This is where the rubber hits the road

[Subtle_badger]

Last night I cooked with double cream. I feel a little dirty, but in a good way.

But now I am facing my personal bête noir: 400 grams of beef tallow.

Am I going to cook with it, or make soap? It's been the enemy for so long, I am not sure what I will do.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador]

If you feel like a last carb blowout, fry some chips in it

[Stoozie]

I know that a lot of folk here prefer not to count macros/calories etc, so I realise this may not be everyone's cup of tea!

It helped me get over the huge mental hurdle of eating what seemed like crazy amounts of fats by logging my calories for 2 weeks, ensuring they weren't above a maintenance amount. I figured I could persuade myself that the body could only lay down fat as body fat if there was an energy surplus.

Taking this as a notional upper limit, I then ate to satiety. Lo and behold, I often did not go as high as the maintenance threshold.

When I had eaten this way and not busted out of all my clothes etc, it was much easier to eat a high fat diet.

[Subtle_badger in reply to Stoozie]

Thanks.

I am generally still counting calories, but also generally not limiting them.

The problem is that until a month ago I was putting effort into counting my saturated fat and keeping it below 20g/day based on advice I was given by an NHS nutritionist/dietician. Moving away from that is hard. Also there is some suggestion that not all saturated fat is the same; dairy fat may be okay but red meat fat might still be bad. So tallow is a step beyond cream.

Mind you, beef tallow is 42% monounsaturated and only 50% saturated, so used sparingly I might still be under the 20g.

Haven't used it yet, but last night I ate the left over Flying Jacob (thank you Jayne1025 !), where the cream had melted into butter, and definitely did not need tallow added 😋