Here’s a quick weight loss diet tip that I want to share with you regarding fat. Not the fat that we’re trying to lose, but the fat that’s in the foods we eat. There’s several different types of fats – some we need lots of to stay healthy, but some we want to minimize, or even eliminate, as much as possible.

Low-fat is good; no-fat is not an option. Fats are essential for the digestive process, cell development and overall health. Despite their bad reputation, they are as essential as protein in any healthy weight loss diet.

Oddly enough, fats aren’t necessarily what make you fat. It’s the quantity of fat you consume that makes the difference; fat has more than twice the calories per gram than either carbohydrates or proteins.

Also, once you eat fat, your body is a genius at hanging onto it and refusing to let it go. This is because fat is how the body stores reserve supplies of energy, usually around the waist, hips and thighs. Fat is money in the bank as far as the body is concerned - a rainy-day investment for when you have to call up extra energy.

This clever system originally helped our ancestors survive during periods of famine. The problem today is that we don’t live with cycles of feast and famine - it’s more like feast and then feast again! But the body’s eagerness for fat continues, along with its reluctance to give it up.

This is why losing weight is so difficult: your body does everything it can to persuade you to eat more fat! How? Through fat’s capacity to make things taste good. So it’s not just you who thinks that juicy steaks, chocolate cake and rich ice cream taste better than a bean sprout. That’s the fat content of cake and steak talking.

Sorry to say, there’s no getting around it: if you want to lose weight, you have to watch your fat consumption. In addition, you need to be concerned about the type of fat you eat. Although this has no effect on weight, it definitely has an impact on our health. Your risk of heart disease, stroke, colon and other cancers, and Alzheimer’s is significantly influenced by the type of fat in your quick weight loss diet.

So here’s the skinny on fat.

Fat comes in four varieties: the best, which actually benefits your health, the good, the bad and the really ugly Let’s start with the nasty one.

The ‘really ugly’ fats are potentially the most dangerous, and they lurk in many of the most popular snack foods. They are the trans fats you’ve been hearing about - vegetable oils that have been heat treated to make them thicken. These hydrogenated oils, or trans fatty acids, take on the worst characteristics of saturated fats, so don’t use them at all. And avoid packaged snack foods, baked goods, crackers and cereals that contain them. (You can spot them by checking the label for ‘hydrogenated’ or ‘partly hydrogenated’ oils.)

The ‘bad’ fats are called saturated fats. They are the more familiar form and they almost always come from animal sources. These are the fats that solidify at room temperature.

Butter, cheese, hard ’stick’ margarine and many meats are all high in saturated fats. But there are a couple of other sources of saturated fats you should be aware of -  coconut oil and palm oil are the only vegetable oils that are saturated and because they are cheap, you will find them used in many snack foods, especially cookies. These saturated fats elevate your risk of the life-threatening diseases we mentioned earlier. The evidence is also growing that many cancers, including colon, prostate and breast are associated with diets high in saturated fats.

The ‘good’ fats are the polyunsaturated fats and they are cholesterol-free. Most vegetable oils, such as corn and sunflower, fall in-to this category. But they’re still fat, and they still pack calories.

What you really should be eating, however, are the monounsaturated fats, which actually promote good health.

These are the fats found in olives, almonds, and rapeseed and olive oils. Monounsaturated fats have a beneficial effect on cholesterol and help protect your heart. This is one reason why the incidence of heart disease is low in Mediterranean countries, where olive oil is a staple.

Although fancy olive oil is expensive, you can enjoy the same health benefits from less costly supermarket brands. It doesn’t have to be extra-virgin, double cold pressed.

Another highly beneficial oil that falls into its own category is omega-3, a fatty acid that is found in deep-sea fish, such as salmon, mackerel, tuna and herring as well as in lake trout, walnuts and flaxseed and rapeseed oils.

Some brands of eggs also contain omega-3 oils, which can help lower cholesterol and protect your cardiovascular health.

Even though more of us are buying low-fat foods and drinking more low-fat milk, our overall consumption of fat remains stubbornly consistent. Why? It’s partly the result of a big increase in cheese and ice cream consumption as well as the ’silent’ fats that are hidden in some of our favorite foods such as crackers, muffins, cereals and fast foods.

A McDonald’s Grilled Veggie Melt may sound like a healthier choice, but it still contains 21 grams of fat. So even though fat consumption has not changed significantly over the past decade, the percentage of overweight people in the population has soared. We can’t pin that on fat consumption alone, however what has increased is our consumption of grain. Since grain is a carbohydrate, we’ll look at that component of our quick weight loss diet next, and determine whether carbs deserve their bad rap.