One of the things about "low fat", "low sugar" is that when you stop eating refined foods, you don't have to worry about it nearly as much.
While you probably should not be having cookies every day, and fried chicken should still be a treat, not a daily thing, if you focus on eating natural foods, you don't have to obsess about calories, fat content, sugar content, etc.
Desserts are a treat, not a staple. In the US, even entrees are loaded with sugar.
Fat is a flavor enhancer and dietetic stabilizer. When you use it with real food, it ends up being way less than all the hidden added fat in commercial foods.
People should not have to count carbs, count calories, or count ANYTHING to eat right. We end up having to just long enough to teach ourselves to eat normally again, but once we get the habits back, of eating mostly fresh fruits and veggies, with whole grains, fresh unprocessed (no preservative) meats, fresh raw dairy, etc, then the body balances out and you can usually handle reasonable treats, and you can have butter on your bread, lard in your biscuits, etc, and not worry about it, simply because you aren't eating food with a bunch of UNNECESSARY fat and sugar and chemicals that are throwing you off.
Dumb, that modern food production has CREATED the problem of the unhealthy high fat high sugar diet, through unbalanced combinations, unnatural ingredients, and excessive refining, and their solution to that is MORE refining, to take out MORE healthy stuff and add in more chemicals.
It just doesn't work. It will never bring on real health.
When you are eating good foods, you start out with foods that are pretty low in fat and sugar, so you can add those where they matter most, in appropriate ways, and enjoy them.
The trick is to not use the healthy stuff the same way that food manufacturers use the unhealthy stuff, because it can still get really unbalanced, and throw you off, especially when you are making the transition.
It usually takes a while to see full benefits, and your body is likely to go through several sets of changes and adaptations as you do so. You are likely to do well, have a setback because you feel good and get lazy for a while, then do better, etc, as well.
Someone once did a study on wheat and diabetes. They found that white flour everyday would gradually worsen their blood sugar control.
Whole wheat flour (from the store) would minimally improve it over a period of a month or so.
Cracked wheat daily (again, from the store) gradually improved it a little more than the whole wheat flour.
Whole wheat berries daily had the greatest effect - it was long term, but it had the best results in showing blood sugar control improvement.
There are basically two reasons for these results:
1. Commercial processed wheat products have the germ removed. The germ has wheat oil, which will go rancid quickly, and that affects shelf life, so it is remove. Whole wheat really isn't whole wheat, it is just part of the whole wheat grain. This is true of most commercial whole grains. Whole wheat berries are the WHOLE grain, germ and all, and the germ has important health benefits, especially for balancing body systems.
2. Oxydation hurts milled grains. Each surface that is exposed to air is subject to it. Some elements evaporate, others convert to useless forms. So the older the milled grain, the less beneficial it is. Whole wheat flour can be just as healthy as whole wheat berries IF it is milled fresh (not more than 2 weeks old, or 1 month if kept in the freezer).
Canned foods also lose a great deal of nutrition. Every method of storage loses some nutrients, but freezing keeps about 90% of the nutrients intact, and drying keeps about 80% (though commercially dried foods typically have preservatives on them). If you use canned foods, they should be only seasonal, not all year, and they should be from the previous season's harvest, not stuff that has sat around for years.
There's definitely a case for fresh whole foods. When you need nutrient dense foods, that is one of the keys - fresh foods just have more power packed in them.
