I’m still working out exactly what I should be eating every day so that I keep within my 1,950 calories a day limit, but also so that I get the most of out those 1,950 calories.

There’s certainly no shortage of diet advice out there. The problem is that much of it is contradictory.

One day milk is good for you. The next day it’s not. One day red wine is good for you. The next day it’s not. And so it goes on.

Fat is a classic example. We not surprisingly equate the fat on our bodies with putting fat in our months and so it is easy for the food industry to dress up "low fat" and "reduced fat" foods as healthy options. That’s not always the case however.

Margarines and other low fat spreads gained in popularity because we were told that they were healthier options than butter which contains high levels of both saturated fat and cholesterol.

The problem is that many margarines and similar spreads contain hydrogenated or trans fats, vegetable oil that is heated and treated with hydrogen in order to make it solidify and give it a longer shelf life.

Trans fats are of no nutritional value whatsoever, but worse they actually damage your health.

A study by the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University in the USA earlier this year found that eating just 5g of trans fats a day increased your risk of heart disease by 25%. It also concluded that eliminating them from America’s diet completely would prevent 228,000 heart attacks and 30,000 coronary related deaths every year.The National Institute of Medicine and the American Dietetic Association recommend that you eat no trans-fats a day and 2g at most.

Remembering that 5g a day is enough to increase your risk of heart disease by 25%, it’s pretty sobering to discover that a portion of large fries from McDonald’s contains 6g of the stuff. And even more sobering to know that trans fats are used in a wide variety of food products today including crisps, sweets, pastries, biscuits, breakfast cereals and so on.

Is a low fat spread containing trans fats really better for you than butter? Who knows, but my money would go on a natural product like butter. Why we even allow trans fats (or hydrogenated vegetable oil as it often says on food labels) in our food beats me. The Danes don’t.

What’s more, a "low fat diet" isn’t likely to be a "balanced diet". That’s because we actually need fat in our diet and more than we probably realise too.

For a balanced diet, around 30% of your calorie intake should come from fats. That’s right, thirty per cent! So for me, about 600kcal of my daily intake of 1,950kcal should come from fat.

Given all the talk about low fat foods, you would be forgiven for thinking that anyone with a diet containing 30% fat would be a walking heart attack waiting to happen, but humans need fat in their diet and obviously plenty of it too.

Without enough of it in our diet we will almost certainly be deficient in Vitamins A, D, E, and K for example because they can only be digested and absorbed into our bodies in conjunction with fats. Fat also contains essential fatty acids that our body’s need to function properly, but can only be obtained from our diet.

Again it all comes back to calories in and calories out. If I have a low fat diet, but then get too many calories from say carbohydrates, I will not lose weight. A packet of fruit pastilles contains no fat whatsoever, but because of the high sugar content they do contain 187 calories.

Of course not all fats are created equal, and some of them are apparently better for you than others so I’m not about to add slices of fried lard to my diet. But I think that striving for a balanced diet which includes the right amount of fat will actually help me lose weight.

If I give my body what it needs it is less likely to go into survival mode and hopefully won’t miss the pound or two of weight I want to shed on a weekly basis. That’s my thinking anyway as I try to establish a balanced diet for myself. Only time (and the scales) will tell if I’m right or not.

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