Secrets to eating meat without gaining weight during weight loss and a guide to choosing the right meat

Eating Meat Smartly Can Help You Lose Weight

Meat often gives the impression of "eating it will make you fat," but this isn't necessarily true.

To determine if a food is likely to cause obesity, you need to look at whether it contains high-calorie components.

Does meat contain high-calorie components? The answer is: fatty meat does, but lean meat doesn't.

As mentioned earlier, the main sources of calories in food are carbohydrates and fats.

First, meat has a very low carbohydrate content, only a fraction of a percent, which is almost negligible.

Second, people might think of the fat in meat. Surely there's fat in meat, right? Fat is very high in calories!

That's right, fat is essentially a block of fat, and its calorie content is indeed ridiculously high. However, in actual diets, many meat dishes don't contain much fat. By carefully avoiding the fatty parts of dishes, you can consume significantly less fat. Let's take pork as an example:

100 grams of pork fat contains approximately 3558 kilojoules (850 kilocalories), equivalent to the calories in 100 milliliters of peanut oil; 100 grams of pork belly, with a good balance of fat and lean meat, has slightly fewer calories, approximately 2378 kilojoules (568 kilocalories);

100 grams of lean pork (which also contains trace amounts of fat) contains only 599 kilojoules (143 kilocalories).

In other words, even if we eat all the meat in a plate of stir-fried radish and lean pork (excluding oil and salt), the calories would still be less than a bowl of rice (a bowl of rice contains approximately 920 kilojoules).

Therefore, as long as you avoid fatty meat, you don't need to worry about gaining weight from eating meat.

Meat contains a large amount of protein, which is also a unit of energy conversion, but there's no need to be too concerned, as protein, once converted into energy, is not easily converted into fat.

For example, bodybuilders often reduce their intake of starches and fats while consuming large amounts of protein to achieve both fat loss and muscle gain.

Therefore, there's no need to completely eliminate meat (except fatty meat) when trying to lose weight. Instead, you can refer to the methods of bodybuilders, carefully develop a diet plan, and eat meat in moderation to satisfy your cravings.

Specifically, different types of meat have different calorie levels.

For instance, beef and rabbit meat are very low in calories, only about 418 kilojoules (100 kcal) per 100 grams, so eating a little is fine. However, note that this refers to the "snowflake beef" found in hot pot restaurants. Snowflake beef is almost half fat and half meat, so its calorie content is much higher than regular beef, and it should be avoided by those trying to lose weight.

Lean pork is a good second choice and can be eaten in small amounts.

Chicken, on the other hand, is relatively high in calories, with 699 kilojoules (167 kcal) per 100 grams. Chicken fat is tightly bound to the meat and doesn't separate easily, so people trying to lose weight should be careful not to eat too much.

Lamb has a high fat content, with about 850 kilojoules (203 kilocalories) per 100 grams, equivalent to a bowl of white rice. Similarly, lamb served in hot pot restaurants is also high in fat and calories than regular lamb, so people trying to lose weight should avoid it.