Why am I Not Losing Fat?! (Part 2)

In last week’s article, we began our discussion on what to do if you seem to have everything in line to lose weight/fat, but you just do not seem to be having success. This week we will continue our discussion with the second of four key components to losing fat: your ability to manage blood sugar.

Fat Loss Barrier #2: The blood sugar management system

The ability to control one’s blood sugar is often talked about but not always fully explained or understood. It is the key component to many successful diets; and without it, fat loss is very difficult. If your body is not very good at regulating its blood sugar, then there are inevitable health concerns just around the corner, including being overweight.

When talking about blood sugar balance, there are two main issues. The first is when you have chronically elevated blood sugar, resulting from something called insulin resistance. The second is when your blood sugar fluctuates and can sometimes crash. This is known as hypoglycemia. Both of these imbalances result in elevated insulin.

Insulin resistance vs Hypoglycemia

Insulin is a hormone that is necessary for life. When your body is functioning properly, insulin is responsible (among other things) for signaling your cells to open their doors to glucose (blood sugar). But as with most hormones, insulin should be balanced. In excess, elevated insulin levels have a host of negative consequences on the body. Here are some reasons you want to take excess insulin seriously: an increase in inflammation, estrogen, oxidative stress, cholesterol, and blood pressure; a decrease in your body’s ability to handle toxins; an imbalance of neurotransmitters (the messengers in your brain that control how you think and feel, and are key players in many diseases).

When someone is insulin resistant, it means their cells are resistant to the signals of insulin and no longer open up when they should. Because blood sugar cannot enter into one’s cells as much as it should, it stays in their blood stream rather than being stored. As a result, the body produces higher levels of insulin to try and help remove glucose from the blood stream. This cycle, however, causes even greater metabolic dysfunction (low energy, weight gain, difficulty sleeping, sugar cravings that do not go away).

Individuals who tend to be hypoglycemic, on the other hand, will have periods of low blood sugar, followed by a release of adrenaline which acts to elevate blood sugar. This is a survival mechanism which can become problematic when happening too often. The adrenaline leads to a sharp increase in blood sugar, followed by a spike in insulin. This can lead to other metabolic issues (feeling jittery before meals/starving between meals, irritability, sugar cravings before meals, difficulty staying asleep, difficult losing weight) plus issues with one’s adrenal glands (excessive production of adrenaline).

Lean, mean, dysfunctional machine

While both insulin resistance and hypoglycemia can lead to weight gain, it is also possible to look healthy and be exercising regularly but still have trouble regulating blood sugar. There are a number of potential issues that can all interplay to make one’s blood sugar management system not work properly, among them the abundance of sugar in our diets, increased stress associated with long and demanding work days, little down time away from and type of stimuli, inflammatory foods, chemicals, and products, and many more.

All of these factors play a role in a vicious cycle of blood sugar management: Elevated blood sugar increases insulin. Insulin causes an increase cortisol. Cortisol increases blood sugar. And round and round it goes.

People can enter into this cycle in one of two ways. The first is through improper eating. Excess sugar or carbohydrates, and excessively large meals can elevate blood sugar levels to a point where this cycle can begin and persist if that eating is not controlled. The second way the cycle can be started is via cortisol. Anything that elevates cortisol (e.g. stress, parasitic infection, food allergies, inflammation, or inadequate sleep) will also elevate blood sugar and therefore insulin levels. In other words, you could have a perfect diet and exercise program, but if you have elevated cortisol levels, you may also be increasing your blood sugar from the inside.

What to do now?

If you think you might have an issue with blood sugar, you may want to get some blood work done. A good blood chemistry screen will contain enough markers to adequately identify patterns of blood sugar mismanagement. Here is a very general guideline of patterns to look for in blood work.

Hypoglycemic: Usually will see fasting blood sugar below 85 mg/dL & LDH (lactate dehydrogenase) below 140 U/L.

Insulin Resistant: Usually will see fasting blood sugar above 100 md/dL, triglycerides above 100 mg/dL, HDL below 55 md/dL, LDL above 120 md/dL. Note: the higher your triglycerides, the more concerned you should be.

