Do you love chicken skin as much as the next person, yet for the sake of your diet, you have to strip your chicken of it’s glistening, scrumptious and beautiful skin before you can bite into boring skinless chicken? Well, if you, like us, love chicken with skin yet forced ourselves to peel it off all for the sake of a healthy diet (read: trying to lose weight), then you’ll be more than happy to hear this news.
There’s no need to peel the skin off the chicken, in fact, chicken skin is actually healthy for you. Wait-what?! Yeah, you got that right. Chicken skin shouldn’t be peeled off and thrown away. It should be savored, tasted and swallowed into your stomach. Sometimes.
Here’s 8 reasons why you should do so.
It’s full of fats, healthy fats
When it comes to talking about fats, there’s two types – the bad ones that clog up your arteries, harm your heart and make you blow up like a hot air balloon, and there’s the good fats, which has 8 grams of unsaturated fats and 3 grams of saturated fats. It’s fats that you need in your diet, but might just cause you to fatten up if you eat too much of it. It’s all about moderation.
There’s not much difference between eating with skin and without
Well, we won’t lie and say that there’s no difference, but eating a serving of chicken with skin provides you with 2.5g of saturated fats and 50 calories, not worth the amount of hardship you have to go through when you give up chicken skin, right? We totally agree.
You won’t be tempted to overeat
Think about it, when you’ve had something fabulous, you’ll find it easier to convince yourself to hold off on eating until the next meal time. But if you just ate skinless chicken which is bland, dry and totally un-enjoyable, chances are you’ll comfort yourself with the fact that you might just indulge in a snack or two, either as a reward for sticking to your diet or to “get the taste of skinless chicken out of your mouth”…and mind.
You no longer have an excuse to eat fried chicken
People are masters at deluding themselves, and one of that is eating fried chicken. As long as you believe in the fact that by forgoing chicken skin, the chicken will miraculously turn healthy, you won’t blink an eye when you eat fried chicken because you’ve removed the skin, so that means it’s less unhealthy.
It’s a good way to get rid of low-fat diet
If losing weight is your health goal, chances are you wouldn’t want to go into a low fat diet. Low-fat diet is high in carbs, and this diet leads you to feeling less satiated, and constantly looking to eat even if meal times have not arrived yet. This increased frequency in eating combined with high carbs lead to weight gain, instead of weight loss.
It contains Omega 9 or oleic acid
It’s a monounsaturated fat that is also present in olive oil, and it encourages the formation of high-density lipoprotein, HDL, which helps to manage glucose sensitivity.
Not all saturated fats are bad
As always, at the end of the day, it’s all about moderation. Saturated fats are not necessarily harmful in low or controlled amount as these “unhealthy” fats plays a part in maintaining bone density and regulate your hormone and immune system. It’s only when you eat excess amounts that will cause the formation of low-density lipoprotein, a cholesterol we don’t want too much of in our body.
It’s the best part of the entire chicken
No kidding, the skin of a well-cooked chicken is probably the best part of the entire dish. Any chicken that’s cooked with skin on will be tender, succulent and heavenly because the skin traps all the moisture within the chicken and ‘juiced’ up your chicken meat. While it has nothing to do with physical health, it does make you feel happy and satisfied with life, and make your day when you sink your teeth into this badly misunderstood part of the chicken.
So what’s the catch? Well, chicken skin might not be that bad, but it must still be eaten in moderation. Now, before you get all disappointed on me, eating the skin sometimes is better than putting it on one side all the time, right?
