The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (8 page)

Before we jump into how this program works, let’s quickly turn our attention to how the fat triggers in this chapter affect some of the important hormones responsible for fat loss. Seeing how these hormones impact your ability to lose weight will help you understand why I designed this program the way I did.

CHAPTER
2

6 REASONS WHY YOU CAN’T SEEM TO LOSE WEIGHT

I
f you’ve ever pored over lifestyle magazines and diet books trying to find the secret to weight loss that actually works, you’ve probably realized that almost every method is merely a remix of some other fat-blasting technique. The same exercises and meal plans seem to pop up again every few years, only with different names.

It begs the question: If these basic moves and meals are all it takes to get lean, why are so many people still struggling to lose weight? Most importantly, why are you? Hopefully, the last chapter opened your eyes to the fat triggers that have derailed your valiant but ultimately futile efforts to lose weight for good. It’s not just a matter of eating less and exercising more. External forces have shaped your body into what it is today. Now let’s look further into the internal forces at play as well.

Just hearing the word
hormones
might make you giggle a bit, because they’re often talked about in a sexual context. However, the truth is that these microscopic chemical messengers affect just about everything taking place inside you. Think of them as tiny software
programs
that direct your bodily processes—everything from your body temperature and mood to your metabolism, growth, and even sense of balance!

If you’ve tried unsuccessfully to lose weight in the past, then working out more and eating less is most likely not your answer. You will be better served by first addressing and correcting the underlying issue—your physiology. So let’s take a look under the hood to get a better understanding of why your body holds on to excess weight. Later in this book, I’ve outlined some clear tools and strategies to help you correct those physiological imbalances, but first let’s examine what’s going awry inside you.

THE INSULIN, BLOOD SUGAR, AND FAT CONNECTION

You’ve undoubtedly heard in the last few years that eating sugar can be bad for you, but you may not understand why. And what’s the difference between the sugar in the food you eat and blood sugar, which is circulating in your body?

Here’s what you need to know: Blood sugar, or blood glucose, is stored inside of you and is the body’s preferred source of fuel. It’s what our cells use to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the ultimate form of energy in the body. How does it get there? It’s derived from the sugar in the food we eat (mainly carbohydrates) and from stored glycogen within our muscles and liver.

As with everything in the human body, there’s a meticulous process through which sugar in your food becomes blood sugar and ultimately the energy you need to do everything from lifting a pencil to running a marathon. The key to this process is insulin, the hormone responsible for shuttling sugar out of your blood and into your muscle, liver, and fat cells.

Eat too much sugar, and regular waves of insulin will try to ferry it out of your blood. With constant exposure, though, your cells can become desensitized to insulin. The consequence—too much sugar in
the
blood—is dire, and sometimes even deadly.
Insulin resistance
is why two-thirds of Americans are overweight and why 10 percent of the world’s population goes on to develop type 2 diabetes. As if that weren’t bad enough, too much sugar in the blood will ruin your arteries, nerves, and other precious tissues. It also increases triglycerides (fats) in the blood, raising your risk of heart disease.

In fat cells, insulin resistance will trigger an increased release of hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL), resulting in further breakdown of triglycerides (stored fat) into free fatty acids. These free fatty acids (FFAs) then move to the liver. Here, FFAs can either be converted to ATP energy in the mitochondria, converted back into triglycerides for storage, or even incorporated into dangerous very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) cholesterol particles.

But it gets worse because insulin resistance also activates many of the lipogenic (fat-forming) genes in your liver, meaning that more sugar and FFAs will be converted into fat, rather than burned as energy. Similarly, too much sugar in the blood causes enzyme processes in the liver to favor the conversion of excess sugar into fat. Simply put, you get even fatter.

On the other side of the coin is fluctuating or low blood sugar, known as
hypoglycemia
. Although you might not think this would be problematic, it can be just as detrimental to your weight-loss efforts. Before my wife, Amy (whose nickname is Yammy), and I learned about nutrition back in our early twenties, she used to turn into what I called the Yammy Monster if she didn’t eat frequently enough. You know the “hangry” feeling of being hungry and angry? That’s hypoglycemia at work. The unwanted hangry symptoms of low blood sugar circle back around to insulin, once again.

The trouble with blood sugar fluctuations is that the highs elicit insulin release, which immediately stimulates the production of inflammatory chemicals, which in turn cause an increase in cortisol. Remember, inflammation is a form of stress and cortisol is one of your body’s stress responses. In fact, any form of stress will create the same response. And since cortisol’s primary function is to increase blood sugar, a vicious cycle of low blood sugar, high blood sugar, insulin
release,
inflammation, and cortisol release is started. Stated otherwise, you could have a perfect diet and exercise regimen, but if you have elevated cortisol levels, you may still suffer from blood sugar issues. I sure did for most of my teens, thanks to my high-sugar diet.

