Why is it so hard to lose fat cont.
What is interesting is that no two experts address the fat loss issue from the same perspective, but they all pretty much agree on several things. They all agree that dieting has been a leading cause of obesity and fat loss resistance, and they all conclude that regular and moderate exercise combined with balanced eating is the solution. Of course, they each have their own recommended diet and exercise programs, which is what sells their books. But in concept they are all basically the same, and they support the recommendations provided in past issues of this newsletter.
The fact that dieting has caused obesity is hard for most people to accept, but look around – we are a nation of dieters, and we are also a nation with an epidemic of obesity, insulin resistance and heart disease. The experts have different perspectives on what contributes to the storage and release of fat, depending on their area of specialty. They include:
• Insulin resistance, which leads to Syndrome X, pre-diabetes and Type II diabetes
• Hypothyroidism, which slows down metabolism and leads to fatigue
• High levels of cortisol from stress, which increases appetite and belly fat
• Leptin and adiponectin, which affect appetite levels
• Adrenaline (also called epinephrine), which is stimulated by stress
• Reductions in estrogen, which leads to abdominal weight gain People struggling with
their weight are often aware of some of these issues.
This can be very confusing, and the reason is because they are all hormones and each one plays a role in how much fat is stored or released, and some are affected by lifestyle choices in eating and exercise. So to understand fat loss resistance, you need to understand more about these hormones, which will be fully discussed in Part 2.
Hormones are the brain’s messengers. They carry information and instructions between the cells and the brain, or from cells in one part of the body to cells in another part. There are hundreds of hormones, and when it comes to fat there are at least a dozen hormones that can be involved in whether it gets stored or released. Fat-storing hormones are insulin, cortisol and estrogen. Fat-releasing hormones are adrenaline and glucagon. And the hormone that impacts metabolism is the T3 thyroid hormone. In addition, fat produces its own hormones, including leptin, adiponectin, and a bad form of estrogen.
What makes hormones complicated is they work together and affect one another. So when a hormone gets highly elevated or depressed, it becomes imbalanced and affects other hormone messengers and their messages. A heightened hormone, such as insulin (fat-storing), can override and block messages of another hormone, such as adrenaline (fat-releasing). And this is why fat loss resistance is so difficult to understand and overcome.
The Truth About Fat Cells
Fat is more complex than was once understood. We each carry around about 30 billion fat cells, and those who are obese have closer to 200 billion of them. That is a lot of fat cells, each with the ability to grow to a thousand times its size. When a cell gets filled to capacity it then divides into two. The good news is that fat cells can also shrink. Men have the good fortune to have smaller fat cells than women, unless they come from families who tend to be overweight. In that case, genetics plays a significant role. It is certainly harder for people that have been born with larger fat cells to manage their fat weight, but that doesn’t have to be an excuse to fuel the fat cells.
Fat, while something we want to get rid of, is needed to provide warmth, get us through a famine or food shortage, and generate immediate energy in a flight or flight stressful situation. In this day and age, most people don’t need fat for these things, but fat cells don’t know this. They frequently experience periods of famine and the call to respond to stress by the way we live our lives. Fat cells, therefore, work hard to store calories we can’t currently use and then to release them when we need extra fuel for times of food shortages, stress and cold.
Fat gets stored whenever we eat more calories than we burn. Most fat cells simply store the fat. But abdominal fat cells are quite different. They do more than store fat. They have the ability to produce their own hormones, which can create more fat. Because of their active state, they are the most resistant to giving up their stored fat and they have the greatest impact on disease.
Fat cells don’t operate on their own. They need a way for fat to enter and leave the cell. This is handled by fat-storing and fat-releasing enzymes, which are activated by many different hormones. The more fat-releasing enzymes you have, the more that can be activated. Men have nearly twice the number of fat-releasing enzymes than women, and conversely women have twice as many fat-storing ones as men to ensure survival during pregnancy in the event of a food shortage. This is one of the reasons women gain fat more easily and men lose it faster.
Being female, however, isn’t the cause for fat loss resistance. The problem is the way fat cells respond to stress, hormonal imbalances, under and overeating, dieting and inactivity. While women primarily struggle with fat loss resistance, men are now struggling with it too. The main reason is dieting.
