Timing your fat intake: done right, eating certain fats can actually help you lose bodyfat

Muscle & Fitness, July, 2009 by Tabatha Elliott

Fat is spelled with three letters, but it has been a four-letter word in M&F's lexicon for decades. Anyone interested in shedding bodyfat shunned dietary fat because we all thought eating fat made you fat.

Now we know better: Eating certain healthy and essential fats such as monounsaturated and omega-3 fats can actually help you lose fat. Even the much-maligned saturated fat has a plus side: Athletes who eat larger amounts of sat fat have higher testosterone levels.

Today we recommend you keep fat intake to about 30% of your total daily calories. Emphasize the healthy and essential fats, but don't neglect saturated fat altogether. Do, however, avoid or at least limit fat pre- and postworkout, because it slows the digestion of the protein and carbs you want to get to your muscles immediately to enhance recovery and growth. In addition, research shows that eating large amounts of fat before training can blunt NO levels and limit blood flow to muscles.

Yet another reason to watch your fat intake around workouts is because it can blunt growth hormone (GH) levels. University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center (Torrance) researchers had subjects perform 10 minutes of high-intensity cycling on a stationary bike after ingesting a zero-calorie (placebo), high-glucose or high-fat liquid meal. As reported in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, subjects who consumed the high-fat meal exhibited GH levels that were about half of those of subjects in the high-glucose and placebo groups. Similar results were reported by researchers at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, and the low GH in the high-fat-meal group was found to be due to an increase in somatostatin, a hormone that blunts GH. The effects of fat consumption on soma tostatin have also been confirmed in numerous studies.

Although these study subjects ingested at least 25 grams of fat, keep your fat intake to less than 10 grams at meals that are within a two-hour window pre- and postworkout. Stick with healthy omega-3 fats, which are more readily used for fuel during exercise compared to saturated fat.

BY TABATHA ELLIOTT, PHD