How I Stopped Fearing Fat and Made Peace With Olive Oil
I spent the low-fat years afraid of avocados and nuts. Here's what I came to understand about healthy fats once I stopped treating the whole group as the enemy.
Hannah Caldwell 3 min read I came up in the low-fat era, when fat was treated as public enemy number one and every product wore “low fat” like a medal. I absorbed it completely. For years I bought the low-fat everything, feared avocados, rationed nuts like they were contraband, and felt vaguely virtuous about it — while often feeling hungry and unsatisfied an hour after eating.
Unlearning the fear of fat was one of the bigger shifts in this whole diary, partly because it had been drilled in so deep. (Usual reminder: I’m not a dietitian. This is just where lived experience landed me.)
What fat actually does for me
Once I let it back in, the most obvious thing was how satisfying fat is. A meal with some fat in it — a bit of olive oil, some avocado, a scatter of nuts — keeps me full and content in a way the low-fat versions never managed. Those low-fat products, I eventually realised, often replaced the fat with added sugar to keep them palatable, which was rather the opposite of helpful.
Fat also carries flavour, helps my body absorb certain nutrients, and is just slow, steady energy. None of that is sinister. I’d spent years fighting something that was largely on my side.
The low-fat trap, in hindsight
The thing that genuinely got me was the swap I never noticed. “Low fat” sounded healthier, so I trusted it. But pull the fat out of a yogurt or a dressing and it tastes like sad chalk, so manufacturers put something back — often sugar. I’d been congratulating myself for choosing low-fat versions that were quietly worse for me, all because I’d decided fat was the only villain worth watching.
Reading the ingredient list instead of the front-of-pack claim was what eventually exposed this. The full-fat plain yogurt often had a shorter, cleaner list than its low-fat, fruit-flavoured cousin.
The fats I actively reach for now
I stopped thinking about “fat” as a block and started thinking about which fats came in foods I felt good eating:
- Olive oil — my default for cooking and dressing nearly everything. I no longer measure it with a guilty eye.
- Nuts and seeds — a handful as a snack, or scattered over oats and yogurt. Filling and easy.
- Avocado — once feared, now a regular. On toast, in salads, wherever.
- Oily fish — tinned sardines and salmon are cheap and I genuinely feel better when they’re a regular part of the rotation.
I still keep portions sensible, because fat is energy-dense and that’s just true. But “sensible portion” is a world away from “terrified avoidance.”
Making peace with a whole food group
The real lesson wasn’t about fat specifically — it was the same one I keep relearning. Treating an entire category of food as the enemy never made me healthier. It made me anxious, left me hungry, and pushed me toward worse choices dressed up as better ones.
The same thing happened to me with carbs, and the cure was identical: stop judging the whole group, look at the actual foods, and let go of the fear. Olive oil and I are at peace now. So are nuts, and avocados, and the rest of the things I spent far too long avoiding for no good reason.
A few questions I get asked
Is eating fat going to make me gain weight?
That was the fear that ran my eating for years, and it's more tangled than I'd assumed. Fat is energy-dense, so portion matters, but eating fat itself isn't the simple cause-and-effect I'd imagined. The fats in nuts, olive oil and fish became some of the most satisfying, useful things I eat once I let them back in.
Are all fats the same?
No, and that's the bit I'd missed. The fats in whole foods like fish, nuts, seeds and olive oil sit very differently with me than heavily processed fats. As with most things, I came to care more about the food the fat comes in than the word 'fat' on its own.