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HOW CHRONIC DIETING IS DESTROYING YOUR MIND BODY AND LIFE
The intention with chronic dieters is to re-educate them, and help free them of the toxic emotional and physiological repercussions of long term, unsuccessful dieting. It’s important to remember that I'm am doing an “intellectual intervention.” This is about a psychic rescue mission to help save people from the pains of a cultural practice that fails to deliver on it’s promise, and oddly enough contributes to and perpetuates the very condition it is meant to alleviate.
Lets Get Clear for a min
Dieting doesn’t work for a number of key reasons:
A. First, when we artificially restrict caloric intake, when we simply don’t eat enough food because we are following a low calorie diet, the body commonly goes into what’s called a “survival response.” This is a version of the physiologic stress response where your body thinks it’s quite suddenly on a desert island, or that it’s food supply has been cut off because of famine or natural disaster. At such times – and this is a brilliant mechanism built into our physiology – the brain instructs the body to hold onto body weight, to vigorously store body fat, to not build any muscle, and to burn calories very slowly. All this is because the body correctly interprets that it’s starving, and it needs to do whatever it can do to survive. When you diet, your body thinks it’s on that same desert island because the food supply is severely limited, and your calorie-burning metabolism literally and physiologically changes overnight. Dieting is doing the exact opposite of what you wanted it to do.
B. Next, when you do what most dieters do – skip meals, or eat a tiny breakfast and a small lunch, and then a big dinner, you are going against the natural bio-nutritional circadian rhythms of the body. This simply means that your body is optimally designed to digest and assimilate the bulk of its’ calories at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky – approximately 12pm to 1:30pm. These hours are literally your peak digestive power times, and calorie burning power times. You keep starving yourself in the morning and at lunch, eating a tiny amount of food, and thinking that you’re a good girl because you haven’t eaten much. Meanwhile, you are simply confusing your body, feeding it at the wrong times for peak calorie burning efficiency, and once again, because your body senses a lack of food at the key meals of breakfast and lunch, it goes into a survival response and slows down calorie burning and fat burning.
C. Next, like many dieters, you are restricting your intake of healthy dietary fat. Most people erroneously have the false belief that “fat in food = fat on my body.” This is old science, bad science, outdated science, and it’s shocking that it’s still being practiced. It’s the equivalent of believing the sun revolves around the earth. Fats - EFAs, are essential to life. When we are too low in fat, we literally become clinically or sub-clinically fat deficient. One of the symptoms of fat deficiency is inability to lose weight. Isn’t that a brain bender? Interestingly, you have some of the other symptoms of fat deficiency – constipation, dry skin, brittle hair and nails, digestive weakness, fatigue, poor memory, mood issues, redness around the eyes. Once again, dieting is giving you the opposite of what you wanted.
D. Next, the nature of most dieters is that they fight food. You think food is the enemy. You think appetite is the enemy. These, of course are biologically absurd strategies and thoughts. Food is essential for life. Saying food is the enemy is like saying oxygen and breathing is the enemy. We are designed by evolution and the Grand Intelligence to need food, require it, and desire it. Fighting the need for food is like trying to fight the need for blood flow. But here’s the important fact – when you fight appetite or fight the need for food, we put ourselves in a physiologic stress response. So the day-in, day-out fight against eating creates a low level stress physiology where cortisol and insulin are increased, which in turn signals the body to hold onto weight, not lose any weight, and to burn fat as slowly as possible. Fighting food creates the exact opposite effect that you’re looking for.
E. Next, like many dieters, you follow a diet that’s low in pleasure. You have the belief that pleasure is somehow bad, and if you have some, you’ll lose control. You live in fear of appetite, of desire, of receiving pleasure from food. As it turns out, the brain is programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Every organism on the planet is designed this way. Pleasure is not something frivolous. It’s a literal psycho-physiologic need. With a deficiency in pleasure, the body becomes even more hungry, more ravenous. When you keep denying yourself the simple pleasures of food and nourishment, the eventual response is stress and anxiety. The body feels deprived. So once again, we shift into stress physiology, and the results are excess weight or inability to lose it. Pleasure literally catalyzes the relaxation response, which promotes the optimum state of calorie burning.
So, these are just a few of the major reasons why diets don’t work. I work differently. By getting you off of dieting and back into real eating, real nourishment, your body can begin to find it’s true, natural weight. This means that in our work together, you’ll be learning to make friends with food, friends with appetite, and with pleasure. You’ll be calling a cease fire on the war against body fat and the war against the need to eat, and by doing so, you’ll shift your body out of the stress state it’s been living in – a state of weight gain or inability to lose it – and into a physiologic relaxation response which promotes optimum health and weight. You’ll be learning how to eat regularly, to trust the wisdom of your body, to trust your appetite, to slow down with food, and to find a way to eat that’s fun, enjoyable, stress free, and that you can carry forward to the rest of your life. The alternative is to stay in dieting misery with the same miserable results. Do you think you’re on board to try something different?
