Weight Loss – Weight Management

Weight Loss – Weight Management – The real issue is fat loss and fat management – the mirror, not the scale, tells the truth!

Most of your metabolic rate is controlled by your muscle mass. I recall some years back reading about Aaron Baker, a bodybuilder preparing for a major contest, looking very massive and ripped to about 5% body fat, and the guy was eating 10,000 calories a day just to maintain his muscle structure.

Muscle burns calories all day and all night. Few people understand that when you ‘pump iron’ to the point of exhausting the muscles, creating micro-trauma in the muscle fibers, the repair process is a massive burner of energy, 24 hours a day for 4 to 5 days after the workout. It is incredibly easy to stay lean when you weight-train correctly, just 2-3 days a week like I do, even at 70+ years of age.

The rest of the secret to staying lean is related to hormone sensitivity, particularly to leptin, insulin and maintaining healthy levels of testosterone (for both men and women). Over the last decade scientists have learned that body fat is not an inert storage medium for energy, rather, deposits of fat cells are an active endocrine organ. Fat produces hormones that affect many of the body’s regulatory systems. High body fat increases appetite and cravings for carbohydrates, slows energy expenditure, increases conversion of testosterone to estrogen, raising estrogen levels in both men and women, and releases adipokines, some of which are pro-inflammatory and lead to chronically high levels of inflammation, C-reactive protein and insulin. High levels of body fat bias the body to build more and more stores of fat, in most cases leading to the familiar Metabolic Syndrome, Insulin Resistance and Type II Diabetes. So how does one reverse this age-related progression of increasing fat storage and recover the fitness of youth? We have to start with an understanding of how the body uses food as fuel and what it does with any excess in our diet.

Causes of leptin resistance

The foremost cause of leptin resistance is the huge simple carbohydrate consumption in the modern diet; in a word, sugar, the most detrimental of which is fructose in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Fructose normally comes in small doses, with a lot of fiber and water, as in fruit. Fructose does not cause an insulin response, which would allow it to be absorbed by the body’s cells; it is processed by the liver and largely converted to triglycerides and put back in the blood stream. If you overload on fructose, you block leptin from the brain, and load the blood with TGs to be taken to fat cells for storage. If you eat predominantly manufactured food items, pre-made meals to toss in the microwave, most canned soups, salad dressings, and fast-food in general, you are getting a load of HFCS in them. Sweetened sodas are the most common source, but many supposedly healthy juices and juice ‘drinks’ are loaded with HFCS. But sugars and starches in general are the primary dietary culprits that after years of use drive us down the path to the degenerative diseases of aging.

The second most significant cause is inadequate sleep promoted by today’s fast-paced lifestyle. These two factors will push you into leptin and insulin resistance faster than any others. You can try to fight it, but the healthy, active body needs 7 to 8 hours solid sleep per night to avoid leptin resistance. Recent studies have shown that men in their mid 20s will manifest the clear signs of metabolic syndrome within a week when sleep is limited to 5 hours a night. The antidote for lack of sleep is food; haven’t we all experienced that? And the craving is largely for carbs to provide some quick energy and get the brain happy again.

Strategies to reverse leptin resistance

Once leptin resistance is established, all diets and weight loss efforts will be doomed to failure, with yo-yo weight loss and regain the ultimate outcome. The cycle cannot be broken without re-establishing leptin sensitivity. The healthiest dietary means to restore leptin sensitivity is to drastically increase consumption of essential fatty acids, especially omega-3 oils from flax and cold water fish, while drastically reducing or eliminating simple carbohydrates, sugars and starches. The healthiest exercise approach is to start a body-building routine, three days a week, with moderate aerobics on the off days. Put these two together and in four months you will have an entirely new body, that can run, jump, dance and enjoy life to a much higher degree. You can find the best strategies for doing this at Wellness Resources, a brilliant website published by Byron J. Richards that deals specifically with metabolic problems centered on leptin resistance. If you want permanent healing from being fat, this is the place to go.

Strategy: Start a ‘muscle-building’ program in parallel with a nutrition program that provides for muscle growth AND fat loss.

See our Nutrition Category  for details on eating to accomplish that purpose. Focus on strength training over protracted aerobics to foster increased testosterone production (builds muscle, lowers inflammation, down-regulates fat storage in both men and women) as opposed to increased cortisol which encourages fat retention. A major development in the battle against metabolic syndrome, obesity, and fat Americans has just been offered by Life Extension Foundation in their new product Advanced Anti-Adipocyte Formula. I think this is a breakthrough of major proportions in that studies performed using Irvingia (a component of the product) show very significant drops in triglycerides and LDL cholesterol, with increase in HDL cholesterol along with decreases in leptin resistance and insulin resistance. It blocks the conversion of carbohydrates to triglycerides, lowering storage of carbs as fat, while reducing fat cell size and lowering the inflammatory factors produced by fat cells. A third effect is to increase the signal protein adiponectin. Adiponectin has been shown to reduce plaque buildup in blood vessels, improve insulin sensitivity and lower inflammation and C-reactive protein (CRP), all very good outcomes. I started taking it at the end of ’08 and have continued to use it as part of my fat management strategy. Life Extension Foundation’s article by William Faloon on how the product works can be found by following this link: Read it soon!