Remember that these are just the norms, but use your own experience every day as feedback as well. If you often have cravings for sugar, have low energy, feel jittery between meals, or have been putting on weight recently, take some time to reflect on your diet and your lifestyle. If you tend to eat a lot of carbs and/or sugar, that would be a great place to start. If you are stressed out, are not sleeping well, and have not taken the time to center yourself and relax, then see how you can work to de-stress. Each of these plays a major role in your health, weight, energy, and longevity, so if you want to look and feel your best, this is a crucial area to work on.

Again, a big issue today, so stay tuned for our 3^rd segment next week where we will talk more about the adrenal system!

Why am I Not Losing Fat?! (Part 1)

If you are currently trying to lose weight or have tried in the past, you know that it is not always easy. Part of the reason why losing weight AND keeping it off is so hard is that weight loss does not always mean fat loss which is really what we are looking for. If you lose a bunch of weight, but it is all muscle, you are sure to gain the weight back and more. Even if you lose fat, but do not make the lifestyle changes necessary to keep with your new exercise and eating routines, it can be easy to fall back into old habits and regain the weight. So what can we do to fight fat and keep it off for good??

Fat loss can be a complicated subject to teach because there are so many possible limiting factors in a person’s ability to lose fat. There’s the exercise part, which plays a huge role in building muscle and burning fat. There’s the diet part, which affects everything. There’s the psychology, which is often overlooked, but is crucial to staying on track. And there’s the social part, which again, is a must. Without the help of family and friends it is impossible to form new habits. BUT, what happens if you have a good exercise & eating routine, you are focused and your friends and family all back you up…and you still can’t lose fat?

Well, that’s when we start looking to your physiology.  In particular, we need to examine four major physiological systems that can greatly influence fat loss:

1. Your oxygen delivery system
2. Your blood sugar management system
3. Your adrenal system
4. Your digestive system

To be clear, exercise, diet, motivation, and social support are always the first places to look if you are struggling to lose and keep fat off. Under normal physiological situations, the body has no problem giving up the fat as long as these areas are covered. However, there are some people who just cannot seem to lose the fat, regardless of how well everything else is going. What’s up with them?

Well, assuming they really are on track, they’re likely experiencing abnormal physiological situations where fat loss is quite difficult because the body isn’t functioning as it should. It’s kind of like planting a garden. Sunshine and water are requirements for a garden to grow, just like diet and exercise are necessary for fat loss.  But even with all the sunshine and water in the world, your garden won’t grow if the soil is unhealthy. In other words, you can diet and exercise all you want, you can develop a strong social support circle, and you can get your head screwed on right.  But if your body — your soil — is not working properly, neither will your weight loss program.

So let’s dig a little deeper and discuss the big 4 physiological situations that might be preventing you from losing fat.

Fat Loss Barrier #1: The oxygen delivery system

The cells of your body run primarily on two things: oxygen and glucose.  If either one of these is deficient in any way, your body will be unable to work properly. One of the most important things your cells can do is to produce energy. They essentially take in nutrients to create energy, allowing them to perform their specific functions. To create this energy, however, one very important nutrient MUST be present: oxygen. If your cells are not receiving adequate amounts of oxygen, nothing in your body will work correctly… including weight loss.

In conventional medicine, a decrease in the ability to deliver oxygen to cells is often called anemia, a condition referring to a deficiency in red blood cells’ ability to deliver oxygen to the tissues and organs of the body. Anemia can be caused by any number of things – iron deficiency, vitamin B12/folate deficiency, excessive blood loss (i.e. heavy menses, gastrointestinal bleeding), medications, specific chronic or hereditary conditions (i.e. thalassemia), etc. The three main causes of anemia are red blood cell destruction, blood loss, or an inability to produce an adequate number of healthy red blood cells.

If you feel that you are struggling to lose weight, or that your body is just not functioning as well as it used to, you may want to have your doctor run standard blood work, and make sure the following tests are included: hemoglobin, hematocrit, red blood cells, MCV, MCH, MCHC, iron, and ferritin.

If these numbers are below the optimal reference range, and another marker called transferrin is increased above the optimal reference range, you may have low iron. If this is the case, increased dietary iron might be necessary, but first consult with a qualified medical professional.

