It’s only natural to worry, right?
And I suppose I can only speak for myself here, but there’s rarely a day that goes by that I’m not worried about SOMETHING, whether it’s my kids or something in my business or the dog not eating her dinner.
And a big thing I see my clients worrying about, especially when they’re new to my program, is the fact that for the first time in their lives, they’re being encouraged to eat MORE. And not only that, I’m telling them to eat foods that for most of their life, they’ve been told to stay away from—eggs, meat, cheese, butter.
So they start worrying that this new way of eating can’t possibly be HEALTHY.
They start worrying about things like calories, and fat, and cholesterol—convinced they’ll never lose weight & get healthy if they don’t.
And I understand why it happens. Because we’ve all been indoctrinated by decades of bad advice, and unfortunately it’s left us all a little bit scarred and scared of the wrong things.
And that’s why today, I wanted to take a deep dive into real research—to really dig into exactly why those fears are off-base, what’s actually holding you back when it comes to health, and how to break free with facts, not myths.
So buckle up, because this is a deep one. But I promise it won’t be boring.
See here for all source links for supporting data for this post.
My name is Ruth Soukup and I am the founder of Thinlicious and the creator of the Thin Adapted System, as well as the New York Times bestselling author of seven books.
And if this is your first time reading, here’s what you should know about me: I’m a 46-year-old woman—ALMOST 47—who struggled with my weight and health for ten long years, failing at diet after diet, until I finally decided to take a radically different approach.
Instead of starting yet another diet, I started researching. And I quickly learned that almost everything we’ve ever been told about health and weight loss, about what makes us lose weight and what makes us fat, is totally wrong. We’ve been lied to for the last 70 years. And it’s had a devastating effect on our health.
So I changed the way I ate. I stopped focusing on calories and started worrying about HORMONES. And I lost 49 pounds without dieting or Ozempic or making myself miserable, and now I’ve kept that weight off for years.
But that journey changed me. Frankly, I’m still a little pissed that I struggled for SO long when I didn’t have to, and my goal now is to help as many other women as possible find out the truth. I’m obsessed with helping women over 40—like you—ditch the crap holding you back and find real freedom through transforming your health.
And that’s what this blog is all about: a health revolution that’s not about quick fixes or drugs, but real, lasting change.
So now you know what you’re getting yourself into, and you have a little more context for why I care so much about this topic!
And let me just tell you—today, we’re going BIG. We’re taking a deep dive into one of the biggest hangups that so many women have when it comes to eating in a way that will actually FIX your hormones and heal your body.
It’s something I hear about all the time from the clients in my TAS program, and I guess I just want to set the record straight, once and for all.
Because we’ve all been so brainwashed by all the bullshit that we can’t actually believe that ignoring calories, eating more fat, and not panicking over cholesterol IS the way to lose weight and get healthy for life.
It just doesn’t seem possible, especially when you’ve spent your whole life watching your calories, skipping butter, and avoiding eggs and red meat, because that’s what all the experts, including maybe even your doctor, have convinced you is the only way to lose weight and get healthy.
And I get it—I bought those same lies for decades.
But they are lies, and today I want to prove it to you. That’s why we’re taking a deep dive into what over 50 years of research actually says, and then cutting through the noise with straight-up evidence.
And just in case you STILL don’t believe me and want to go even deeper, I’m going to make sure to link all of my sources in the show notes so that you can read them all for yourself if you want to.
We’re going to tackle these hot topics one at a time, in three big chunks—calories, fat, cholesterol—so that by the end of this blog post, you understand exactly what’s been said and what you’ve been told, why it’s wrong and what the actual research says, and what you can actually do about it.
Because frankly you’re smart, you’re ready, and you deserve the unfiltered truth, not some watered-down health fairy tale.
Calories—Why You’ve Been Tricked Into Counting
Okay, let’s start with the thing you’ve probably been thinking about almost every day since you were a teenager: CALORIES.
And honestly, is there anything we’ve been conditioned to stress over more?
