry from today's organic, extra virgin coconut oil or traditional society's raw coconut oil.

Chapter 2 explains the lipid hypothesis (and makes it interesting for non-chemistry majors like me) and explains the relationship between fat and heart disease and cholesterol. She explains how quality fats actually protect you from heart disease. This will be of particular interest to those eating a low-saturated-fat diet in hope of preventing or recovering from heart disease. All of this is written in a logical, yet not dry style.

Chapter 3 details the effects fats have on your various body systems, and the important nutrients that these systems need that can only be obtained from fats.

I know that up until this point this review makes the book sound boring, but it is very exciting, filled with facts and ideas that work.

Chapter 4 explains why diets with healthy fats help you to lose weight and be healthier at the same time, including important effects of healthy fats upon metabolism. This chapter also explains problems with ineffective weight loss theories of the past. It discusses the pros and cons of the Atkins diet, Ornish (low-fat vegetarian), Zone, South Beach, Weight Watchers, juice fasts, and the glycemic index.

Chapter 5 discusses the principles of healthy traditional diets, which surprisingly are similar the world over. It discusses individual foods at length as well as MSG, superfoods, fermentation, supplementation, raw vs. cooked, and more.

Chapter 6 is all about weight loss, based on four core principles:
1. Eat three meals per day, and always eat breakfast.
2. Eat traditional fats, including coconut oil.
3. Eat nutrient dense foods, particularly those supplying calcium and vitamins A and D.
4. Restrict calories moderately.
It also discusses special weight loss tips, such as taking coconut oil before each meal (and gives you 25 ways to use coconut oil in your meals). Of particular interest to me was why you should restrict your calories moderately but not too much. The chapter takes you step-by-step and day-by-day into starting your weight loss program, effectively holding your hand with shopping lists and daily menu plans.

Chapter 7 is about dietary emphases for recovery from various illnesses and health issues.

Chapter 8 is an everyday gourmet diet for those who are interested in maintaining their weight. It also covers dining out.

The rest of the book (about 100 pages out of almost 300 pages) is recipes and resources.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those who are serious and committed to their health, especially including those who are unwilling to lose weight through dangerous fad diets.
*****

Underneath this book's mainstream title and flashy hot-pink packaging lie a revolutionary premise. Real foods - including meat, eggs, butter, cream, coconut oil and other traditional high-fat foods - are the keys to weight loss, high energy, brain function, feelings of wellbeing and disease prevention. So throw out those low-fat, highly processed and packaged foods, forget about being a vegetarian, "bread-atarian" or "soy-atarian" and go back to enjoying the whole foods that your healthy ancestors really ate. In the process, you'll not only regain your health and find your perfect weight but totally enjoy your food. This book is a simpler version of the authors' grassroots classic NOURISHING TRADITIONS with the same sound science but a new emphasis on the healing power of coconut oil. As a Clinical Nutritionist, I have found that coconut cream and oil are very healing to the thyroid and greatly speed the recovery of former vegetarians and heavy soy eaters. The book also answers the many questions clients have about trans fats, vegetable oils, cholesterol and the dangers of the currently popular low fat/high protein diets. Highly recommended.

I have been using coconut oil and coconut milk for awhile. The oil is great for cooking and the milk tastes great in a shake! The fatty acids in coconut milk are the same/similar to those found in breast milk; now all baby formulas contain coconut oil. It makes sense that these fats are good for adults, too. Also, since adopting many of the principles from Nourishing Traditions, I have had much more energy, much less fatigue and no weight problem. My mother-in-law is always asking me how I can eat so much without gaining weight... I have also tried to feed my son this way. He's 15 months and is VERY strong and healthy - no ear infections and only 2-3 colds/viruses. It's science and it's common sense. Eat healthy to be healthy.

I serve as a chapter leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, and as such have been following the Nourishing Traditions principles outlined in Sally's book for some time. I had not been consuming coconut oil however, nor consistently limiting my meals to three a day. I wasn't quite sure how to integrate coconut into my diet on a daily basis. The book offers many recipes - including simply adding coconut oil to a smoothie! After an initial couple of days having difficulty consuming the recommended 1 T. of coconut oil melted in warm water or herbal tea 20 minutes before each meal, I am now drinking it easily and find that my appetite is definitely surpressed!

I found the book to be very well written and compelling!

What I most appreciate about Sally and Mary's plan is the great importance they place on the QUALITY of the food consumed. Namely organic, sustainably produced, natural, whole foods. Animal protein from pasture raised animals who are treated humanely. Real, raw (as opposed to pasteurized) milk products. Instead of the artificially sweetened diet sodas which are typically recommended on other diets, this plan recommends kombucha, beet kvass, kefir and real ginger ale. It includes enzyme rich foods such as sauerkraut, mineral rich bone broths and soups ... and traditional superfoods such as cod liver oil. There are many generations of nutritional wisdom in this book - it is not merely the latest fad approach to health, wholeness and weight loss.

I am an extremely slow loser when it comes to weight loss. Low fat diets made me fatter. High protein diets worked well the first couple of weeks and then nothing. I feel coconut oil is adding something back that my body has been missing. My energy level has risen so much. This was the biggest change. My weight has dropped 3 pounds in the last two weeks. This has been with no exercise and going through the Holiday Season where last year I gained 12 pounds! My family has been going through intestinal flu, and winter colds. I am the only one not to be affected. Coconut oil is anti-viral and anti-bacterial. Its also great for skin and hair conditioning. I bought mine through tropicaltraditions where it is organic and expressed naturally. There is a lot of information there on coconut oil to do more research.

I was afraid to eat fats until I read this book. The authors make a good case that low fat is just a marketing ploy, and that coconut oil, butter and other healthy fats are actually what we need to lose weight.. For years, the food industry put transfats into all processed foods, while the government and science turned a blind eye to this harm to our health. The American Heart Association even told people to eat this junk claiming that margarine was healthy and butter was not. What a joke! Now, they've done an about face, without even apologizing.

For decades, the sole scientific voice questioning trans fats was Dr. Mary Enig, one of this book's authors. She is a real pioneer and has the science down cold. Now that the tide is running the other way, it's great to have a book that is so complete by authors who really know their stuff. The authors analyze the science and also provide several diet plans along with great recipes..

I was amazed, but eating fats really does make weight loss easier because I'm not starving all the time. In fact, I defy anyone to feel hungry on this diet. You're not always thinking about your next meal, you're not tempted to eat junk. The weight loss is gradual but it feels a lot healthier than crash and burn dieting.

When I think of the years I spent trying to lose weight drinking tasteless skim milk, egg beater omelettes and low fat muffins and who knows what else! Whereas now I put cream in my tea, make eggs in coconut oil, and drink the coconut tonic, and I actually am losing weight. It's mind boggling!

You have to experience it to believe it because we have been so brainwashed into thinking fats are bad-- and in fact, as the authors show, we need them for health.

To know there is a problem with American eating habits, all you have to do is look around you. People are getting fatter and unhappier at an alarming rate! The dietary guidelines continually pounded into our heads by the US government and big business are not leading to a healthier, slimmer, more energetic population.

I never was a fast-food person and was pretty good about eating a "healthy" low-fat diet. So why didn't I feel really good? This book was the first I read in exploring a new way of eating that has brought myself and my family newfound health and vitality. We no longer endure those nagging food cravings - wandering around the kitchen opening cupboards trying to find that certain food to fill a void - is a thing of the past.

This book is full of information about fats; which ones are benefical and which are detrimental. I wasn't about to just take it as gospel though, without further investigation. I went on to read Nourishing Traditions, The Untold Story of Milk, and if you don't mind a bit of dryness for the sake of tons of carefully collected information, Dr. Weston Price's amazingly researched Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Eat Fat, Lose Fat presents the beginning of a much larger scenario that is both frightening and hopeful. Frightening because in just a few decades we have strayed so far from traditional healthy eating habits to a nation that relies far too much on heavily processed, over-heated, over-sugared, over-chemicaled food sources. Hopeful, because even though a near-radical change in eating habits is not easy, it is certainly worthwhile and of tremendous mental and physical benefit.

We eat differently now - preparing food takes a bit more preplanning, especially at first while you are learning a new way. Gathering our foodstuffs has become an adventure that I have enjoyed tremendously - buying pasture-raised eggs from our neighbors, organic veggies from small family farms, certified raw milk from a local creamery. I also have a whole new appreciation for our great natural foods store that, thankfully, is only a few miles down the road. If you don't have one near you, don't worry - you can conveniently shop on the internet for a whole array of carefully produced organic foodstuffs at reasonable prices and have them delivered right to your front door. In most areas, you can arrange for weekly pick-ups/deliveries of organic produce from wonderful little farms in your area. For the first time in years I have tons of energy and have planted a huge garden with all kinds of veggies and fruit that my family will thrive on. I've made arrangements to buy half a grass-fed beef this coming fall. So don't let the fact that this type of eating takes a little more time and effort deter you - you will have the extra energy and optimism to do it!

