I am not a nutritionist or an M.D. The Dr. in front of my name is in cultural anthropology, which gives me credentials to do a lot of things, but nutritional analysis is not one of them. I don’t have a lab to test the recipes. So when I say that a food item has so many fat grams/serving, it is an estimate based on the fat or fat-laden ingredients that are in a recipe, such as oil or butter, meat, fish, or peanut butter. I don’t count the 1.2 grams of fat in a cup of flour; it will only be 0.1 gram in one of the 12 muffins. I don’t count the 0.2 grams in a 1/4-cup of raisins or the 0.6 in a banana. Yes, I know that all of these fractional amounts of fat might add up to a gram of fat in a serving, but I want to eat, not do math. This lack of precision, as long as I account for obvious fat content, has not hindered my weight loss or maintenance. If you need for some reason to be more precise, look up each ingredient in a good nutritional counter for your own satisfaction.
I don’t include the total number of calories in a serving, because I’m focused on fat grams, not calories. Why does it work? I think because a gram of fat has 9 calories and a gram of almost anything else has 4 calories – so if you restrict fats, you are already eating fewer calories. You actually might eat a lot more calories on any given day, for example, if it is summer and like me you eat a lot of fruit. But you will probably eat fewer calories another day. However, I do not claim that this is a scientific answer.
A final disclaimer: This way of eating works for me; it might not work for everyone. But the food is good anyway.
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