We’ve been told over and over again to count them, to track them, to cut them, and above all, to “maintain a calorie deficit” because it’s all just simple math, right? It’s just “calories in and calories out.” According to all the experts, calories are supposed to be the magic bullet for losing weight and staying healthy.
And so every diet you’ve ever been on has looked the exact same way. You aim for that perfect little number, whether it’s 1,200 or 1,500, or a certain number of points, believing if you can just stay under that line, the pounds will finally melt off.
Weight Watchers even tried to convince us that “Zero Point Foods” were the answer we’ve all been waiting for. It was still just about calories.
It’s one of the oldest myths in the health game, and it’s been letting you down for way too long. And if you’ve ever been on a diet and FAILED, you probably already know, deep down, that there’s something wrong with this paradigm.
So how did we get here?
Well, as Gary Taubes explains in his book, Why We Get Fat, this whole calorie obsession kicked off sometime after World War II, when the “calories in, calories out” idea started taking over. It was based on the law of thermodynamics, which says that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but can only change from one form to another.
And on the surface, it sounds so logical, right? It was easy to get on board with an idea that seemed so straightforward, so common sense, so scientific.
So by the 1950s, this idea of needing to count calories was pretty much everywhere, and then it got permanently locked into place in the 1970s and 1980s when the USDA guidelines told us all to “eat less, move more.”
And that’s right about the time that Big Food saw their chance to create a whole new category of food, and man oh man, did they ever jump on it—pushing low-cal snacks, diet sodas, anything to convince you your body’s just a math equation: burn more than you eat, and you’ll be fine.
What’s worse, though, is that doctors bought into it too. And they’re still telling you to cut back, even when you’re starving yourself and the scale won’t budge.
But here’s the thing no one is telling you—not your doctor, or the diet industry, or all those food companies trying to convince you to buy their toxic low-calorie processed crap.
“Calories in, Calories Out” is a lie. That’s not how our body works.
The law of thermodynamics does not apply to our body, because our body is not a simple system. It is an incredibly COMPLEX system, an intricate network of processes that all work together to keep us alive and functioning.
And the system that RULES all of these processes in our body, the system that determines whether we store fat or burn it, the system that gives us energy or tells us we’re hungry is our ENDOCRINE system, which is just a fancy word for HORMONES.
Our HORMONES are what run the show.
And all of our hormones are interconnected, they all work together, which means that if one is out of whack, they’ll all be messed up.
And the hormone that is the biggest problem for almost all of us is INSULIN.
Because all those low-calorie foods we’ve been eating are still loaded with sugar and toxic processed ingredients and artificial chemical sweeteners, which has basically caused an epidemic of insulin resistance in this country.
Dr. Benjamin Bikman lays this all out in a TON of detail in his amazing book, which I highly recommend, Why We Get Sick.
But the bottom line is that insulin resistance is running the show for 90% of us, locking in fat and keeping your body from burning it. When your insulin is high, your body CANNOT burn fat. Period. End of story. It doesn’t matter how few calories you eat.
And on the flip side, when you keep your insulin low and take your hormones out of crisis mode, you can basically eat as many calories as you want or need, so long as you keep eating the right kinds of foods. Your body won’t store the extra as fat, because your hormones are telling you to burn it for energy.
Gary Taubes dug into this even further in another one of his books, Good Calories, Bad Calories, where he unpacks 50 years of research that show how calorie restriction fails over and over again, while getting insulin under control actually works.
A 2018 JAMA study tested it—500 people, split between low-sugar and low-fat diets. The low-sugar group cut insulin levels and lost more weight, no calorie counting needed.
A 2020 Metabolism trial showed the same thing—low-sugar DOUBLED weight loss compared to calorie-counting in just 12 weeks.
And not only that, a 2019 Nutrition & Metabolism study found that cutting calories jacked up hunger hormones by 30%, while eating a low-sugar diet kept them steady.
