Yo,
Protein is an essential nutrient for the body, no doubt. I think everybody who’s been training for a while realises this. It’s necessary for the maintenance and growth of muscle. However, most people (including me, until recently) put such a focus and emphasis on protein that they forget the necessity for other nutrients. They don’t even have an answer to “why do we need fats in our diet?”
After all, it makes sense why people in the fitness space lack an understanding of the importance of fats. Many products in grocery stores try to make themselves stand out by making themselves “low fat” or “high protein and low fat”.
This creates the perception that fat is something that should be avoided and that protein trumps all.
WRONG
Both protein and fats are essential. Not just for fitness goals, but for our overall health. Today, however, we will be primarily focusing on the importance of fat in our diet in a fitness context. Essentially talking about how it helps us to achieve our fitness goals.
Everything that we go into today will be from my own experience and research. Take what you will from today and don’t be afraid of fats. 
Energy and the Caloric surplus
Lets start with the energy component of fats.
Fats are actually the slowest source of energy, but the most energy-efficient form of food. One gram of fats provides the body with 9 calories, which is more than double the amount of calories provided by a single gram of protein and carbohydrates.
Fats are clearly quite dense in calories, which makes them useful for a particular situation…
Bulking. A bulking stage is when you prioritise muscle growth and must enter a caloric surplus. A caloric surplus is when you are consuming more calories than your body needs to maintain its body weight, resulting in muscle gain (if training and eating optimally).
Some people may struggle to enter a caloric surplus, as their maintenance calories may be quite high. This is conveniently where fats come in, as by incorporating more fats in the diet, you’re able to consume significantly more calories.
So from a bulking and muscle-building standpoint, if you’re reading this and you’re looking to pack on muscle, do not forget about your FATS!
Now some of you may be thinking, “But if I eat too much fat, won’t I get fat”. You must remember these two things:
1. Eating too much of anything is bad, just as there are side effects of eating too much protein powder and protein as a whole, there are also side effects of eating too much fat.
2. Eating fat does not equate to gaining fat. There are numerous factors that contribute to you actually gaining fat. You will gain fat if you are eating in too much of a caloric surplus (so beyond approximately 500 calories as a surplus), your protein intake is not high enough, you are not training hard enough, your training program is not optimal (for example, not incorporating progressive overload)
I want to share this with you as well.
I recently finished a two year bulk and gained around 30kg. This was much better than my first time bulking, where I gained around 13kg. In the first bulk, I gained probably around 6kg of fat and 6kg of muscle.
To me, this was a failure, as it was my first year of training and should have achieved much more muscle with “newbie gains”. Now I can go into depth about what I’ve learnt from bulking and why the second bulk was much different, but we’ll focus on the diet as this is the focus.
In the first bulk, my protein was moderate and my fats were moderate to high. Now with the second bulk, my fats were in the moderate to sometimes high, but my protein was always high. Moreover, in the second bulk, I put on a lot more muscle, despite me not having newbie gains.
You see, fats are not the enemy
Absorption of vitamins and minerals
Now this may come as a surprise, but fats assist in the absorption of vitamins and minerals.
Vitamins A, D, K and E are called the fat-soluble vitamins. These fat-soluble vitamins actually dissolve in fats and in order to be absorbed, they require fat from food.
Imagine if you continued to stay afraid of fats, you would deprive your body of these essential vitamins and minerals. Vitamin A, D, K and E. Those are four essential vitamins, four!
You can do a quick search to find out the purpose of all those vitamins and learn about what would happen if you avoided them.
Meals
Quite frankly, fat makes food taste better. A fattier piece of steak generally tastes much better than a lean piece of steak.
In my opinion, and maybe you agree as well, chicken thighs taste better than chicken breasts. This comes down to the added fat that is on the thighs.
Fat makes food juicer and tender. It is able to provide flavour and texture to foods. On top of that, it can prevent foods from sticking to utensils and therefore, make it easier clean.
For those who like to meal prep, this would make cleaning a lot easier. Moreover, adding fats to your foods would make it easier to stick to your cutting or bulking diet, as it makes food taste better.
Important to remember
Like everything in life, there are important things to remember in fat consumption.
You must consume it in moderation. There are side effects of eating too much fat, just as there are side effects of eating too much protein.
It is important to consume good fats and not bad fats. There is a distinction.
Good fats include foods such as:
– Olive oil
– Avocado
– Egg yolks
– Dark chocolate
– Fat contained in milk
– Fatty fish
– Fat on red and white meat
– Nuts
– Chia seeds
Bad fats include
– Seed oils (these are more harmful than you may realise, I encourage you to do some research. You may be shocked, as I was. Search on Google and youtube)
– Fast food
– Deep-fried foods
– Processed foods
Conclusion
Fats are not the enemy. We need fats in our diet for energy, caloric surplus, absorption of vitamins and for meals.
Always eat fats in moderation and understand that they are essential nutrient, just like protein and carbohydrates.
I hope you learnt something today guys, because I know I did. I felt it was important to talk about something other than protein and protein powders, as these nutrients can often get overlooked and has a bad name. Thanks for reading guys and I’ll see you next time.
(Let me know in the comments if you learnt anything!)
