Get Your Fats Straight: My Journey to Get it Right

As someone who has been coaching folks on how to transition from a modern to a Traditional Diet for over ten years, I feel quite certain I’ve seen and heard it all when it comes to health fads.

Well, ok – maybe not all.  But certainly very very close!

One mistake I see over and over again is the very same error I made myself over 21 years ago when my husband and I first got married and decided to eat “organic”.

Organic actually meant something back then. There were no labeling tricks, GMOs, or hidden chemicals to worry about.  Just clean, nutritious, organic food certified by either the state of California or Oregon that tasted great.

Unfortunately, eating “organic” wasn’t exactly the health boon I had hoped it would be.

I was still very tired a lot of the time and suffered from uncontrollable sugar cravings which I chalked up to poor will power.

Eating Healthy is Not Just a Matter of Will Power

As it turned out, it wasn’t a will power problem at all that caused my nearly constant sugar and refined carb cravings.  It was a metabolic need for sugar that caused these cravings which stemmed from the utterly wrong and hopelessly unbalanced fats in my diet.

I had Country Crock in the refrigerator and avoided fat, especially butter, as much as possible.  I drank skim milk and ate lowfat yogurt. According to my HMO doctor, I was doing everything right.

And yet, I felt terrible much of the time. I had trouble getting out of bed in the morning, was foggy brained and had difficulty getting well under my own power when I got a cold or flu which I seemed to suffer from frequently.  I also was a tummy bug and food poisoning magnet.

And then, a miracle occurred!  Someone handed me a cassette tape (remember those?) about Why Butter is Better by a lady named Sally Fallon Morell.  I was skeptical.  I threw the tape on the seat of my car and there it sat for weeks.

When I finally listened to that tape, my life changed in less than an hour. What was said on that tape made so much sense and was rooted in such compelling research, I couldn’t believe that I had never come across this information before since I was an avid reader of health related books.

Where has this information been all my life, I thought?

I Finally Get My Fats Straight

I immediately went home and chucked the Country Crock spread, the bottle of vegetable oil in the pantry, and the lowfat salad dressing in the trash. I poured the skim milk down the drain and bought myself some full fat yogurt, cream and butter.  I bought a jar of ghee for cooking and extra virgin olive oil for making my own salad dressings.

I gorged on full fat everything that night for dinner – and the next morning for breakfast.

And you know what?

I felt better!

How much better?

Much, much better!  The very next morning, I wasn’t as tired when I got out of bed and I noticed my sugar cravings were much diminished mid-morning at work.  I was actually able to resist the box of Dunkin Donuts on the conference room table for perhaps the very first time.

From that point on, making sure the fats were right in my diet became Job #1.

Having eaten organic and clean for over a decade and seeing little results and then experiencing the overnight impact from one simple tweak – getting my fats straight – made me realize how incredibly easy it is for people to make a huge improvement to their health with just a few simple alterations.

A few months later, I became the Chapter Leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation, founded by none other than Sally Fallon Morell, and my focus became helping those in my community get their fats straight as I knew this would give people the energy, concentration, and focus to tackle the other dietary and life changes that needed to be made too.

But, getting the fats straight needed to come first.  Without that critical first step, it is very hard if not impossible to transform health to a vibrant state.

You might feel ok, but are you vibrant?  Do you jump out of bed in the morning with a clear head and a spring in your step?

This is what I mean when I say vibrant.  Not simply getting through the day, but feeling awesome while doing it.

Because getting the fats right is such a critical and foundational principle to health and because I have seen so many people earnestly trying to be healthy but getting the fats all wrong, I finally decided to write a book about it.

Why I Wrote “Get Your Fats Straight”

My eBook aptly titled Get Your Fats Straight is based on the three steps I’ve used for years to help people on the right path to Traditional Diet and correspondingly vibrant health.

I also wrote Get Your Fats Straight with the goal of keeping the discussion about fats very, very simple.

I’ve read a lot of books on fats over the years and most of them you need a degree in Chemistry to understand.

Get Your Fats Straight is such a simple explanation of all the fats – which ones to eat and why and which ones to avoid and why – along with how to implement them in the diet in a cost effective and practical manner that you will be relieved.

For those of you just getting started on a Traditional Diet, Get Your Fats Straight is where you want to begin.  If you’ve gotten off track for awhile and need some easy, focused steps to get you back on the wagon, Get Your Fats Straight can help with that too.  If you just want an enjoyable read on fats that will give you some new ideas for your own kitchen, Get Your Fats Straight offers that as well.

I’ve included numerous, very simple recipes at the end of the book that we eat in our home on a frequent basis to give you a basic menuplan.  These recipes are very simple, but use a lot of traditional fats.  A meal does not need to be gourmet or take a lot of time to be incredibly nourishing and satisfying.

So read and enjoy … and if you don’t have a Kindle, join the club!  I’ve read many Kindle books without ever owning a Kindle!

Simply read the Kindle book in your PC or Mac browser.   If you prefer, you can download the free Kindle software to your smartphone, iPad, or tablet (from the appstore or android market) and read that way.  Kindle reading is fun and very easy to do.  I’ve gotten so I buy few print books anymore as I much prefer them on my tablet and phone so I can read and refer to any of my books, anytime and anywhere.

I am hopeful Get Your Fats Straight will help many folks avoid the pitfalls of organic eating that took me over a decade to finally resolve!

 

Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist