Ways to manipulate diet and lifestyle to encourage
|
health and weight loss.
|
|
Trying to loose weight by cutting calories is never going to work.
|
|
The reason is that our bodies are still working the same way as they did when we were prehistoric hunter gatherers. Evolution is too slow to have caught up with the changes we have made in our dietary habits in the last few thousand years and certainly cannot cope with the drastic changes made in the last 50 to 100 years.
|
|
The body has an inbuilt survival mechanism. In times of famine it turns down the metabolism (the rate at which it burns food), so that more can be laid down as fat as insurance against the hard times.
|
|
Going on a calorie controlled diet triggers the famine response and the metabolic rate is turned down to preserve scarce resources. You loose some weight but you cannot maintain the restrictive diet and start to eat normally again. But your metabolic rate is now lower and for the same amount of food as you consumed before, less is turned into energy so more is stored as fat.
|
|
You decide to try again, fail again and find that each time you try you end up gaining more weight. This is called yo-yo dieting.
|
|
A better way to approach the problem is to encourage the body to increase it’s metabolic rate so that it turns more of the food you eat into energy not fat.
|
|
One way is to increase the ratio of muscle to fat in our bodies. Muscle cells burn much more food than fat cells, even when not being used, so the more you have of them the greater proportion of your food will be turned into energy. To increase your muscle volume involves resistance/weight training. However this does not need to involve long hours at the gym, in fact this is counter productive. I have details of a simple programme that involves only 10 minutes training per day in the comfort of your own home, that is suitable for any age group or sex, which will quickly increase your muscle mass. Ladies please don’t worry you will not turn into Mr Atlas.
|
|
The other way to turn up your metabolic rate is to change the way you eat, to convince the body there is plenty of food and it doesn’t need to fill up it’s fat stores.
|
|
At this point I would like to explain how the body utilises the food that we eat. Energy is obtained mainly from carbohydrates, some from fats and from proteins if absolutely necessary when the others are in short supply (this last process however can produce harmful by-products for the body to deal with). Carbohydrates (cereals, starches, sugars etc.) are broken down in the digestive system into simple sugars, the final product being glucose (blood sugar) which can be absorbed through the lining of the intestine into the blood, to be transported to all cells. Glucose is used by all cells to produce energy for warmth and movement. However too much or too little glucose in the blood is harmful to the body. Too little and, as well as being ravenously hungry, we become lethargic, irritable, headachy etc. etc. and can pass out. Too much can seriously damage vital organs.
|
|
The body therefore has a clever mechanism for keeping blood sugar levels in balance. Any excess glucose is turned into glycogen and stored in the liver and the muscles. This is our short term reserve tank. Once these stores are full any further excess is converted to fat and escorted to fat cells by insulin. This is our long term reserve tank.
|
|
Stopping our bodies laying down fat therefore depends on not overloading our blood stream with sudden surges of glucose, which produces a massive release of insulin to remove it from our bloodstreams as fat.
|
|
Not all carbohydrates are the same. You may have heard about complex carbohydrates and the glycaemic index. All carbohydrates are made of sugar molecules attached to each other. The longer the chain of sugars (complex carbohydrates) the longer it takes the body to break them down into simple glucose ready for absorption. Eating simple sugars such as table sugar, sweets, fizzy drinks, alcohol, and refined flours such as white bread, biscuits and cakes etc , which are all absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, gives a surge of blood sugar that requires a big release of insulin to remove it as fat. Because of this large release of insulin, the glucose is removed quickly and about 2 hours later the blood sugar level has gone too low and we are hungry again. So what do we do? - eat more sweet things to get rid of the hunger and start the
|
