What a perfect time to make this post as all of us our recovering from our holiday binge this weekend. My guess is after reading this you may think twice about how you eat on the holidays to come.
So what is the point I am trying to make? If calories in and calories out isn’t all it’s cracked up to be then how does fat loss or gain happen.
Well, I will let you in on the secret.
Insulin! Most of us are familiar with insulin, its role in blood sugar and type II diabetes. Insulin may actually be the cause of all of the chronic disease and health problems we are facing. Insulin causes our tissues to take in fat and sugar for storage and therefore tissue growth. Ask any bodybuilder. Insulin is the most anabolic hormone that exists. It is just as much if not more effective at adding muscle as steroids if utilized appropriately. It is however more dangerous because at very low dosages it can induce diabetic coma and death very easily. The term anabolic just means to build up or save energy. It does not mean steroid. There are different types of steroids. The most common are anabolic, bodybuilder, steroids and anti-inflammatory steroids like prednisone. The opposite of anabolic is catabolic, meaning to break down or release energy.
High insulin levels in the body are now actually being implicated in the increasing cancer rates and deaths we are seeing in the U.S.. It makes sense. Let me explain. We all have cancer cells inside our bodies. Yes it’s true! They are simply mutated cells. Not the kind that kill us. Not yet for most of us.
Still a little scary!
When we are healthy our immune system is able to clean up those cells without much problem. This also implicates that an impaired immune system must lead to cancer cell development as well. There are many things that can decrease the function of our immune system. Guess what, one of them is ingesting high amounts of sugar. Surprise! Ingesting more than 50 g of sugar, about 1 can of soda, in one sitting can lower White Blood Cells count by 50%.
I will go into more detail about insulin later but now I need to explain a few other things.
There are many reasons why we gain or lose weight and less of it has to do with the calories in calories out hypothesis. Actually, most studies show people placed on bed rest for prolonged periods of time will drop a significant amount of weight. However, that weight is usually lean tissue and is not a desirable way to lose weight.
Weight loss is more than just losing mass. We don’t want to end up being a smaller, fatter version of ourselves. The idea is to keep as much lean muscle as possible while getting rid of any undesirable or unnecessary fat. This is where exercise really comes in. But what we are really talking about is what causes people to gain weight or more importantly body fat. This has been the question myself and millions maybe billions of others have been trying to discover then answer to.
Yes, genetics play a role. A human’s body size and shape, anthropomorphic characteristics, are passed down from their parents and maybe as unique to their genetic coding as their facial features and finger prints. Unfortunately for some people this can be a limiting factor. I said limiting, not defining.
This just means that a person is more likely to convert nutrients such as carbohydrates and fats, into body fat. Why does this happen? How can one person eat the same things and they gain body fay but another does not? The answer revolves around insulin and I will explain later. Promise!
Yes some people will have to fight a harder to not convert nutrients into body fat. These people just have to understand what the process is that allows fat to be converted to muscle. They may have to work harder at this but so does anyone who isn’t born with the perfect genes. Not sure the perfect person exists, Hollywood and E! wouldn’t let you think that. Having excessive body fat is more than aesthetics. It leads to decreased energy, chronic diseases such as Diabetes and metabolic syndrome and possible disability. Once we all understand how to fight fat gain, we can possibly cure obesity.
We can also be our leanest and healthiest. Maybe better than we ever have been. The answer is really easy if you ask me. Changing isn’t the hard part. Convincing ourselves that we need to change is. Once we have convinced ourselves or allowed ourselves to change, we can easily have anything we want.
There is more to it than just genetics. Gestational diabetes may also play a role. Altered sugar metabolism and excessive fat gain during pregnancy causes children to be pre-disposed to fat gain. Cultural practices are passed down to our children as well. Who teaches a child what to eat? The parents! In this era, our schools also play a great role in providing meals for our children and educating them on food selection. None the less, children tend to eat a similar diet as their parents. If their parents eat cookies, cakes, soda, and chips all day long, the kid has no reason not to think this is normal behavior.