A hard day can sometimes be a great teacher if we stop for reflection
Can early morning fasted cardio help you lose fat faster than other cardio methods? In order to comprehend how cardio on an empty stomach could be beneficial, we first need to understand why it would work. The basic idea behind fasted cardio is that your body will be more likely to use its own fat stores for fuel instead of the food you just ate, and those stored fats may be accessed faster depending on the type of diet you follow. The physiology behind why fasted cardio will help you lose more fat during your cardio session is not as simple as just stated. The metabolic mechanisms that enable fasted cardio to help you oxidize more fat is much more complex. In short— yes, it does work. Fasted cardio works because it helps you to become more efficient at using fat for fuel and because your hormones and metabolism are all in the perfect alignment for fatty acid mobilisation. Metabolising Carbs vs Metabolising Fats Carbohydrates are your body’s most readily available fuel source, but only a limited amount of carbohydrates can be stored in the body. The liver and skeletal muscles are the storage sites for carbohydrates (glucose), and the stored form of glucose is glycogen. A well-nourished adult can store approximately 500 grams or 2,000 kcal of glycogen. Of this, approximately 400 grams are stored as muscle glycogen, 90-110 grams as liver glycogen, and 25 grams circulate in the blood as glucose. For glucose to enter the liver and skeletal muscle, it needs help from the hormone insulin. Insulin is the main regulator of glucose transport. Insulin binds to an insulin receptor on cell membranes and causes GLUT4 transporters to surface on the membrane. These GLUT4 transporters act like doorways that allow glucose to move into liver and muscle cells. Once glucose enters the cells, it undergoes a process called phosphorylation where it is trapped in those cells as glycogen to be used for energy. Lipids or fats on the other hand are stored as triacylglycerol (triglycerides) in muscle, liver and fat cells. This is long-term energy storage in contrast to glycogen. A normal adult can store 2,000 to 3,000 calories of glycogen in liver and muscle and even a lean person can store up to 75,000 calories of triacylglycerol in adipose tissue (fat cells). The beginning process of breaking down these stored lipids is called lipolysis. Lipolysis is the hydrolysis of triglycerides into free fatty acids. Lipolysis as well as glycogenolysis (breakdown of glycogen) is regulated by epinephrine. Epinephrine is released into the blood from the adrenal medulla of the kidney at the onset of exercise and begins breaking down carbohydrates and eventually lipids to use for energy during your workout. The metabolic cascade begins with epinephrine binding to beta-adrenergic receptors on adipose tissue and skeletal muscle fibers. This results in a change of a specific membrane attached to G protein. The activated G protein interacts with adenylyl cyclase and increases its ability to change an ATP molecule into cyclic AMP (cAMP) and inorganic phosphate (PPi). The cAMP activates protein kinase and stimulates the breakdown of glycogen, and protein kinase also phosphorylates hormone-sensitive lipase to start lipolysis. Some studies have shown that fasting can increase the number of beta-adrenergic receptors in adipose tissue. Once glycogen is released from the liver and muscle, it goes directly through glycolysis to make energy. However, fatty acids must first be released from the triglyceride molecule, and then they have to be moved into the mitochondria to be further degradated by beta-oxidation. This is a much longer process because in order to be oxidized, fatty acids— and the transport of the fatty acids from the cytosol into the mitochondria— require the help of carnitine. Carnitine shuttles the fatty acids across the mitochondrial membrane. The beta-oxidation then begins and the fatty acids are transformed into energy (ATP). So as you can see, it is a much longer process to metabolize stored fat than it is for stored carbohydrates. Even in a fasted state, it can take up to one hour to deplete glycogen stores and initiate lipolysis and beta-oxidation. However, this crossover concept of shifting energy sources from carbohydrates to lipids can be increased depending on hormone regulation, diet and exercise intensity level. Lower Insulin and Increased Growth Hormone First thing in the morning, after you’ve been fasting all night, your body’s natural levels are optimal for fat loss. After not eating for the last 10 or more hours, your insulin levels are very low. Insulin is an inhibitor of lipolysis by blocking the metabolic process of allowing hormone-sensitive lipase to begin releasing fatty acids from triglyceride molecules. When insulin levels are low, your body is better able to release and transport fatty acids into the mitochondria to be oxidized. In the morning, your circulating blood glucose (blood sugar) is also low. Some people might think this is a bad thing, and it can be if it ends up impairing your cardio performance. However, if it doesn’t, low blood sugar forces your body to begin using stored fats for energy because there is not enough glucose to sustain your workout. Finally, you will also experience higher growth hormone levels. Growth hormone is highest while you are sleeping because it is secreted in response to fasting. Growth hormone is highly catabolic to fat cells because it increases the rate of whole-body lipolysis