Calories or Fats - Which One Should be Consumed Less?

Calories or Fats - Which One Should be Consumed Less? - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. So calories: if you want to lose weight, you would want to create a calorie deficit, which would mean you would want to be eating less calories than you are burning. You can do that by burning more calories or eating less calories. And a 500-calorie deficit per day would mean you would lose about a pound a week. By the same token a 500-calorie surplus per day would mean you would gain a pound a week. And then, as far as fat, if you want to lower your cholesterol, you would want to make sure that less than the 7% of your total calories is from saturated fat. Saturated fat is what we consider the bad fat - that is the type of fat that raises your bad cholesterol, your LDL cholesterol, which puts you at a higher risk for heart disease. So, if you were going to make sure and consume less than 7% of your total calories, saturated fat, you would take your total calories, multiply it by .07 to get 7%. That would give you your calories from saturated fat. And then divide that number by 9 and that gives you your total fat grams because there is 9 calories in a gram of fat. And from that you have your total amount of saturated fat that you would need per day. Most people should not exceed 20 grams of saturated fat per day. And then total fat is also important because even if you are getting your fat from a healthy source - say it is all from olive oil - if you have too much fat in your diet, it can still increase your cholesterol, so most people need between, for a low fat diet, between 20 to 30% of their calories from fat. So you would again calculate it the same way: take your total calories that you plan to eat, multiply that by 0.2 or 0.3 to get your total calories from fat, or 0.25 or wherever in between you want to fall, and then divide that number by 9 and most people between 50 to 75 grams of fat per day.