I was doing everything right with fat.

That was the problem.

When I first started learning about healthy eating, I was told I should be eating lots of healthy fats. Healthy fats are incredibly important. So that’s what I did. Avocadoes and walnuts because of their Omega 3 content. Coconut oil because we need the saturated fats for our hormones. I ate nuts and seeds and used olive oil generously in my cooking as well as in my salad dressings. As I was also trying to avoid gluten, I even made my own ‘seed bread’ using sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

I was doing exactly what I’d been told to do, and I did it for quite some time. “Don’t be afraid of fat.” “Fat is your friend now.” I was even told that you could tell if people were getting enough healthy fats because their face would have a nice ‘glow’.

It was supposed to help me feel better but yet I still wasn’t feeling like myself. I was feeling sluggish. A little foggy. My skin would itch but then it would go away. And very slowly, I found that my weight was also starting to creep up.

It turns out that consuming more fats and oils than you need matters a lot. It’s not just about what kind of oils and fats but how much is equally if not even sometimes more important.

As it turns out, your body doesn’t actually need very much fat to function. But the amount most of us are consuming tends to be far more than what’s actually required.

Here’s what nobody tells you: your liver is already busy. It has hundreds of jobs to do every day, filtering out toxins, conjugating hormones, breaking down protein into usable amino acids, hanging on to toxins it can’t yet process and so much more. When we overburden it with too much fat, it bogs down. It doesn’t have the energy left over to keep up with everything else on its list. And eventually your liver is going to start sending you messages that it needs help. Like weight gain, belly fat, skin rashes, gallbladder issues, hormone issues.

Too much fat can also crowd out the water in your bloodstream, potentially leaving you dehydrated. And when there’s too much fat circulating, it gets in the way of glucose actually reaching your cells, so the sugar you consumed for energy struggles to make it to where it needs to go. The sugar stays in your bloodstream much longer than it should. And you end up feeling tired because the glucose you are supposed to be using for energy is being blocked.

I’m not saying to cut out fat completely. We need some. Essential fatty acids exist for a reason. This isn’t about replacing one hard rule with another. But it might be worth paying attention to how much fat is showing up in your day. The oil in the pan, the veggie dips and sauces, the handful of nuts, the avocado, the oil laden dressing. None of it looks like much on its own. But when you add up the total consumed in a day or in a week, it’s often a lot more than we think.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the amount of fat we’re consuming so we can give our livers a break and at the same time help that glucose make it to where it’s needed.

It’s good to keep the awareness you already have about quality and avoiding seed oils as much as possible. Maybe try cutting back on the quantity for a while (even cutting it by half) and see what happens.

Talk soon,
Debbie