by jaybob

Created on: October 08, 2008   Last Updated: October 13, 2011

Dieters will often find themselves choosing between a low-calorie diet and a fat-free diet when they are trying to lose weight. The amount of fat that a dieter consumes obviously determines how many calories a person has in their day, but choosing a low-fat diet also means that there is a wider array of delicious foods to choose from and better overall health in the long run when compared to a strictly low-calorie diet. When choosing to cut weight quickly for a photo shoot or simply trying to look better in a bathing suite, a low-calorie diet is probably your only option, but healthy day-to-day dietary choices of cutting out saturated and trans fats can mean the difference between starving yourself to loose weight and not needing to diet at all. One of the greatest defining factors of the American diet is it's addiction to unhealthy fat-saturated foods; making a conscious decision to cut these foods out of your diet can make all the difference in the world.

The Low-Calorie Diet

We all know what it is like to be on a low-calorie diet; the painful rationing of food, casting sidelong glances of longing at desert trays, the all-too common lapses into binging, and the eventual rebound after the diet is over and you return to the same unhealthy choices that made you diet in the first place. Granted, cutting calorie intake is perhaps the only short-term solution for loosing weight in a pinch. By burning more calories than you consume in a day, the eventual result of that culinary calculation is weight loss. Unfortunately, not only are you destined to suffer from the psychological and physiological stresses of clinically starving yourself, but you are also doomed to regain all of that weight back once you go off the diet and start eating "normally" again.

The American Diet

Not a diet so much as it is a culture, the American diet is your "normal" day-to-day breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacking choices. It's important to note that it is this same American diet, with its prevalence in mass-produced food alternatives and deep fried everything else, that has you dieting in the first place.

Believe it or not, much of the high-calorie foods that you are trying to cut out are actually dripping with saturated and trans fats. Saturated fats are the non-essential fatty acids that are not only high in calories and cholesterol, but are also correlated with a wide spectrum of weight and cholesterol related disease such as many different kinds of cancer, instances of diabetes,

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