How to release excess fat........

Today's Post:  Friday, 9-28-2012

When people have more than a few pounds of extra fat to lose, they usually have some barriers to overcome.

It can seem as if their excess fat is locked down and not removable.

The bad news is that this is partly true it turns out.  The much better news is that you can systematically release these locks. 

And, the best news of all is that if you use the methods that release one of them, the others are also mostly released.  The methods are virtually identical.

1.  The first barrier is that your body has a natural feedback messenger to let you know you have enough food and turn off your hunger.

But it's as if it comes from a phone that has almost no volume so you don't hear it even if it's on its highest setting.

This messenger is called leptin. 

When you become fat, the process gradually creates this effect.:  You eat enough food and leptin is released just fine.  But your body no longer lets the message get to you.  So you don't feel that much less hungry or feel like stopping eating.  You eat food your body does NOT need.

It's called leptin resistance.

Fat loss expert Joel Marion in a recent email said in so many words that being fat causes this problem in part. But the initial cause -- and the one under your control that can reverse the problem -- is your intake of processed and packaged foods and the ingredients they are made out of.

The lack of fiber WITH the leptin may be part of the problem.  Ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, excessive sugars, excessive salt, MSG, oils high in omega 6, and hydrogenated versions of those oils have ZERO fiber.

And, refined grains have almost no fiber. 

All soft drinks have zero fiber.

And, when you subtract that ingredient list from the packaged snacks and packaged desserts that list their ingredients, there is often little or nothing left.  And, this is also true to a surprising extent of packaged dinners and entrees. 

For soft drinks and most of those foods too, there is often very little protein.

And, relative lack of protein tends to turn on your famine response which itself is a likely cause of leptin resistance.

How to lower leptin resistance:

There are several solutions. 

a) One of my favorites is to focus on protecting your health and STOP ingesting things that harm it. 

Soft drinks to a large degree and each and every one of these ingredients of packaged foods do things like cause heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, gout, and mental decline.  They are still legal to put in foods.  But once you know how deadly they are, it's easier to stop eating them and look for other kinds of foods and drinks you like that have NONE of these ingredients. 

Why on earth eat things that harm you when foods that support your health instead are available!?

That said, it's often MUCH easier to eat MORE of the foods that don't have these ingredients.

b) My favorite approach is to find the "superfoods" that do a great job in protecting your health and make sure to eat those and as many kinds as possible.  The more of those you know and eat or drink the easier avoiding the bad stuff gets. 

Organic blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, and most other kinds of berries fit here.  So do nuts for those not allergic to them, avocados, and extra virgin olive oil.  Cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower fit here. (Raw they prevent cancer strongly; and they have lots of fiber and hardly any calories.) Cooked dark green and orange and yellow vegetables eaten with a health OK fat or oil produce multiple health benefits as well.  Broccoli is a superfood in part because it fits on the first of these eaten raw and on the second one cooked with something like extra virgin olive oil.  Most spices other than salt and MSG are super foods as are the plants they are derived from garlic and basil and sage are 3 examples of this.

Joel Marion's point is that a general rule that tends to eliminate the bad stuff and cause you to eat the good stuff is simple.

"….eat only one-ingredient foods." 

"What do I mean by one-ingredient foods? Simple. A one-ingredient food is a food whose only ingredient is that food."

He lists tomatoes which are a red-orange fruit usually used with savory foods as a vegetable.  He also lists green beans which despite having less protective nutrients many people like and are a nonstarchy vegetable with a lot of fiber. He lists spinach which I don't much care for but many like and is a dark green vegetable.

He lists apples and pears.  A recent email found a study showing that eating these two foods are strongly preventive of strokes.  (Unwaxed and organic apples and organic pears are far safer to eat.  This is extra important since a lot of the protection in red apples is in the peel; and the peel in both apples and pears has a lot of the fiber.)

Besides the raspberries and blue berries I listed, he adds cherries.  The dark red sour cherries are the best for you.  But they all taste good.  And, eaten one at a time, they slow your food intake which also can help with fat loss.

He lists 3 kinds of nuts, almonds, cashews, and walnuts. (It's critically important to eat nuts that are raw or dry roasted only and totally unsalted.  The packaged food versions cooked in junk oils and heavily salted are NOT good for you. Pecans, walnuts, and to a lesser degree almonds have the most health benefits for people not allergic to them.)

As I do, he lists avocados as a source of great nutrition and health OK oils.

He also lists olives.  And the extra virgin olive oil he leaves out also fits in this group.

For protein foods he lists:

Chicken, beef, fish, eggs, yogurt, and black beans. 

(Black beans, lentils, black eyed peas, pinto beans and other kinds of  can be cooked with only water and then only health OK spices added and health OK oils such as extra virgin olive oil added.  They are high in fiber, can be cooked ahead and eaten cold, and cost very little.

