If you are eating more calories that your body needs, whether from fat or carbohydrates, the body will store them as fat.  Period.  According to an National Institutes of Health study, by 1990 the average American was consuming hundreds more calories a day than he was consuming 10 years before.
There are researchers who believe that eating small amounts of fat can keep you from overindulging on total calories.  Ohio State University nutrition scientist John Allred points out that dietary fat causes our bodies to produce a hormone that tells our intestines to slow down the emptying process.  We feel full and are less likely to overeat.

Add a little bit of peanut butter to your piece of fruit and it can help to keep you from a binge later.
Here is another trap to avoid.  Reducing fat might not be as smart as it sounds.  Tufts University scientists recently put 11 middle-aged men and women volunteers on a variety of average reduced and low fat diets.
The results were astounding.  Very low fat diets which provided only 15 percent of fat from calories did have a positive effect on blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels.  By the way, that diet is so strict there is no way it could be duplicated in real life.  But a reduced fat diet, which is more realistic, only affected those levels if accompanied by weight loss.

Not only that, they concluded that cutting fat without losing weight actually increased triglyceride levels and decreased HDL!

So while excess fat is not healthy, it isn’t a dirty word either.  Without some fat in our diets, our bodies could not make nerve cells and hormones or absorb fat soluble vitamins.

If obesity is one of your high cholesterol causes, try losing a pound a week with a 500 calorie solution.  No, we aren’t going to ask you to only eat 500 calories a week! 

What you can do is easily lose a pound a week just by cutting 500 calories a day out of your diet.  You can easily burn 250 of them just be spending about 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, like bicycling, dancing or just walking.  To get rid of the other 250 try cutting out mayonnaise, doughnuts and alcohol.
If there were no other reason to take control of cholesterol, here’s one that certainly has merit.

The typical American diet consists of fatty meats, processed cold cuts, dairy products and fried foods.  As if that weren’t enough, throw in commercially baked breads, roles, cakes, chips and cookies.  This is a surefire path to high cholesterol.

Try substituting butter and margarine with a fruit puree.  Prune puree is one particularly popular alternative but try using applesauce and apricots as substitutes. 

What has the chefs who specialize in nutrition so excited about using prune puree is the significant difference in fat grams as well as calories.  One cup of prune puree has 407 calories and one gram of fat.  One cup of butter has 1,600 calories and 182 grams of fat.  One cup of oil has 1,944 calories and 218 grams of fat.  You can see now why bakers are excited about prunes!

Prunes also contain large amounts of pectin which helps hold in the air bubbles that make baked good rise.  They also have large amounts of sorbitol, a sugar alcohol, which helps keep baked goods moist and gives them the flaky, tender taste of shortening or butter.

The only drawback to using fruits like applesauce and apricots as fat substitutes is that baked goods tend to become soggy and moldy within a day or two so plan quantities accordingly.  Also, when baking with substitutes for fat, use cake flour instead of regular all purpose flour.  It will keep the baked good tender.  Don’t over bake your fat reduced recipes as they do tend to dry out quicker than traditional recipes that call for butter or oil.
Here’s another healthy living tip for you.