Many of the chemicals and concentrations of macronutrients in foods today do not exist in nature. Corn has fructose in it. High fructose corn syrup doesn’t really have any corn it. It is a concentrated carbohydrate. There are many other concentrated forms of natural food substances we are fed which do not exist in the nature. Sugar and other carbohydrates however are the largest and most widespread natural foods found in the American diet that are concentrated to toxic levels. Other toxic chemicals found in our diets that should be avoided are but not limited to MSG, aspartame and trans fats.
The human mouth would never encounter these in nature and they would not encounter levels of carbohydrates in nature which we find in candy bars, soft drinks, and any type of fructose or sucrose syrup.
A young child experiences pain at lower thresholds because their nervous system receptors are still really sensitive. This is the same for all of the child’s senses including taste. Soda tastes sweet to an adult. A soda to a child is like cocaine. Just go to Chucky Cheese. What do you see? A bunch of cracked out kids going nuts! Watch the car ride home. A bunch of cranky kids going through withdrawal, passed out, coming down from their high.
I look back and think that maybe I was drugged at a young age. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t have a choice and my parents didn’t know they were giving us poison. Now, I am forever ruined. Once you cross the line there is no going back. You have been exposed. I will always know how good a, “insert favorite junk food” tastes. (Mine is probably a good milk shake or Cadbury Cream eggs this time of year) You can never forget. I have never done heroin but my guess it feels pretty good for the people who do or have done it. Unfortunately they will always know that feeling. They even convince themselves they need it. You can’t need something unnatural that is killing you. That’s the addiction, the pathological thinking.
At one point in time the government had a rule that food companies had to put a label on imitation foods that said imitation. At one point some states actually required margarine to be colored pink. In the 1970’s the law was over turned by food companies and lobbyists who were going to benefit from the sales of imitation foods. People are less likely to eat foods that say imitation on them. Or at least they were prior to the 70’s.
The foods we eat today may actually be making us malnourished and over fat or obese. Obesity is often described as an energy imbalance. Too many calories in and not enough calories out.
I am here to paint a different picture. The foods we eat are very high in carbohydrates and low in the nutrients and vitamins which keep us healthy. Insulin spikes when we ingest food. Insulin causes
- · Increased protein and DNA synthesis
- · Uptake of nutrients in to cells and subsequent lowering of blood sugar
- · Increased fatty acids uptake or increase of fat in fat cells contributing to guess what body fat
Our bodies get fatter and larger due to increased exposure to insulin, just as a body builder. A body builder does several other things to use insulin to turn body mass increases into muscle and not fat. This will be similar to what I will explain for all of us to do later to limit are fat gain.
When we are malnourished are bodies will try to hold onto everything. Our bodies like to use sugar instead of fat for energy because it is easy to break down. The body also likes to store fat because it has much higher energy yield per gram the either glucose or protein. Similarly to heroin, our bodies get used to high levels of insulin and we become resistant. Now our bodies will not respond to insulin as well, leaving high levels of blood sugar circulating through our circulatory system. This in turn causes insulin levels to increase even further. It is a downward spiral from here unless we make a change.
So, the body that is gaining fat is likely to be exposed to high insulin levels. It is also malnourished from eating unhealthy foods that are also high in energy or calories primarily from carbohydrates. This causes spikes in insulin which is anabolic(making us into a growing machine) and causes our bodies to convert excess sugar into fat and not muscle because we are insulin resistant. Insulin then pushes the nutrients into the fat cells. If our systems stay in this state for say 40-50 years we get sick. We experience chronic diseases such as Type II Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease, and Cancer. High levels of insulin exposure to a pathological human body that has a weakened immune system and does not clean up mutated cells will get cancer.
Stay tuned for part II. I will give you specific things you can do to address this. It is more than what you eat, how much you eat and if you are physically active. The answer lies in when you eat what you eat and how you exercise. Ask yourselves why does someone go to the gym for months or more and never lose an ounce of fat or weight. Are they eating too many calories? I hope I have helped you think otherwise. Are they not burning calories during exercise? Sure they are. Fat loss requires much more specificity. Look forward to talking to you soon. Sorry for the delay as well. Easter holiday got a little in the way.
Thanks and talk to you soon!
Lyneil Mitchell DPT
A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world - John Locke
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