For chicken, beef, eggs, milk, cheese and yogurt there are two solutions for good health. 

Get grass fed beef and yogurt, milk, and butter from cows fed only grass; chickens fed only on natural pasture foods and eggs from such chickens –

Or get the least fatty versions from critters fed with grains.  The fats from grain fed animals are harmful in several ways.  So minimizing them a lot is protective.  Skinless poultry, nonfat Greek yogurt, nonfat cottage cheese, super-trimmed lean cuts of beef, and 2% lowfat milk are dramatically safer to eat when grain fed than eating them in the full fat versions.

Eggs are a special case because they have so little fat in their yolks compared to the nutrition when from grain fed hens. So eating some of those is likely OK.  But eggs from pastured hens are better for you and are beginning to be available.)

(Fish are only safe to eat if you get wild caught fish because the farmed fish are very high in pollutants.  And it’s important to eat fish with little or no mercury.  Sardines are OK on mercury while swordfish are totally not.  Tuna has enough mercury you should skip it or only eat it rarely. But once a month or so is likely OK. Mercifully, wild caught salmon are OK both ways and high in omega 3 oils.)

2.  The second block is how much insulin you have in your blood. 

If you use insulin less because of what you eat and your insulin works well when needed, you get 2 benefits according to Dr Jonny Bowden who calls the process of doing it right turning on your fat burning switch.

Insulin does lower excessive blood sugar which is protective. 

a) But if you use it too often you have too much in your blood -- or you become insulin resistant & you both use more and it lowers excessive blood sugar levels less – or both. Then you have even more of an excess of insulin in your blood!

But when that happens, the insulin tells your body to put the excessive sugars into your fat stores – the exact opposite of what you want if you want to lose fat!

b) It gets worse.  If you need extra energy, the high insulin levels lock up your stored fat so you can’t use it.

BUT if you have the normal lower and more infrequent levels of insulin in your blood, the “fat burning switch” is turned on.

You don’t have the excessive blood sugars to go into fat storage and you also have no excessive insulin to send your normal level of blood sugars into fat storage.

Even better, not having the excessive insulin to lock up your fat storage allows your body, according to Dr Bowden to release a messenger called glucagon that when you need extra calories takes removes them from fat storage to be used for energy!

As you can see, the way he explains it reveals in the bad condition you add fat on autopilot and it’s virtually impossible to remove it.

But switch to the desirable, low insulin condition, and you tend to never add fat and can burn what you do have after it’s removed from storage whenever your body needs extra energy.

What can you do to fix this if you are in the fat gaining mode?

a) Don’t ingest things that spike your blood sugar or do so dramatically less as in a twenty five times reduction or more!

All soft drinks and foods made with these ingredients: high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, excessive sugars, and refined grains each spike blood sugar and insulin.

Many of the same ingredients that also cause leptin resistance!

And, it’s even worse than that!

When your insulin lowers the too high blood sugar that results, it overshoots because it was hurried by the big sugar spike.  Then you get low blood sugar and rebound hunger.  That hunger causes cravings for more sugary foods. Those calories are NOT needed for your body to operate. Every one of them is extra and unneeded.  Had you drunk water or eaten real foods instead, you wouldn’t even be hungry then!

Worse, it becomes a vicious circle if you give in and eat or drink more sugary stuff then!

Round and round it goes making you fat and keeping you fat.

Simply put, eliminating those foods and drinks as close to as totally as you can and as fast as you can is one of the most important keys to permanent fat loss.

You just saw what to eat instead in the first part of this post. 

When you upgrade your lifestyle to only eat those real foods, fat loss becomes possible and dramatically easier.  And keeping it off becomes almost automatic instead of impossible.

But there’s more you can do.

b)  You can lower excessive insulin and reverse insulin resistance a second way too!

You can get some moderate exercise most days of every week.  That works but is far easier for some people than others. Some people get 2 hours of walking each weekday as part of their commute for example.

It also works to do even as little as 5 or 10 minutes of vigorous exercise almost every day.  Because you can do this much at home first thing in the morning, almost everyone can do this.  And, it’s most effective studies show if you do some interval cardio and some strength training in each week.  Spending the same time per week on only the cardio or the strength training is less effective than some of each!  It’s also better for you as you are both fit and strong instead of only one of those.

This works two ways.  The exercises USE up blood sugar so there is less of it in your blood to potentially trigger an insulin release.  But, even better, you stop needing extra insulin and insulin resistance improves or stops completely!

How do you cause fat loss and release the locks on the fat you have?

STOP the bad foods and drinks and eat a lot of the good ones and get used to both parts and begin and keep doing regular exercise.

That’s common advice for fat loss. 

My hope is that this post has helped you to know why it’s essential and why it works!