What it really all comes down to is that the thing you need to be worried about most ISN’T calories or how MUCH food you’re eating, it’s whether the TYPE of food you are eating is keeping your insulin high.
Right now you’re cutting calories, feeling hungry all the time, and still not losing—because calories aren’t what’s driving this. They’re basically a distraction, and they’re stealing your energy.
So what can you do about it? STOP counting—start eating REAL food that keeps your insulin low. Honestly, it’s pretty simple, at least in theory. Stick to WHOLE foods that are low in sugar. Meat, vegetables, healthy fat. Avoid toxic processed garbage. But eat as much as you want.
You’re not failing because you’re weak; you’re stuck because the calorie myth is a BIG FAT LIE—one of the biggest ones we’ve ever been told.
So it’s time to let this one go, my friend. The research backs you up, and your body will thank you.
Fat—Why It’s Not the Villain You Think
Alright, moving on—let’s talk about something else you’ve probably spent too much time stressing out over, especially if you’re a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s like me.
FAT.
I don’t know about you, but I can distinctly remember spending my high school years convinced that fat was the biggest villain in the health world. I actually kept a pocket-size fat gram guidebook on me at all times!
All while chowing down on so-called healthy fat-free snacks like Snackwell cookies and Red Vines and the worst of all—those Olestra potato chips that were supposedly made with fat-free fat that actually just wreaked havoc on your intestinal tract. Remember those?
In any case, most of us have been conditioned to avoid fat like it’s the plague—butter, meat, oils—because we’re convinced it’s why we’re carrying extra weight or putting our heart at risk.
And even though you may have given up on the Snackwell cookies and Olestra chips, you’re probably still automatically reaching for “low-fat” everything—yogurt, dressings, skim milk—thinking that’s the smart way to stay lean and healthy.
It’s one of the sneakiest lies we’ve been sold, and it’s been holding you back for way too long.
So where did this line of BS come from?
Well, it all started back in the 1950s with Ancel Keys and his “fat kills” theory—a shaky study that pinned heart disease on saturated fat.
We NOW know that this study—and others like it—were actually funded by the sugar industry, who were worried by other research that was clearly showing sugar as the problem.
So they rigged the system in their favor, and this new idea that fat is bad took off like wildfire. By the 1970s, it was totally locked in—medical schools started teaching it, the USDA rolled out low-fat guidelines in 1977, and once again Big Food saw their golden ticket.
They started pushing vegetable oils, margarine, “heart-healthy” low-fat snacks—anything to convince you that butter and steak were out to get you.
Doctors of course got on board too, because that’s how they were being trained. But the really sad part is that advice has stuck around, even as the whole thing started to unravel and the truth started to emerge.
But here’s the real story: science says fat is NOT your enemy. It’s your friend.
A 2010 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition meta-analysis looked at 21 studies with 347,000 people and found absolutely NO link between saturated fat and heart disease.
Harvard’s 2015 review found that fat actually lowers insulin, cuts inflammation, and revs up your metabolism, while low-fat diets mess all that up.
A 2021 Lancet study put high-fat diets up against low-fat, and guess what happened? High-fat won hands down, dropping weight and triglycerides by 20%.
And a 2019 Nutrition & Metabolism trial showed that fat-based diets cut inflammation markers by 25%, while low-fat pushed them up 10%.
The truth is that healthy fat—the non-ultra-processed kind that comes from animals and olives and coconuts and avocados—is NOT clogging your arteries or piling on pounds. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s actually keeping your insulin low, regulating your hormones, healing your gut, and helping your body BURN fat rather than store it.
Yep, you heard that right: fat makes you burn fat, not store it.
In fact, a 2020 Metabolism study found high-fat diets boosted fat burn by 15% over low-fat.
And a 2018 Journal of Lipid Research showed that saturated fat actually cuts leaky gut markers by 18%.
So while you’re avoiding fat and grabbing all that “light” junk instead, it’s leaving you tired, bloated, and stuck. I know this is hard to believe, but more healthy fat is what you need to break free.