If your hemoglobin, hematocrit, red blood cells, are decreased below the optimal reference range, but your MCV, MCHC and MCH are increased, you might be experiencing decreased oxygen deliverability due to either deficient B12, folic acid or both. If this is the case, increasing dietary B12 and/or folic acid might be necessary. Additionally, digestive function (which we will talk more about later) should be assessed as this pattern is often due to poor absorption.

If you have not had blood work done in a while, it may be a good idea to find out sooner than later if you have any deficiencies. These can have a number of negative influences, not the least of which is the inability to lose fat!

This is all I want to dive into this week as we have already gone over two important points. First, exercise, diet, psychology, and social support are all needed to lose weight (fat) and keep it off. Second, if you have all of these in place and are still struggling, your oxygen delivery system may not be working properly.  Next week we will continue to look at why you may not be losing fat.

Urgency: The Missing Link to Success

Think about the last time you had a deadline to meet. What were your actions like? Were they random and unfocused or were they concentrated and purposeful? More importantly, did you meet the deadline? My guess is that you got it done and were probably very focused on your effort until the task was complete. This, the power of urgency, is something that is all too often overlooked when it comes to making changes in our health.

We have all had those times where we thought “today is the day I get back on track”, only to fall right back into our old habits a week (or an hour) later. We want to look, feel, or perform better, but we just cannot seem to change. The problem is that there is no sense of urgency. If you want to lose 10 lbs., you know you need to start moving more and eating better. But what is the urgency? If there is no upcoming reunion, serious health concern, competition, etc., then there is no perceived importance in making changes right now. So what if you don’t lose the 10 lbs.? Well, you may be heading down a road to problems that become increasingly more difficult to recover from.

Attitude is everything

When we have the attitude that “I can always change tomorrow”, the change almost always comes too late, if at all. 10 lbs. becomes 20 lbs. becomes 30 lbs., and as we age, it becomes harder to lose the weight. This means that you now have 3x as much weight to lose and it will be 3x harder to lose each pound.

There is also a motivation factor. The longer you wait, the harder it is to get the momentum turned in the right direction, meaning that you will probably not see results as fast as you like. We do not end up overweight and unhealthy because of one bad habit. It happened because of 100 bad habits that built up over time. The lack of results and the seemingly endless work we have to do to reach our goals can lead to discouragement and again makes change hard. Even in the presence of a LIFE-THREATENING condition, change can be almost impossible to tackle. What was once 10 lbs. of extra weight has now become Type II Diabetes and the problem is more frightening and more complicated than we ever thought it could be.

On the contrary, when we have a mindset of urgency, we start figuring out what we can do TODAY to make a difference. We start to break down the problem into manageable parts because there is no other way to manage it. Just like a project deadline, we must figure out what needs to be accomplished and start chipping away.

So ask yourself, shouldn’t something as important as your health be your top priority every day? Without health, what do you have? There is nothing that can replace good health and it can be a full-time job to regain health once it’s lost.

Where to focus

The most difficult thing in prioritizing health is that the idea of health is so ambiguous. Feeling good, looking good, having energy, having stamina; these are all terms that are highly subjective and have many ways to achieve them in the short and long term. If you decide today that your health should in fact become more of a priority, what will your first step be?

I would suggest starting with that thing that you KNOW you should and can improve today. If you have a job that stresses you out and keeps you up late, then yes, it might not be the best for your health, but no, you don’t have to change jobs today just to get moving. Start with something small, but important. How much water have you had today? What did you have for breakfast? Have you moved at all since you sat down at your desk this morning? Write down 10 things that you know you can change, and pick the one that is easiest. Work on that for a while, and then once it becomes a habit, move to the next easiest.

Urgency does not mean that you have to do everything today, but it does mean you need to do SOMETHING today. Every day we choose to either improve our health or damage our health. We choose what we eat. We choose how we spend our free time. We choose how much we move. So let’s see what choices we can make today so that we set ourselves up for a healthy, fulfilling life. Start thinking about your health as if tomorrow depends on your actions today (which it does), and you will discover a whole new level of health and vitality that you may not have thought possible.