Learn a couple of basic things about your body fat and its metabolism to understand how to efficiently burn off - rather than store - the excess calories you eat.
Shocking as it may seem, your body actually needs some fat.
It’s true!
Believe it or not, your body fat is not an inert mass; it’s an active gland, vital for your survival. It’s not only an insulator that preservs your body’s heat and energy; it is also the critical support for all the chemistry between your brain and the rest of your body. It produces many essential enzymes and hormones, and controls your body’s immunity and inflammation levels.
Scientific research shows that there are two types of fat:
white body fat - located directly under the skin and more visible at buttocks, hips, and thighs, and
brown body fat - deep-seated in the body and cushioning the spinal column, the arteries, and the vital organs: heart, liver, kidneys, and intestines
How is this information useful to you?
Obviously, when you understand how the two types of fat affect you differently, you can better control their metabolism and ultimately, improve your weight loss results.
Body Fat I: Storage Fat vs. Thermogenesis Fat
White fat is your storage fat, your source of energy during ‘lean’ times. While a little is essentially useful, in large amounts it affects not only your body image and self-esteem, but all your other bodily functions as well.
Brown fat - or thermogenesis fat - is your ‘fat-burning fat’.
This might be a new idea to you, but that’s what thermogenesis is all about.
Mitochondria in your brown fat are specialized, energy-producing cells. They work around the clock converting fat into heat energy to maintain your body’s constant temperature. When you have a healthy metabolism, mitochondria in your brown fat also convert any extra calories that you eat into additional heat energy, making you sweat.
You see, thermogenesis explains why it may be that some friend of yours can eat all day without gaining an ounce, while you may put some pounds on just thinking about food! Your friend has an active brown fat, while you might have dormant brown fat.
Why is that?
Well, part of it is a low level of physical activity, and another part is the quality of your daily diet.
Your brown fat (your thermogenesis engine) shuts down whenever your body’s ratio of fatty acids is out of balance as a result of eating highly processed foods on a regular basis.
As you can see, underactive brown fat makes you store any extra calories as sluggish, white body fat, instead of burning them off.
Body Fat II: Your body’s ‘survival mechanism’
As you’d probably expect, you rarely match up the exact number of calories you eat with the amount you burn off each day. In this age and place of abundance - more often than not - you end up eating more calories than you use up. Of course, your body has two options: to burn the excess through the brown body fat - in the course of active thermogenesis described above - or to store the caloric surplus as white fat.
What no one ever told you is that your metabolism is physiologically conditioned to make you store as much body fat as you can, as soon as you have a chance, and to hardly give it up.
It might be a new idea to you, but it’s true.
This specific physiology was developed through thousands of years of living in a ‘survival mode’.
It kept humans from perishing when food sources were unreliable and scarce, and whether you like it or not, it is still at play today.
You see, in early years, along with developing muscle and bone structure, body fat cells are also created: tiny balloons that store any extra calories as fat. They are physiologically programmed to be always full, to provide you instantly with the energy required when food is not immediately available.
With that in mind, it’s easy to understand that when your caloric intake is constantly higher than your caloric expenditure, your body fat cells quickly fill up with fat. They grow bigger and bigger, and as they reach their maximum capacity, new ones are produced. Conversely, when you lose fat your fat cells get smaller; however, they never go away (unless they are artificially removed from the body through liposuction).
While you might be joyfully celebrating losing some body fat, your empty fat cells are not happy. Programmed to continually replenish their fat stores, they start sending out frantic signals of starvation. They are picked up by your brain -which according to the 'survival physiology' - reacts lowering your metabolism (to conserve more energy) and making you feel sharp hunger pangs and unstoppable food cravings.
A brilliant mechanism - completely unnecessary today. However, it’s the reason you might fall into the sea of people who after losing some body fat initially, get it back shortly, on even fewer calories.
And it doesn’t stop here!
Once you start to alternatively lose and gain back body fat (such in the case of yo-yo dieting), more fat cells accumulate in your body. The more fat cells you have, the harder it is to lose body fat and to keep it off. And what no one probably told you before, is that if you were overweight and developed more fat cells as a child or teenager, your chances of becoming overweight as an adult are increased by 70%.
If reading this you’re thinking: "this is not fair!" - you’re absolutely right!
Nevertheless, it’s all scientifically proven and the only brainy thing to do is to keep your metabolism up. So you will efficiently burn - rather than store - the excess calories you may eat in any given day.
How?
Well, first be sure to NOT cut more than 1/4 of what you’re presently eating all of a sudden. Drastic calorie-reduction always backfires. It sets off your body’s ‘starvation mode’ and slows down your metabolism - in an attempt to preserve the fat.
Second, eliminate as much as you can from your diet foods that contain fattening fats (processed foods, cheese, milk, and red meat). Include healthy fats instead: flaxseed, hemp, olives, and coconut oils. This will restore an optimum fatty acids balance in your diet, which re-activates the mitochondria in your brown body fat and boosts your metabolism.
Additionally, you can enhance your fat burning by supplementing daily your diet with 2-4 grams of Gamma linolenic acid (GLA), a potent omega-6 fatty acid found in borage oil, evening primrose oil, and black currant oil. Of course, after the initial few weeks of significant weight loss, you should take an omega-3 (fish oil or flaxseed oil) along with GLA for an optimal fatty acids balance.
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