So what can you do? Well, this one’s easy. Stop avoiding it! Start eating a whole lot more healthy fat, while avoiding the processed junk and seed oils as much as you can.
You’re not risking your health; you’re reclaiming it—and once again the research proves it every step of the way.
Cholesterol—Why You’ve Been Scared of the Wrong Thing
Okay, last but not least, let’s tackle the big elephant in the room that everyone freaks out about whenever we talk about eating more fat: CHOLESTEROL.
And honestly, has there ever been a bigger bad guy in the health world?
We’ve been taught to fear it, along with anything that might raise it, like eggs, red meat, and saturated fat, for as long as most of us can remember.
The conditioning is so deep, it impacts our food choices without us even realizing it.
I mean, think about it—how many times have you opted for an egg white omelet or chosen chicken instead of steak because you thought it was the healthier choice?
It’s one of the sneakiest health scams of the last century, and it’s done a real number on us.
So how did this mess even start?
Well, once again, we need to go back a few decades, because this one kicked off in the 1960s with the Framingham Heart Study, which linked blood cholesterol to heart risk.
Pretty soon, medical schools, the American Heart Association—all the big shots—jumped on board.
“Lower cholesterol, save lives” became their mantra.
And like with fat and calories, Big Food and Big Pharma saw nothing but dollar signs.
The food industry pushed processed vegetable oils and margarine as “heart-healthy” swaps for butter and animal fats, while drug companies rolled out statins and got doctors prescribing them like candy.
We were told to ditch eggs and steak and load up on whole grains and “heart-healthy” cereals instead.
It was a full-on propaganda attack, and most folks are still buying it, even though it’s wrecked our health in ways we’re only now starting to see.
Americans are fatter and sicker than ever, and our health nosedive lines up perfectly with this “low cholesterol” push.
But once again, it’s all a big fat lie, and the research backs everything I’m about to tell you.
First off, let’s get super clear about the basics: eating foods high in cholesterol—like eggs, steak, and saturated fat—doesn’t actually raise your cholesterol. Even the Framingham study showed that!
They literally tracked people for 30 years in that study and found cholesterol from food barely moves your blood levels—less than 2%.
Instead, almost ALL of the cholesterol in your body—more than 80%—is produced in your liver. And that’s because it’s NOT some evil poison that we’ve been led to fear—it’s actually an essential building block your body needs to function.
Here’s the deal: cholesterol isn’t just sitting there clogging things up. It’s busy building your cell walls, making hormones like estrogen and testosterone, and even helping your brain work right.
Even LDL—the so-called “bad” cholesterol—isn’t doing bad things. It carries fat around your body, clears damage, and keeps your nerves firing. Without it, you’d be in trouble.
But the tests most doctors run don’t tell you that, which is a HUGE part of the problem. They give you total cholesterol, HDL, and LDL numbers, but skip LDL particle size—which is what actually matters for risk.
So your doctor hands you a half-baked test, says your LDL’s too high, and pushes statins.
And you go along with it because you’re scared. After all, everything you’ve heard screams that cholesterol’s bad news, and if your cholesterol is high you could drop dead of a heart attack at any moment.
So let’s talk about what the science ACTUALLY says.
First of all, you’re not about to die if your cholesterol is high. Even when your LDL number is higher than your doctor thinks it should be. In fact, a 2021 Lancet Healthy Longevity study tracked 1.8 million people over TWO DECADES, and found definitively that folks with higher LDL DIDN’T die sooner. Many actually lived LONGER.
So take a breath.
Especially because a lot of other research backs this up, with more recent studies showing that seniors with higher cholesterol often outlive those with lower levels, especially past 60.
Why? Because cholesterol supports your immune system, fights off pathogens, and keeps your brain sharp—stuff you need more of as you age.
Now, let’s talk statins—because this is where it gets messy. For most people, statins are way worse than cholesterol ever could be. A 2021 study at the Society of Nuclear Medicine meeting found folks with mild cognitive issues on lipophilic statins—like atorvastatin—had DOUBLE the risk of dementia.