by increasing cAMP and stimulating hormone-sensitive lipase. Growth hormone and insulin are antagonists. When one is high, the other is low. Since your insulin levels are low upon waking, your growth hormone levels are higher. Time Your Carbs The timing of when you eat carbohydrates throughout the day and the kind of carbohydrates you eat also contribute to the shifting of carbohydrates to fats for fuel. To make your fasted morning cardio session even more effective, do not eat high-glycemic carbohydrates later in your day, and especially not for your last meal. The glycemic index (GI) of a carbohydrate indicates how quickly blood glucose levels will rise after once consumed. There are three categories of GI: high, moderate, and low. The higher the GI, the faster the glucose is absorbed, used, and depleted in the body. In general, the more refined the carbohydrate in the food, the higher the glycemic index. Examples of refined food include processed white flour foods, crackers, rice, noodles, many ready-to-eat cereals, etc. In contrast, high-fiber, high-protein and high-fat foods have low-glycemic indexes. So if you eat pasta for dinner, it may take longer for you to deplete your glycogen stores during your fasted cardio as opposed to making your last meal of the day a lean source of protein and a low GI carbohydrate, such as chicken and a green vegetable. Exercise Intensity The intensity level of exercise also plays a role in substrate utilization. A person’s respiratory exchange (RER) ratio signifies the primary fuel source being used during exercise, and it increases in proportion to the increase in exercise intensity. As exercise intensity increases, the RER increases, indicating the primary fuel source is carbohydrate oxidation, whereas that of lipid oxidation decreases. The release of fatty acids into the blood from adipose tissue stores rises in parallel with exercise intensity to approximately 50 percent of VO2 max, and then gradually declines. Glycogen utilisation increases exponentially with increasing exercise intensity. Higher-intensity aerobic exercise will inhibit stored fats from being used as the primary energy source, so prolonged low- to moderate-intensity is recommended for fasted cardio. Regularly performed aerobic exercise can play a significant role in fuel utilization during exercise. Trained skeletal muscle has a larger capacity for oxidative metabolism than untrained muscle. This means that a trained person will increase fat oxidation and decrease carbohydrate oxidation faster than an untrained individual, and their ability to exercise to exhaustion is vastly increased. The Bottom Line To sum it all up, fasted cardio can be beneficial in burning more fat if you follow a low-glycemic diet, limit the amount of carbohydrates you eat later in the day, and perform prolonged low- to moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. Because of the longer process to utilize the beta-oxidation process, a 20-minute high-intensity workout is not going to cut it. The depletion of glycogen stores could take up to 60 minutes depending on a person’s diet and training level. Higher trained individuals can deplete glycogen and start using fat sooner than novice exercisers. There are situations however, where I would not recommend fasted cardio, such as if your cardio sessions are suffering because of a lack of energy or you suffer from hypoglycemia. Don’t forget that there is an afterburn effect (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption— EPOC) that helps you burn calories even after you’re done exercising. To get this effect, you need to be able to train at a decent intensity level. Are you a morning person? If so, that early morning cardio might be for you.
We all see things about ourselves, our relationships, and our world that we want to change. Often, this desire leads us to take action toward inner work that we need to do or toward some external goal. Sometimes, without any big announcement or momentous shift, we wake up to find that change has happened, seemingly without us. This can feel like a miracle as we suddenly see that our self-esteem really does seem to be intact, or our partner actually is helping out around the house more. We may even wonder whether all of our hard work had anything to do with it, or if it just happened by way of grace. As humans, sometimes we have relatively short attention spans, and we can easily lose track of time. We may worry about a seedling in a pot with our constant attention and watering for several weeks only to find ourselves enjoying the blooms it offers and wondering when that happened, and how we didn't notice it. Nature, on the other hand, has infinite patience and stays with a thing all the way through its life. This doesn't mean that our efforts play no part in the miracle of change--they do. It's just that they are one small part of the picture that finally results in the flowering of a plant, the shifting of a relationship, the softening of our hearts. The same laws that govern the growth of plants oversee our own internal and external changes. We observe, consider, work, and wonder, tilling the soil of our lives, planting seeds, and tending them. Sometimes the hard part is knowing when to stop and let go, handing it over to the universe. Usually this happens by way of distraction or disruption, our attention being called away to other more pressing concerns. And it is often at these times, when we are not looking, in the silence of nature's embrace, that the miracle of change happens.