Dieting Feeds Fat Cells
Dieting is a way of life for many people. Formal dieting is based on severe calorie restriction for weeks on end. Yet many people simply lead busy and chaotic lives and have a tendency to skip breakfast or lunch and ignore their hunger signals. The general belief is that’s OK, because if you miss a meal you save on calories. But the truth is the body perceives this as a food shortage and acts accordingly.
When the body doesn’t get the calories it needs to fuel its daily metabolism, it interprets this as a potential famine and will slow down metabolism to conserve fuel and stimulate fat-storing enzymes so that incoming calories can be stored away to survive starvation. So when you skip a meal and then eat a bigger meal later, more of that meal will be stored away as fat.
The human body is unable to distinguish between missing a meal or dieting and the beginning of a famine. It is triggered whenever you don’t get enough calories to fuel your daily energy requirements or there is an extended period of time you go without food (beyond 5-7 hours). At that point the body activates fat-storing enzymes, deactivates fat-releasing enzymes and begins to hoard as much fat as it can – primarily in the abdominal area. In extreme diets, where people eat under 1200 calories for nearly two weeks or more, there can be a 50% increase in fat-storing and 50% decrease in fat-releasing enzymes. The longer this goes on, the higher the percentage
So why does it seem like you are losing the fat when you lose all that weight? In the first week, about ninety percent of the weight loss is water. During the next week or so it is primarily water and muscle weight. The body breaks down muscle, because that is where extra fuel (called glucose – from carbohydrates) is stored. When the muscle gets broken down, water and nitrogen is released with the glucose. The nitrogen also causes water to be released from other tissues. Since most tissues in the body are primarily made of water, a significant drop in weight occurs when these fluids are released.
The body will also break down fat, when it can’t find any more glucose. At this point it will convert fat into glucose, so that the body can continue to function, because the body is primarily fueled by glucose. Metabolizing fat into glucose is ketosis, which is unnatural and stressful on the body.
The stress of dieting and ketosis increases cortisol levels, which increases fat-storing. Ketosis also demonstrates to the body that extended famines are real and there is a need for even greater fat storing the next time a food shortage or starvation occurs. Being in starvation mode, particularly when it is extreme enough to require ketosis, damages the fat enzyme mechanisms making it very difficult to reactive fat-releasing enzymes. Starvation from dieting also reduces muscle mass, which reduces metabolism levels.
So after a diet, you may be thinner and lighter in weight, but you now have a fat-storing machine full of bigger fat cells primed for food and much less muscle mass than you had when you started the diet. In addition the size of the fat cells and number of fat-storing enzymes increases with each additional diet. Once a diet ends, the first thing most people do is binge on foods they have been denied. This is called deprivation backlash. They can’t seem to get enough food and don’t know when to stop eating. This is also driven by the body’s need for fuel, which it didn’t get enough of during the diet, and for storing more fat in anticipation of the next famine. Once the body experiences a diet as famine, it anticipates more famine. And the more famine it experiences, the more it prepares.
Overeating is just as bad as undereating, which is the binge-diet-binge cycle. They are both fat storing modes. When you don’t get enough food, the body prepares to hoard fat at the next meal. When you eat more calories than the body can burn as energy, the fat-storing enzymes are activated to store it away. So let’s say you skip breakfast, putting the body into starvation mode. (You last ate about 14 hours ago at dinner, and now have a calorie deficit to fuel your cells nearing 1000.) Then you ignored your hunger signals mid morning, had a small lunch around noon, and by afternoon you are ravenous. You start to snack around 4pm and at dinner you overeat bypassing your fullness signal and follow this an hour or so later by a large dessert. All during this time, the fat-storing enzymes are in high gear and the fat cells are storing as much as they can when you eat.
Fat storing is just one problem with dieting. The other is that dieting disrupts hormone levels, particularly the T3 thyroid hormone that regulates metabolism. A rapid loss of weight – say 10 pounds, can decrease metabolism by 15%. In addition, cortisol hormone levels go up during the diet because of the stress, and insulin levels go up after the diet because of bingeing. Both are fat-storing hormones that activate fat-storing enzymes.
