If you want to successfully lose weight, you cannot cherry pick weight loss advice!
It confounds me sometimes how people will ask how to lose weight, then totally reject the advice they are given. If you knew how to lose weight, you wouldn’t be asking how to in the first place. You know this to be true. Additionally, people need to understand that losing weight in and of itself is not enough. They need to understand also how to keep those unwanted pounds off of their bodies permanently.
In my experience, I have had people get angry when I have told them to quit eating foods with added sugars, and processed foods. I’ve had people flat reject the idea of weighing, measuring and tracking their food intake. It is what it is, if these angry people ever come to understand that I am telling them what they need to hear, I am still there for them if they come back to me. However, I am never going to waiver on my advice, nor am I ever going to feel bad about angering would be weight losers with my advice.
You have to make a permanent change to your nutritional lifestyle if you want to be successful at weight loss. There are truths you are going to have to accept in what this lifelong endeavor requires of yourself. You have to make permanent changes my friends, it is as simple as that.
Calories in/Calories out
You are going to have to consume fewer calories than you expend in a day. It is as simple as that. The laws of thermodynamics apply to everyone my friends. Our bodies use the calories we consume to fuel our Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).
There are three main bodily processes that burn calories:
- Basic metabolism. Your body uses most of the calories you get from food to sustain basic functions, such as your heartbeat.
- Digestion. Around 10–15% of the calories you eat is used to power digestion. This is known as the thermic effect of food (TEF) and varies based on the foods you eat.
- Physical activity. The leftover calories you get from your diet are meant to fuel your physical activity, including workouts and everyday tasks like walking, reading, and washing dishes. (1)
If the calories we consume equal our BMR needs, our weight remains stable. If the calories we consume are less than we need, we lose weight. When they are greater, our waist lines expands. There is no getting around this.
When we exceed the caloric needs of our BMR, those extra calories get stored as glycogen, or as fat, in our bodies for later use. Weight loss is always a matter of caloric deficit, no matter whether your calories come from carbs, fats, or protein.
It is only to your detriment if you reject this piece of weight loss advice.
Stop Eating Foods With Added Sugars!
Just get over it, what you want to eat is not helping you to have a healthy body. Any weight loss plan that tells you that it is alright to continue eating added sugars, are not there to help you. They are there to take your hard earned money instead. These weight loss businesses do not truly have your best interest at heart, and will tell you what you want to hear to draw you in. If you reject weight loss advice to give up added sugars, you might as well resign yourself to remaining fat if you refuse to change.
There is zero nutritional value to adding sugar to foods. Yes, sugar makes them taste delicious, while also making us feel good. But there is no health benefit to consuming it. In fact, the inverse is true in that sugar causes inflammation in the body which is the precursor for many modern chronic ailments and diseases.
In the Standard American Diet (SAD), the top sources of added sugars come from soft drinks, fruit drinks, flavored yogurts, cereals, cookies, cakes, candy, and most processed foods. And added sugars can also be found in items that you may not think of as sweetened, like soups, bread, cured meats, and ketchup.
Everyone loves sweetened foods, but the effects of added sugar consumption include higher blood pressure, inflammation, weight gain, diabetes, and fatty liver disease. All of these conditions are directly linked to an increased risk for heart attack and stroke. Now, just how good were those cookies and cakes?
Additionally, when we consume added sugars, especially in sugary beverages, it contributes to our weight gain by tricking our bodies into turning off its appetite-control system. Because liquid calories are not as satisfying as calories from solid foods it becomes too easy for us to add even more empty calories to our diets. Find something else to drink other than sodas and anything else sugar sweetened. I know and understand this piece of weight loss advice is tough to hear, but you don’t need added sugars!
Added Sugars Spike Insulin/Insulin Spikes Body Fat!
When we eat too much sugar, it usually makes us feel poorly afterwards. This is a result of hypoglycemia. Or in simpler terms, your pancreas has pumped out insulin to get your blood sugar in order, and once the insulin has peaked, your blood sugar will drop off. Which makes you feel sickly. But, there is also more at play than this. Insulin causes us to also get fat when we constantly have high levels of blood sugar.