For fans of Enig and Fallon's NOURISHING TRADITIONS (and I am one), this book is a must-have because it shows you how to implement their dietary approach for weight loss, as well as delving into the rationale for their nutritional wisdom. I began incorporating coconut before the holidays, and it is satiating and supports their easy to follow weight loss guidelines. I've lost five pounds! Plus, the recipes (by Sally Fallon) are fabulous and easy to prepare. This has got to be the tastiest diet on the planet-- and it works!

I lost 50 lbs. on a lowfat/lowcarb diet and kept it off for the last 2-years. But...I have been constantly craving, and sneaking "highfat treats". In the language of dieting... it's called 'cheating'. This book has taught be that I am craving these foods, because I am nutrient deprieved, and that our ancestors ate this way for eons. How can I not trust 100's of 1000's of years, and what my body desires?! I am loving that they've given me permission, to eat fat. I have gained about 7lbs (but could use the extra weight). I've now stablized.

And am thrilled to search/find "good quality nutrient rich foods"...they make a real difference. A big cheers to the authors for reminding us that the old ways are the best. Forget cooking your dairy products, eat them raw!

And as for the whole raw diet fad, it's bogus. Try eating fermented foods, you'll get a ton more enzymes. I strugged with either switching to this diet (Westin A. Price), or to the raw food diet (but I could not bring myself to becoming a vegan). I couldn't give up my animal products (good fats). Until you try grassfed/organic meat and other free-range animal products, you don't know what you're missing! It costs more, but it's worth it.

Also... try making your own Keifer (a miracle food)... out of raw dairy. It's been so healing. I have never liked to cook, but I have spent more time trying to fix health problems (due to the junk food they sell on at these bigbox grocery chains).

Now I support local farmers, and cook a lot. I have several cookbooks, that I take the time to read. It's never too late to cook, and I save so much time by staying healthy, then how fastfood affects ones health.

I hope this book becomes #1, because it will bring back raw, organic foods into being legal again, and more readily available. Don't trust the garbage the system say about food...they make a killing on alternative foods (that are really bad for you).

Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig are true revolutionaries in these crazy times of flagrant misrepresentation of food facts. They move a step further beyond their phenomenal, groundbreaking book, "Nourishing Traditions" and offer additional, important information regarding the importance of fats in the well-being of the human body. Enig should be, by all accounts, the most heeded fats specialist in the world. Her credentials as a
PhDed lipid chemistry scientist stands in itself, and she alone provides the necessary research of why the propagation and alteration of harmful, modern, factory-made fats has enacted such a horrifying toll on human health. This book is more than a methodology to losing weight by the proper intake of fats; it is a crucial guide to the basics of good, vital health. The advantage this book offers is that it is scientific in the modern sense; our predecessors over thousands of years had no knowledge of such facts, but they had their own advantages: they could only eat foods in their most natural state possible. Modern technology has proved to be both a blessing and conversely, a curse. We now have the means to produce and distribute food, but many food factories and factory farms has obliterated the purity of the earth's wondrous bounties. Science has allowed us to conquer bacterial diseases and viruses that were the scourge of mankind in æons past. Heart disease and cancer were once rare conditions, but the tides have shifted and now they have taken place as the modern menace and grown to insidious proportions. The science that Fallon and Enig offer here, is simple, but absolutely vital. They provide the self-evident fact of consuming food in as close to its natural state as possible, starting with the intake of pure, wholesome fats. This book is a dietary scheme, of a new-based-on-an-old way of eating habits. But it in no way promotes the notion of traditional dieting, whereby there is a depletion of essential nutrients that wreak such havoc in the "eat sparsely, lose weight" mindset. Such diets are dangerous, and never work. As this book shows, fats are *the* crucial element in our body's composition, as they regulate metabolic functions. It should now be evident that processed, refined carbs are contributing to the obesity epidemic, and this book shows how to combat that. Most exciting though, is the research on coconut oil, which may very well be the dark-horse miracle food of our times. Consumed by tropical countries for millenia, Enig's research and findings confirm the oil's wondrous nutritional and healing properties. I personally have been consuming coconut oil on a daily basis for a year, and the results have been a perfectly steady metabolism (no more ups and down in blood sugar), no stomach upsets, ease of elimination, softer, smoother skin, and I believe it has contributed to the most stable weight maintenance I've ever had. But this goes along with the overall dietary system I've adopted as suggested by Fallon and Enig. Fallon's delicious recipes in this book make it infinitely easy for one to incorporate ways of using coconut oil. This book will provide the reader with some enlightening information on how to regulate weight, and along with it, good health and a sense of well-being. I heartily recommend this book as a necessary companion to Fallon's book, "Nourishing Traditions."