Quote Originally Posted by Mrs Steve R View Post
Personally I would give the smoothies diet a miss because you can cram a hell of a lot of fruit in to one smoothie that you would not normally eat in one day, I think eating it whole is far better for you.
I have just been doing my own thing really, I don't eat meat and certain fruits make my mouth itch so I've built my plan around that, I still have my favourite cauliflower cheese twice a week and the rest of the time I have fruit, salads, seeded bread ect, I use honey instead of sugar and avoid processed foods and artificial sweeteners like the plague.

My sister argues that if I was doing the same thing without taking the oil I would have lost more weight but I don't believe I would have stuck to it if I hadn't, the oil is processed in a different way so I don't have the same dips and highs throughout the day like I did before, I don't even think about food throughout the day now, before it would not have been unusual for me to have munched my way through a box of french fancies by this time of day (shocking)

You can find good and bad stories on the internet about coconut oil many based on old research from when saturated fat was wrongly demonised, saturated fats are essential for good health..

“Saturated fats found in butter and coconut oil (myristic acid and lauric acid) play key roles in immune health. Loss of sufficient saturated fatty acids in the white blood cells hampers their ability to recognize and destroy foreign invaders, such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Human breast milk is quite rich in myristic and lauric acid, which have potent germ-killing ability. But the importance of the fats lives on beyond infancy; we need dietary replenishment of them throughout adulthood, middle age, and into seniority to keep the immune system vigilant against the development of cancerous cells as well as infectious invaders.”
https://wellnessmama.com/1265/saturated-fat/

and they do not clog up your arteries..

"Among doctors and the public alike, there is a popular belief that dietary saturated fat clogs up the arteries and results in coronary heart disease. A new editorial published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine says that this notion of saturated fat clogging a pipe is "just plain wrong."
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317118.php

Unless you are still being breast fed I think it's worth taking for the lauric acid alone.

Obviously I'm not an expert and I'm not telling anyone what to do, I'm just saying what has been working for me, I will sort out a load of links for you and you can decide for yourself.
Thanks to you and NYC Blue for your replies. Regarding saturated fats, I first started thinking of trying to lose weight around thirty years ago and for about eighty to ninety per cent of that time, I tailored my diet around cutting right down on saturated fats - it wasn't as if you could eat as much sugar as you wanted, but saturated fat was definitely thought of as the villain of the piece.

I like what you say about coconut oil because it seems that, even if it does nothing else, it stops you feeling so hungry through the day, but, as someone who has a heart condition (atrial fibrillation), it's probably best to take rs3100's advice and check with my GP or fibrillation nurse before I try to make any drastic alterations to my diet - for now I think I'll stick with some of the foods you and NYC Blue talk about - I can see me having a lot of cheese salads which was something I virtually stopped eating back in my anything but saturated fat days.