The High Fat Diet - What it Does to Your Metabolism

High-fat diets seem to be making a wave in the diet-fad world once again, but you wan't to make sure that you know exactly what it is it's doing before mowing down on all the cheese you can get your hands on.

A high-fat diet resets your metabolism. This will make it harder for your body to burn calories.

A recent study used healthy students trading one meal a day for similar calories consisting of 55 percent fat—granted, these were mainly the saturated kind of fats. The result? Eating that much fat for 5 days reduced people's muscles ability to oxidize sugar after meals. So why is that important? Muscles are the primary way your body process sugar. If your muscles can't process sugar, you can wind up with insulin resistance which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure and weight gain.

In another study, published last year in Biological Psychiatry, they found that people's metabolisms slowed after just one high-fat meal. In order to ensure that the cause wasn't just unhealthy fats, the lead author of that study repeated the experiment using healthy fats like polyunsaturated oils, found in canola and olive oil. Surprisingly, the results were the same.

Over time, Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, the study leader, estimates that indulging once a week in a high-fat meal could add up to an 11-pound weight gain in one year. And that's just from one meal. If you're consistently eating a high-fat diet, the effect could be much larger. Furthermore: Any time your metabolism is altered, it can have a massive effect not just for your weight but your whole body. All of the pizza binging weekends aside, you're still safe - more studies need to be done, especially to look at the different unhealthy ingredients in foods.