The weight loss advice we give at David’s Way to Health and Fitness comes from hours of study and research my friends. From our studies we know that our pancreas secretes insulin as a result of the carbohydrates in our diet. This occurs primarily to keep blood sugar under control. However, insulin also works to orchestrate the storage and use of fat and protein. Insulin ensures that our muscles get enough protein to complete whatever rebuilding and repair that may be necessary. Insulin also helps us to store enough fuel to function between meals.
Because one place we store fuel for later use is in our fat tissue, insulin is the regulator of fat metabolism. Insulin accomplishes this through two enzymes. The first is LPL, lipoprotein lipase.
LPL sticks out from the membranes of different cells and then pulls fat out of the bloodstream and into the cells. If the LPL is on a muscle cell, it pulls the fat into the muscle. If it is on fat cells, it simply makes the fat cell fatter. How this happens is LPL breaks down triglycerides in the bloodstream to their component fatty acids., and these fatty acids flow into the cells.
Being as insulin is the primary regulator of fat metabolism, it is also the primary regulator of LPL activity. Insulin activates LPL on fat cells, specifically the fat cells of our abdomens. The more insulin we secrete, the more active the LPL on our fat cells become. The result of this is more fat gets pulled in from the bloodstream and placed into our fat cells for storage. Insulin also happens to suppress LPL activity on our muscle cells which ensures they do not have many fatty acids to burn for fuel. The result is fatty acids do not get released from fat cells when insulin levels are high. These fatty acids cannot get taken up by our muscle cells for fuel. They just end up back in our fat cells, if they even escape them to begin with.
The second enzyme insulin utilizes to regulate fat is Hormone Sensitive Lipase (HPL). This enzyme is even more critical to our storage of fat. Just as LPL works to make fat cells fatter, HSL works to make fat cells leaner. It does this by working inside of fat cells to break down triglycerides into their component fatty acids. This action allows fatty acids to escape fat cells into circulation in the bloodstream. The more active our HSL, the more fat we can set loose to be burned for fuel.
The problem is, insulin suppresses HSL which prevents triglycerides from being broken down within our fat cells. Insulin keeps the outflow of fatty acids from fat cells to a minimum. It actually does not take much insulin to cause this suppression, so just think how suppressed this becomes when you live on sugar. When insulin levels are elevated, even just a little bit, fat accumulates within our fat cells!
I often hear people speak of living their lives in balance while they are munching away at foods that will keep their insulin levels totally out of balance. If you want your life to be in balance, your body must be in balance internally.
Insulin turns on a mechanism in fat cells to pump glucose, the same as it does in muscle cells. This action increases the amount of glucose our fat cells metabolize. This action in turn increases the amount of glycerol molecules floating around in the fat cells. These glycerol molecules then become attached to fatty acids which becomes triglycerides. This means we can store more fat. To ensure we can store all of this fat, insulin works to create new fat cells just in case the ones we already have become full.
To add insult to injury, insulin signals liver cells not to burn fatty acids, but to repackage them into triglycerides, and then ship them back to our fat tissue. In short, everything insulin does increases the fat we store and decrease the fat we burn. Insulin works to make us fatter, therefore it is incumbent upon you to control your insulin through healthy dietary habits. You do this by not consuming foods with added sugars.
INSULIN LEVELS ARE DIRECTLY RELATED TO THE CARBOHYDRATES WE EAT!
In closing, here is how that chain of events occur:
- You think about eating a meal that contains carbohydrates.
- You begin secreting insulin.
- The insulin signals the fat cells to shut down the release of fatty acids by inhibiting HSL, and taking up more fatty acids via LPL from the circulation.
- You start to get hungry, or hungrier.
- You begin eating.
- You secrete more insulin.
- The carbohydrates are digested and enter the circulation as glucose, causing blood sugar to rise.
- You secrete still more insulin.
- Fat from the diet is stored as triglycerides in the fat cells, as are some of the carbohydrates that are converted into fat in the liver.
- The fat cells get fatter, and so do you.
- The fat remains in the fat cells until the insulin level drops.
You can reject my weight loss advice. That is on you if you do. However, your feelings and opinion are not facts, and the simple truth is, your feelings and opinions are not going to get you down to a healthy body fat percentage or weight.
References:
(1) Healthline.com
(2) Why We Get Fat, and What To Do About It, Gary Taubes