Eating fat does not make you fat, revisited

In June 2016 I wrote a column for the Vancouver 24 Hours arguing that eating fat does not make you fat, and that your lifestyle does. I still believe the headline. Ten years later I want to separate the part that has held up from the part I stated with more confidence than the evidence supported, because the second part matters and most people arguing about this online still conflate the two.

No, not in the way the low-fat era claimed.

The original logic was arithmetic. Fat carries about nine calories per gram against four for carbohydrate and protein, so eating less fat should mean eating fewer calories, so you should lose weight. Clean, simple, and wrong in practice, because it treats food as nothing but an energy number and people as nothing but calorimeters.

What actually happened when a generation followed that advice is that fat came out of the food supply and sugar and refined starch went in to replace it, because fat is what makes food taste like anything. People ate more total food, felt hungrier sooner, and got heavier. Fat is the macronutrient that makes a meal satiating. Take it out and you have built a food that makes you want more food.

So the practical claim in my column stands. If you are a man over 40 trying to get your body composition back, cutting fat is not the lever. Whole eggs are not the problem. Nuts are not the problem. Olive oil is not the problem. The avocado is emphatically not the problem.

My 2016 column, and the road trip piece I wrote a month later, went further than that. They implied that because dietary fat is not uniquely fattening, fat is broadly fine and you can stop thinking about which kind. One of those columns literally described coconut oil as an unsaturated fat, which is simply wrong. Coconut oil is roughly 80 to 90 percent saturated. I got that backwards in print and it stayed on the internet for a decade.

Here is the honest state of things, and I am going to be careful because this is genuinely contested rather than settled.

The question of whether dietary fat drives obesity and the question of whether saturated fat drives cardiovascular disease are two different questions with two different evidence bases. Answering the first one no does not answer the second one.

On saturated fat and heart disease, the major bodies have not moved. The American Heart Association's presidential advisory on dietary fats recommends lowering saturated fat and replacing it with unsaturated fat, particularly polyunsaturated. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee reviewed food sources of saturated fat and cardiovascular disease and came to a consistent conclusion.

There is also real, published dissent. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials questioned whether saturated fat restriction on its own reduces cardiovascular events, and that paper exists and deserves to be read rather than dismissed.

My read, and I want to be clear that this is a coach's read and not a cardiologist's: the strongest version of the evidence is about replacement rather than restriction. Cutting saturated fat and replacing it with refined carbohydrate does very little for you, which is probably a good part of why the restriction trials look weak. Cutting saturated fat and replacing it with olive oil, nuts, fatty fish and seeds looks considerably better.

Which means the practical advice does not actually hinge on the controversy. Eat more of the fats that come with other things in them. That recommendation survives either result.

Almost every man I have coached who arrived already tracking his food had one of two problems. Either he had been tracking accurately for years and it had not worked, or he had tracked meticulously for eleven days and then stopped, and the eleven days told him nothing except that he was capable of tracking for eleven days.

Tracking is a diagnostic tool. It is excellent for two or three weeks if you genuinely have no idea what you are eating, and after that it becomes a substitute for changing anything. The men who get lean and stay lean are almost never the men with the longest logging streaks.

What works instead is structure, decided in advance, so that the decision is not being made by a hungry version of you at 4pm.

So put options in front of him. A cooler with pre-portioned food in it. Nuts in the car. Hard boiled eggs, which travel absurdly well and which my kids ate happily for years. Fruit and vegetables you have already cut up, because a whole cucumber in a bag is a decision and a sliced one is a snack.

Both source columns recommended specific brands by name. Jerky, electrolyte powders, bottled water, protein shakes. I do not remember which of those were commercial relationships and which were things I actually liked, and the fact that I cannot tell the difference a decade later is the reason none of them are in this version.

Everything on this site that is a paid relationship gets labelled as one. Everything else is something I bought with my own money.

I also cut a line about consuming plenty of unsaturated fats from foods like coconut oil. See above. It was wrong and I would rather correct it in public than quietly delete it.

My original column ended on the idea that once you stop thinking about food as a diet and start thinking about it as the lifestyle you actually want, the choices get easier. I still think that is true and I now think it is close to useless as advice, because it describes the destination and not the road.

Here is the road. You change the defaults, one at a time, and you wait. Protein at breakfast for a month until it is not a decision. Then fat at every meal. Then the evening cutoff. Each one takes about four weeks to stop requiring thought, and the compounding is what does the work, not the intensity.

I have watched this play out with enough men to be confident about the timeline, and the honest version of it is that the first six weeks feel like nothing is happening, and then the fourth month is when someone asks you what you have been doing.