Why? Those statins cross into your brain, mess with cholesterol there, and tank metabolism in areas hit first by Alzheimer’s. Plus, they’re overprescribed—more than 80% of folks don’t actually need them, per a 2022 Annals of Internal Medicine report.
Not only that, they jack up your risk of diabetes by more than 46%, cause muscle pain, and BLOCK CoQ10, which is your heart’s fuel. That’s right, the drug your doctor is telling you that you need to be taking to lower your cholesterol so that you can protect your heart is actually HURTING your heart.
All while Big Pharma’s laughing all the way to the bank. Statins are currently the most widely prescribed drug out there, and doctors keep pushing them despite no real benefit for most. It’s a scam, plain and simple.
Bottom line here, cholesterol isn’t the big scary monster you think it is.
Here’s more evidence: a 2019 Journal of the American Heart Association review found no link between dietary cholesterol and heart risk, but did find that a low sugar diet cuts inflammation and improves overall health.
This shouldn’t actually be a surprise, because we’ve known it for a long time. Back in 1863, Dr. William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence showed low-carb, high-fat diets cut heart issues. No statins required.
More recently, a 2020 JAMA study found that high-sugar diets tripled triglycerides, but eggs didn’t budge them.
Cholesterol can be a confusing topic, but what it really comes down to is that your body needs cholesterol—it’s not the enemy. It builds cells, hormones, and brain power, per a 2018 Journal of Lipid Research.
The only real threat when it comes to cholesterol is when your LDL is made up of small, dense particles rather than large buoyant ones. The 2021 Metabolism study confirmed that.
So what can you do when your doctor tells you your cholesterol is too high? Well, you have to start making sure the test results he or she is looking at are actually telling the whole story.
The normal test doctors run don’t.
So push back and ask for a CAC scan; it’s 90% accurate for artery plaque. If it’s clear, you’re fine.
Or get an NMR Lipoprofile to check your particle size. If your LDL particles are large, you’re fine.
Then keep eating a diet of whole foods loaded with nutrient-dense red meat, eggs, and healthy fat. Because insulin’s the real threat, not cholesterol.
Typically my TAS clients do often see cholesterol bumps early on, but those numbers tend to level out as inflammation drops. And the research says you’re safe, so now hopefully you can finally stop worrying about it!
Final Thoughts—You’ve Got the Power Now
I know this was a meaty post and I threw a LOT of information and data at you all at once, but it’s SO important to understand the truth, which is that you’ve basically been fed a giant pile of lies about calories, fat, and cholesterol—decades of it—and it’s kept you spinning instead of thriving.
You’re not crazy for worrying—Big Food, Big Pharma, and old-school doctors pounded this into you—but it’s time to let it go.
The research is clear as day—insulin and inflammation, not calories, fat, or cholesterol, are what’s driving your weight, your energy, your health. Your hormones are the driver.
Understanding this and applying it to my own life is how I lost 49 pounds and have kept it off for years, while eating like a queen.
It’s also how I’ve now helped thousands of women over 40 do the same with my Thin Adapted System—aka, my TAS program.
And honestly, TAS is awesome, it really is. Because even though this stuff is simple in theory, in practice it can feel hard to implement. My program not only gives you a clear path to success, with all the practical tools you need, but it gives you the support and the science-backed education to actually implement it in your life for good.
And if you’re ready for a better way to live—a lifestyle that will not only help you lose the weight, but actually HEAL your body, then there’s no better way to do that than by joining TAS.
To find out more and get signed up, just go HERE.
At the end of the day, this isn’t just about weight—it’s your life on the line.
You’re too tired for your kids, too foggy for your goals—those old lies stole that from you. Real food brings it back: energy, clarity, confidence.
You’re not failing because you’re weak—you’ve been misled, and now you’ve got the truth.
What you do with this information is up to you.
Feel free to share it with a friend who’s stuck in the same mess.
See here for all source links for supporting data for this post.