Shrinking the Fat Cells
The only way to shrink fat cells is to activate fat-releasing enzymes. These enzymes work to release fat from the cell and into the bloodstream so that it can be used as fuel. Pretty much the only time the fat-releasing enzyme is activated is when the body needs to burn more fuel than it has available from its daily intake – either from increased adrenaline or aerobic activity. Once released, fat travels to the working muscle where fuel is converted into energy and burned. If it isn’t burned, it will be re-stored as fat. You may have heard that when you are aerobic you burn both carbohydrates and fat, but if you work out too hard you only burn carbs. It is in our muscles where carbohydrates and fat are converted into energy to fuel our activities. In fact, fat can only be burned in the presence of oxygen and carbohydrates. When we are aerobic, we have enough oxygen to support the conversion. When we are huffing and puffing and can hardly talk, we are anaerobic and not getting enough oxygen to convert fat into fuel.
The most important thing is to eat food to the rate at which your body burns energy (by eating when you are hungry and stopping before you get full). This keeps your blood sugar and insulin levels balanced, which will be discussed further in part 2. The thing to avoid is under or over eating or skipping meals, because that will trigger your fat-storing hormones. You also want to eat foods that are a balance of nutritious (and satisfying) carbohydrates, proteins and fats. This is called balanced eating, and more is being written about it under the names of mindful eating, non-dieting or Intuitive Eating. The book French Women Don’t Get Fat is based on similar concepts.
The second most important thing to do is to start burning the fat that has been stored away, by doing regular moderate – not high intensity – aerobic exercise to activate the fat-releasing hormones and enzymes. This will increase lean body mass and metabolism, which can be further improved by doing some strength training to rebuild your muscle.
A third thing you can do is to provide additional stimulation to the fat-releasing enzymes, so there is more fat released and available to burn. This is possible now with a natural, slow release Fat Loss Patch (that we now endorse) that is safe for short or long term use.
Together these changes in lifestyle will work together to balance hormones and to reduce the fat-storing to fat-releasing enzyme ratio.
Why I Endorse the Fat Loss Patch
Many of my female clients have struggled to lose fat and weight despite months of aerobic exercise and balanced eating, which is a problem commonly experienced by others in the fitness industry. People that have dieted and become inactive become prone to fat loss resistance, particularly women over forty. To help my clients get results and stick with their program, I needed a way to kick start fat-releasing in a safe and effective manner.
The Fat Loss Patch is a safe, natural product that is worn each day to stimulate fat loss and normalize hormones triggering fat enzymes. It naturally stimulates the fat-releasing enzymes and normalizes hormones using herbal extracts in a low dosage, slow release formula. All the ingredients are on the FDA’s GRAS (generally recognized as safe) list, and they have no known negative side effects or negative impact on hormones that are functioning normally. I have done extensive investigation into the ingredients, product and company, and I am convinced it is a safe and effective product that I can fully endorse.
I have also tested the Patch personally, because I wouldn’t recommend something I had not tried. I wore the Fat Loss Patch for three months, even though I have no fat to lose, and it had no negative affect and didn’t make me abnormally lean. Instead it is helping me to maintain my optimal levels. Many people who wear the Patch experience more than fat loss, because it helps to normalize their hormones. They often have better sleep and mood elevation, and they experience reduced food cravings, blood pressure and blood sugar levels. There are two Fat Loss Patches to choose from. The regular and the power Patch. The power Patch provides more fat-releasing support and includes a small amount of serotonin to reduce carbohydrate cravings and stress. I highly recommend these patches to those who have tried exercising and balanced eating and struggled to see results within three months. It is also good for those that want to feel better, be more energetic and need some help getting motivated to exercise and eat better. The Patch has best results when combined with regular exercise and balanced eating, because then the released fat is fully burned off. Yet lots of people have started with the patch and then discovered a desire to be more active after just a few months. Either way, the patch helps with fat loss resistance.
Fit Beyond 40 Newsletter Editor: Alice Greene Published by Fit Beyond 40, 2005