One of the toughest things to avoid when moving to a whole food diet is oil. You have probably been cooking with oil your whole life. When cooking in a pan, you unconsciously and immediately reach for the oil. After all, how are you going to keep your food from sticking to the pan?
Unfortunately, this automatic, no-thought cooking habit does not adhere to a true whole food diet. This means skipping the butter too, as an oil replacement. So, why should you avoid oil if you are aiming for weight loss through a healthy whole food diet?
The reason is that oil is not really a whole food at all.
Oil is the fat that has been removed from a particular food. You avoid it, especially when you are trying to lose weight because it is incredibly dense in calories. Check out these simple comparisons:
Vegetables, on average, deliver about 100 calories per pound of food.
Fruits are 3 times as calorie-dense, offering 300 calories per pound.
Hold onto your socks – Oils, even healthier varieties like coconut oil, hit you with 4,000 calories per pound!
When you burn more calories than you take in, you have the perfect recipe for weight loss. This is why a whole food diet is so weighted and loss-friendly. The foods you are eating are extremely high in phytonutrients, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals that keep you healthy.
Those same foods do not deliver much of a calorie punch. These foods are also dense, meaning you feel full longer when you eat them. So without even counting calories, you restrict your caloric intake, which is very difficult when you add oil to your whole food diet.
You also need to understand the nutritional profile of oils that you cook with and consume.
Unlike true whole foods, they have virtually no nutrients. The reason why you are moving to a whole food diet is to ensure that you are getting all of the things into your body that it needs to function at its healthiest.
Yes, some oils deliver more nutrition than others. Coconut oil is healthier than most other oils, and it has an extremely high flash point, meaning that it doesn’t oxidize when you cook with it under high temperatures. Even though, this oil, and others, deliver little in the way of nutrients compared to the calories they cost you. So skip the oil for healthy, maximum weight loss in a whole food eating plan.