Insulin also has a number of unwanted effects that impair your ability to lose weight. First, insulin creates undesirable hormonal shifts in both men and women. In men, it upregulates an enzyme called
aromatase
, which converts testosterone to estrogen. The opposite reaction occurs in women. This makes fat loss more difficult for both sexes. Second, increased insulin levels are known to elevate leptin, one of our important hunger hormones. And as with insulin, chronically elevated leptin levels can lead to “leptin resistance,” whereby the brain no longer responds to leptin and thus never gets the signal that you are full and should stop eating. Third, insulin stimulates an inflammatory chemical called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which has a number of damaging effects inside the body including raising cortisol levels even further. Finally, insulin impairs your liver’s ability to clear toxins and excess hormones from your body. As a result, these compounds linger in the body longer than they should and cause further damage. For instance, having too much estrogen circulating in your body is not ideal as it promotes cell growth (i.e., cancer) and is the biggest factor in increasing fat storage at the hips and thighs by upregulating alpha-adrenergic receptors in those areas.

If your goal is to reset your body to become a fat-burning machine, then you have to control both blood sugar and insulin. And that is simply not going to happen if you eat constantly throughout the day or rely on refined carbohydrates that spike your blood sugar. Recall that, in a fed state, insulin goes up. Conversely, in a fasted state, it goes down. If you’re constantly in a fed state because you’re eating every 2 to 3 hours, then is insulin ever getting a break? Not really. That’s just one reason for the strategic 5-Day Food-Cycling Plan in this book. Your body doesn’t need a constant infusion of food. You’ll see why when we get to
Chapter 5
.

The takeaway? If you’ve been having a tough time losing weight, then fluctuating levels of insulin could be at play.

THE
STRESS, CORTISOL, AND FAT CONNECTION

I’ve mentioned that stress and its ensuing cortisol release are big contributors to gaining and holding on to excess weight. Remember, when your body perceives a threat (a stressor of any form), it usually responds by storing and saving fat for a rainy day. This goes back to our Paleolithic environment. It’s the classic fight-or-flight response that helped our ancestors survive, but it doesn’t serve us well in today’s nonstop stressed-out world.

The major reason that stress impairs your ability to lose fat is because it prompts the adrenal glands to release cortisol, whose main role is to increase blood sugar levels during times of stress. Thus, chronically high cortisol will lead to high insulin levels (due to constant high blood sugar), which as we just learned leads to fat storage.

Too much cortisol also impairs your ability to lose fat through the following mechanisms.

•
It decreases your body’s ability to make and convert thyroid hormone into its active form, T3, which results in a slowed metabolism since your thyroid is the master metabolism gland.

•
It impairs your brain’s ability to communicate with leptin (the “I’m full” hormone), which means you don’t get the message and end up eating more.

•
It lowers your body’s ability to use insulin at the cellular level, which increases your chances of developing diabetes.

•
Like insulin, it lowers your liver’s ability to detoxify excess hormones and toxins, which leads to further hormone imbalances that contribute to weight gain.

•
It increases imbalances in your gut flora (known as
dysbiosis
) and can lead to leaky gut, allowing large food proteins to enter your bloodstream, which can lead to heightened immune and stress responses.

Those are just a few of cortisol’s effects on fat loss. The health implications of too much cortisol (and too little, for that matter) are just as bad. It’s important to repeat: Stress isn’t just worrying about
stuff.
It’s the foods you eat, how you exercise, the toxins you ingest, your mental and emotional concerns, and more. Anything that pushes your body out of balance (homeostasis) can be considered a form of stress. The goal of the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet is to minimize these stressors as much as possible by improving the quality of your diet, exercise, rest, and recovery.

Although the promise of this book is to help you lose up to 15 pounds in as little as 21 days following my proven 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula, the reality is that you can follow this way of eating and living forever. I do. It’s not a fad. It’s a principle-based program that resets your body to burn fat. I recommend following the plan for at least 21 days. Then you can continue to follow it to the letter or modify it slightly, as you’ll see in
Chapter 12
, so you can stay lean and healthy for life.

THE THYROID AND FAT CONNECTION

Stated simply, your thyroid is the gland responsible for your body’s metabolic rate. Thus, anything that impairs its function will slow your ability to lose fat. Thyroid hormones, specifically the active form triiodothyronine (T3), act on nearly every cell in the body by increasing our basal metabolic rate and regulating pretty much all growth-related activity. These hormones also regulate protein, fat, and carbohydrate metabolism and stimulate vitamin metabolism.

How does the thyroid exert its powerful metabolic functions, and why does it help or impair your ability to lose fat? Well, a great deal of its power has to do with the fact that its hormones target the metabolic powerhouses inside our cells, called
mitochondria,
which are responsible for creating energy (ATP) and generating heat (as a by-product). Essentially, the more T3 reaching your cells, the more signals your mitochondria receive to produce energy (or burn calories, if you will).