Monday, March 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
So, you've been religiously cutting the fat from your diet.
You've stopped cooking with oil and started spreading low-fat cream cheese on your morning bagel. Butter? It isn't even part of your vocabulary anymore.
Joyce Vedral wishes she could applaud your efforts.
But the Las Vegan, who's authored eight fitness books -- including the best-selling "Bottoms Up!" and "The Fat Burning Body Workout" -- and stars in five exercise videos, says foregoing fat altogether is not a good idea.
In her latest book, "Eat to Trim" (Warner Books, $23), Vedral says no less than 10 percent of a person's total daily caloric intake should include fat "... for good health and to prevent a feeling of continual hunger."
Women, she says, should consume between 15 and 25 grams of fat each day -- the equivalent of one hot dog or five 4-ounce chicken thighs -- while men should take in 18 to 30.
The complete opposite of the anti-fat messages consumers have been bombarded with in recent years, but...
"The body needs a certain amount of fat to feel full," Vedral contends over a lunch of grilled mahi-mahi and rice at Jerome's on Maryland Parkway.
"In the society that we live in today ... it's possible to get through the day without eating 5 to 7 grams of fat. (There's) low-fat ice cream, low-fat yogurt, pasta."
"In a way, she's right," agrees Jeanne Palmer, senior health educator for the Clark County Health District. "You do have to have some fat in your diet."
But 15 grams, she says, "is very low," considering that the American Heart Association's recommendation is 30 grams a day.
"There are a lot of scientists who believe that's not low enough to reduce the risk of heart disease," Palmer counters, "so there are people who are getting down below (30 grams). That would be a goal for a lot of people."
The key to losing weight, says Vedral, a former bodybuilder, is balance.
"If there is a significant fat deficit in the body," she writes, "we cannot absorb and make use of calcium or vitamins A, D, E or K. If we completely deprive our bodies of fat, our internal organs will have no cushioning."
While penning "Eat to Trim," Vedral discovered that the menu plans in her previous books didn't contain enough fat.
She also stopped to reassess her own eating habits.
"Before I wrote the book, I was wondering why I was having so much trouble losing weight." Not consuming enough fat, she claims, was why she "was always hungry."
That's when she devised and spent four months following the meal plans featured in "Eat to Trim," dining on its 200 vegetable-heavy recipes.
Her favorite: Strongman's Tangy Tuna, with only 3.6 grams of fat.
"Oh God, I live on that! It's so much food," she says.
It's tough to think of the "Eat to Trim" plan as a diet, considering that it allows for three full low-calorie, low-fat meals and two snacks -- liked baked sweet potatoes, pretzels and sugar-free Popsicles -- per day.
Menus featured in the book were approved by a nutritionist with the Miami Beach, Fla.-based Pritikin Longevity Center, a lifestyle and nutrition education center founded by Nathan Pritikin of "Pritikin Diet" fame.
The meals follow a modified version of USDA's "food pyramid," except "You're eating more vegetables that have almost no calories," Vedral says.
The chapter that 115-pound Vedral enjoys touting is titled "Eat Like a Dog, Look Like a Diva: For People Who Love Food."
Count her in. "I'm hungry, you know what I mean? I'm not a picker. I can't cope with feeling deprived."
Skinny as a child, the 53-year-old started gaining weight during adolescence, and put on an additional 10 pounds every year after she was married.
A trip to the doctor's office forced her to see the light. "He said to me, 'For such a young girl, you've got a lot of fat on you,'" she recalls.
"I was 25 and I was about 30 pounds heavy and getting fatter every day," she recalls. She tried "every diet you can imagine ... and none of it worked for me."
That's why Vedral is quick to set the "Eat to Trim" plan apart from other fad-diet books.
"Anytime you get a gimmick diet out there that promises you huge weight loss in short periods of time, you're gonna have competition," she says, "but in the long run, they all come back to me because you can't fool Mother Nature."
"The caveman didn't have a 'Zone,'" a trendy diet of recent years, she reminds. "He just ate vegetables, fruit, protein. That's what you eat."
Besides, "Who wants to build their life around food? Food should be a normal, natural part of life that you don't think about.
"I could easily invent a diet that could make people lose weight very fast," she says, "but they'd gain it right back the second they got (caught) off-guard."
Vedral finally got her weight under control "by learning how to eat healthy and working out with weights."
"To stay this thin, I have to follow the book. No matter what maintenance plan you're on, you've got to watch it, because a little cheating here and there, it creeps up on you."
The trick to dieting, Vedral says, is to think of yourself as an athlete in training. "It's exciting. You're eating for your muscles. Your body's happy and you have more energy."
As with most diets, exercise is an important component of "Eat to Trim."
The "What About Exercise?" chapter explains the right and wrong ways to work out and demonstrates the correct use of dumbbells with photos of Vedral in action.
After all, she says, "Losing weight is one thing, keeping it off is another."
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