Weight loss, weight loss, everybody writes about weight loss. Different diets, cleanses, expensive pre-measured food… Whole books on weight loss. Well, enough!
I am going to tell you in this one short article all you need to know about weight loss. From the simple chemistry of Biology 2110, to the little known liver functions that have to be optimized to keep fat from being deposited.
Biology 2110 from the College of St. Scholastica Lectures
paraphrased a bit
“The basel metabolic rate, that is what it takes to just keep the body sitting idle, is about 2000 calories a day. Most of us use between 500 and 1000 calories in our normal daily activities. If you put in any more calories than you burn up, it will store as fat. The only way to get rid of fat is to reverse the process. Calories in/calories out, that’s all there is to it.
Think of each extra pound you have as a pound of butter. That’s what it is you know, fat just like butter. Each of those pounds of fat is 3,500 calories. It isn’t practical to try to burn them off.
If you get on a treadmill at four miles an hour, which is fairly fast, and set it at a high grade so you’re working pretty hard, you’d burn about 250 calories in a half hour. That’s 3,500 divided by 250 is 14. It would take two weeks to lose one pound that way.
The human body is just too efficient. It’s hard to do enough work to burn a significant amount of calories.
It’s easier to limit calories. Not starve yourself, then you go into amino acid deficiency and you get sick, so yea you lose weight when you are sick. But, limiting calories. Learning to eat differently…”
Dr. Gerald Cizadlo
He goes on to say that you can help by increasing muscle mass. The process of building muscle won’t help much, the human machine is too efficient, but the extra muscle burns calories all the time increasing the basal metabolic rate which means you are burning more calories even while sleeping.
Liver Chemistry and Fat Deposition
The advanced biochemistry I mentioned has to do with what is responsible for fat deposition in the first place. Estrogens cause fat to deposit. There are several different estrogens with three main ones. One causes fat to deposit on the hips, another around the middle. The third causes fat to deposit in both areas.
The body makes hormones for a specific purpose after which they are eliminated. Normally, this happens pretty fast. If not, the hormones can end up causing problems like estrogens continuing to stimulate fat deposition long after they are supposed to be cleared.
This happens because the liver doesn’t always have what it needs to break down estrogens after they have done their job. They continue to cause fat to deposit when they shouldn’t.
The reason for this is that the liver isn’t getting the nutrients it needs to reduce the hormones the body makes or the toxins that we are exposed to. This is because most people are deficient in selenium and enzyme activated B6 (P5P), two nutrients essential for this function. A third nutrient, the amino acid L-cysteine, is another limiting factor. There are others, but these are the main nutrients that almost everybody seems to need.
A Toxic Body Won’t Lose Weight
The last major factor that interferes with weight loss is toxicity. Fat cells store toxins to keep them from harming the body. The body knows that if it dumps the fat that the toxins will be free to roam the body causing problems. The body holds on to the toxin insulating fat for self preservation. This is why some people say that they just can’t lose weight no mater what they do. What they need is to detoxify as they lose weight. Detoxification is a big subject that I will continue to write about in the future.
These are the main factors involved in weight loss. No fad diet is going to change the simple rule of calories. Limiting calories, taking necessary nutrients and detoxification, these are the real methods of losing weight.
There are a couple of ‘tricks’ that can be used to help in the process of weight loss, but they all work within the above parameters. I’ll write about these another time.
I think weight loss is all about three things – attitude, diet and exercise. From my experience, reducing carb intake and doing aerobic exercises are keys to successful weight loss.