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Counting fat grams can be an easy way to achieve weight loss but it requires discipline and effort. You have to be aware of everything you eat and how many fat grams it contains. With a solid plan of action, you can start counting fat grams to improve your health and loss weight.

Before you start counting fat grams, see your doctor to discuss your health and your diet. Your doctor can help you determine what your fat intake should be and how much you should weigh. You don't want to cut all fat out of your diet because the body needs a small amount of fat intake so discuss this with your doctor and a nutritionist if you can. A nutritionist can also tell you more about Omega 3 fatty acids which are known as the good fats.

One of the easiest ways to cut down on fats while you are counting fat grams is to replace unhealthy fats with healthy monounsaturated fats like olive, canola and peanut oils that help keep HDL levels (the good cholesterol) high.

Before you start counting fat grams, it's important that you know how to count fat grams. Today more than in the past it's much easier to count fat grams because now labels with nutrition information are required on almost all products. So when you go into a grocery store you can just look at the label to see how many fat grams are in the product. The difficult part in when you're dining out. It's kind of difficult to count fat grams when you're at a restaurant. The best thing to do is ask for a low fat meal and make sure you eat really low fat healthy foods for your other meals.

According to the American Heart Association, most people should limit dietary fat to 30% of total calories. It may be more for people with high cholesterol or heart disease. So, if you need to consume 1,500 calories a day to reach your target weight of 140 pounds, you should try not to exceed 50 fat grams a day. This is really individual though so your best bet is to consult with your doctor and a nutritionist for what's best for you.

Now get started counting your fat grams! You can cook leaner by substituting low-fat ingredients in high-fat items. Use egg substitutes for whole eggs or pureed fruit like applesauce in dessert recipes that require butter or shortening. Start drinking skim milk and using cooking spray or meat stock for sautéing vegetables. Substitute low-fat cheese, low fat sour cream and low fat mayonnaise. You'll find making some simple changes can make a big difference.

AP Photo (2); Getty Images

First we obsess over stars’ “baby bumps,” then we shame the new moms into squeezing back into skinny jeans as quickly as possible. Katie Gentile on the double standard that hurts women.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is back in her “skinny jeans” just four weeks after giving birth to her daughter, reports Us Weekly. Ditto Ellen Pompeo, I read in People. Twice, Heidi Klum walked the Victoria Secret runway just six weeks after having a baby. Natalia Vodianova topped them all, taking to the catwalk a mere two weeks after giving birth.

In 2010, God help the celebrity who fails to shed the baby weight immediately, as she may end up on the wrong side of one of those ubiquitous “best and worst post-baby bodies” pictorials. It is chilling to watch the culture become more and more obsessed with babies, while the evidence of how these babies are created is removed from public view. The supermarket tabloids obsessively scope out “baby bumps,” cooing each time a C- or even D-lister conceives. But the second the bumps become bouncing bundles of joy, the pressure is on for the new mom to squeeze back into her skinny jeans. The post-baby body must banish the bump, or risk ridicule.

It’s as if we should actually believe the baby dropped from the stork, from the sky, from anywhere but that toned, buff body.

It used to be that People magazine confined news about pregnancy and babies to its “Milestones” section. Now baby obsession has changed the very structure of the magazine, giving us features such as “Mommy and Me Fashion,” “Celebrity Family Albums,” and the ever-popular rush to publish the first photos of celebrity spawn. Similarly, celebrity gossip magazines and blogs now devote entire sections to bump patrols, moms and babies (only occasionally dads), and a parade of post-baby body photos. In this “new” culture that seems to mix domestic ideals of the 1950s with the expanded opportunities of the 21st century, baby bumps—expanding breasts and bellies—are celebrated, photographed, tracked, and made an endless source of speculation. But we ignore the less attractive, yet all-too-real aspects of pregnancy: There are no swollen ankles, plump thighs, or puffy faces allowed on the red carpet.

Of course, intense scrutiny of women’s bodies is not new, and celebrity antics have long made for profitable media fodder, but the obsession with postpartum weight control is something new. These days, we rarely see a picture of a pregnant celebrity without the requisite estimation of weight gain, called “baby weight,” as if it is somehow separate from the mother’s body. The best way to get rid of it is breast-feeding, the tabloids tell us, claiming that lactation magically and effortlessly melts away pounds.

Yet as The New York Times recently noted, research is conflicting as to whether breast-feeding actually promotes weight loss. Breast-feeding may burn calories, but it also stimulates appetite, leading many women to eat more. The Mayo Clinic advises normal-weight, healthy women to exercise moderately and eat about 300 more calories per day while pregnant, gaining between 25 and 35 pounds over the course of the nine months. And Mayo advises women to lose only 1 postpartum pound per week in order to maintain solid nutrition. La Leche League advises that women not diet for the first 2 months after delivery to help their bodies recover and establish good milk flow.

Contrast this information with Us Weekly celebrating Ashlee Simpson-Wentz for sticking to her 1,500-calorie-a-day post-pregnancy diet, People discussing Liv Tyler’s postpartum fasting and colonics, or Ok magazine’s “Baby Weight Secrets,” which advise women to stick to fat- and carb-free diets and spend hours exercising daily.

It would be easy to see this obsession with post-baby weight control as just part and parcel of the usual misogynistic obsession with women’s weight. Female celebrities are under constant pressure to stay thin. But look at it another way: When women shed the baby weight, they are not merely getting back their pre-baby body, they are obliterating all the evidence of ever having had a baby in the first place. This means the one thing that only women’s bodies can do is expected to be immediately erased. The post-baby body is wrung of its recent life-giving feat. Sagging milk-filled breasts must appear perky; the once-swollen abdomen is made concave. It’s as if we should actually believe the baby dropped from the stork, from the sky, from anywhere but that toned, buff body.

Biotech, Weight Loss, Drugs

Zafgen’s Mysterious Weight Loss Drug Advances Into First Trial for Obese Women

Luke Timmerman 2/8/10

Zafgen arrived on the Boston biotech scene about 18 months ago with blue-chip venture backing, a highly regarded scientist as CEO, and an audacious idea. The Cambridge, MA-based company was developing a powerful new weight loss drug made to work unlike any other treatment in development, by cutting off the blood supply to fat tissue.

One year later, results are in. The idea was wrong.

“That was the theory,” says CEO Tom Hughes. “It doesn’t appear to be the case.”

As it turns out, though, that’s not the end of the story. Allow me to begin at the beginning.

Zafgen first emerged in public in September 2008. That’s when Hughes joined the company after a stint as global head of cardiovascular and metabolism research at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge. Third Rock Ventures and Atlas Ventures provided the initial backing. The idea was to build on research at Children’s Hospital Boston that found drugs which are made to block formation of blood vessels—a successful cancer-fighting strategy—might also help shrink fat tissue. It was a provocative finding from mouse experiments, partly because nobody had really tried it before. Many other drugs in development for obesity work on receptors in the brain, trying to coax the body to think it’s full and stop eating.

VCs listened with some interest because obesity is one of the biggest market opportunities in the pharmaceutical business now. An estimated two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One of the key things Zafgen learned over the past year, based on detailed animal experiments, was that its drug didn’t work through the mechanisms it intended. The company conducted experiments on its lead candidate and found at the tiny doses it intended to use, “we have absolutely no effect on angiogenesis,” the scientific term for formation of new blood vessels.