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Look and feel great while living your best social life. The best part of F-Factor is that your life doesn't have to change just because you're following the lifestyle. Nothing, that is, except be damaged by the inflammation and oxidation caused by high- carb diets, about which more in a moment. The point is that when you eat badly, energy production suffers.
Less energy means less fat burning. So we need to turn down inflammation, and that means dramatically reducing our intake of sugar. In fact, one of the most inflammatory things we consume on a regular basis is not sugar at all. These so-called innocent oils are contributing to the breakdown of your mitochondria and your ability to burn fat. Our bodies make inflammatory chemicals series 2 prostaglandins , and they make anti-inflammatory chemicals series 1 and 3 prostaglandins.
We make the inflammatory chemicals out of omega-6s vegetable oils and we make the anti- inflammatory chemicals out of omega-3s fish oil, flaxseed oil. You do need both—and if our diets contained an equal amount of each of them, everything would be hunky-dory.
Saturated fat or even Where are all those extra omega-6s coming from? One analysis was jointly done by You guessed it. Vegetable oil. The worst thing and twenty-three years. The conclusion? The bottom line is too much vegetable oil contributes abstract to inflammation; inflammation keeps you in sugar- burning territory.
Instead you're going to eat luscious grass-fed butter and coconut oil, and other wonderful saturated fats that have been shown to reduce your inflammation, keep you satiated and help you burn fat. Relax when you see those fats in the recipes. Now another food we need to discuss when it comes to inflammation is gluten.
How to Set Your Body on Fire with Bread In the last few years, two books have come out that I consider to be among the most important books on nutrition written in the last decade. And what both these books have to tell us about grains will set your hair on end. This connection could be adding inches to your waistline with you even knowing it. Gluten—as you may know—is a component in grains, predominantly in wheat, but also in barley, rye, spelt, kamut and—more often than we'd like—oats, only because of cross-contamination with gluten grains.
For many people, grains may be—and often are—a powerful modulator of inflammation. And let's not forget that nutrition doesn't only impact inflammation, it also influences the whole evil set of triplets—inflammation, sure, but also oxidation and glycation. Because food and supplements are our only external sources of antioxidants.
And you can keep insulin quite low and IGF-1 nice and high with just fat and protein. Vegetables have nearly no effect on blood sugar and are virtual nutritional powerhouses, literally shoveling antioxidant protection into your bloodstream with every bite. That's why I want you to eat vegetables—because of the fiber, the nutrients, the antioxidants, the phytochemicals, and all the other health-giving compounds found in the plant kingdom.
And if you need to bring it back down to practicalities, remember what oxidative damage does to your mitochondria. Hint: the key word is damage. Finally we have the last enemy of the fat burning metabolism, glycation. And how do you think all that excess sugar gets into the bloodstream to create the glycated proteins and, ultimately, the AGEs in the first place?
Through diet. And in the case of glycation it happens in two insidious ways. First, by eating the food that keeps bumping your blood sugar up. The more sugar floating around the bloodstream, the more opportunity for some of it to glom on to proteins, making them sticky and ultimately leading to AGE formation.
But the other way we increase AGEs through our diet is to just swallow those bad boys whole, which is exactly what we do when we eat highly caramelized, or browned foods. And frequently does. So you see, nutrition really is the Macdaddy of the pathways to health. And that includes your mitochondria, and it includes your cell membranes, both of which are absolutely vital for an efficient, fat-burning metabolism.
See, a diet like that—which, by the way, is a very healthy way to eat—has some potential pitfalls. So let's look a little more carefully at how we are going to do this. Some folks in the low-carb community believe we should replace most of those carbs sugars and starches with more protein, while others believe we should replace them with more fat. Both make very persuasive cases. I do believe we need a certain amount of protein at each meal to get the real metabolic advantages of protein.
I tell you this because it is critically important that you do not try to do a low-fat version of this program. Then, after ten days on a higher fat, moderate protein and low carbohydrate diet, you're going to have a carb feast.
Yep, you read that right. After ten days you're going to do a carb feast. It allows you to avoid all of the metabolic adaptations and other pitfalls I described in the last chapter.
You eat really low carb for a period of time, which accomplishes two things: One, it depletes your glycogen stored sugar stores, which is important because it's harder to burn fat for energy when your body has plenty of it stored as carbs. Two, it trains your body to run on fat, or fat metabolites. So far so good. Worried about your IGF-1 levels plummeting when insulin is spiked? The insulin spike goes up and down so fast, it barely has any effect on IGF Then you start again with a low-sugar eating plan, continuing the path towards fat burning but without the metabolic adaptations that can slow you down, depress your thyroid, eat up your muscles, and make you cranky as heck.
And before you know it, carb feast is here again. Remember, the nutritional goals for this program are: 1 Eat healthful and delicious foods that provide the broad spectrum of natural antioxidants, anti-in- flammatories, protein, fat and fiber.
The bottom line is simply this: The food you eat, over time, will direct your body to run primarily on sugar or primarily on fat. It is also an important contributor to detoxification. Some eating patterns increase insulin the fat storage hormone making it more difficult for IGF-1 to do its job. A number of important studies in the last few decades have documented a powerful association between lack of sleep and obesity.
Lack of sleep—or the wrong kind of sleep—has a profound effect on four important hormones that help regulate appetite and fat storage. Lack of high-quality sleep basically makes your hormonal symphony sound like a kazoo. Sleep is a big part of an anti-aging lifestyle.
Without sufficient amounts, you age faster. Sleep affects how we work, how we relate to other people, how we make decisions, and how we feel in general. Not getting enough sleep can depress our immune system and raise our stress hormones. The right amount of sleep—and, equally important, the right kind of sleep—is absolutely essential if you want to make the transition from sugar burner to fat burner. Geneticists and anthropologists tell us that our specific human genome has only changed 0. Therefore, whenever possible, I think it makes sense to look to what our human genus was programmed for when it comes to basic things such as food, exercise and sleep.
It's what we evolved to eat, what our systems were designed to run on best. Prior to electricity, we listened to our biological rhythms, which were in sync with the rhythms of the earth. We slept when it was dark out, and awoke when it was light. We spent plenty of time in the sun. We moved around a lot. And when it was dark, we sat around the campfire and went to bed and slept like babies.
When the sun rose, we started the day. This, if you will, was the natural order of things. This is the factory-specified sleep pattern for healthy humans. It keeps your hormones running like a purring cat, replenishing healing chemicals for cellular repair, rejuvenation and maintenance, moderating glucose and insulin sensitivity, releasing growth hormone and the anti-aging hormone melatonin , and keeping stress hormones from running amok and forcing you into sugar-burning hell.
This factory-specified sleep pattern has been as wildly disrupted by modern life as our factory-specified diet has been wildly disrupted by processed foods. The restorative power of sleep is well known, but scientists have been unclear about just why this is so.
However, a fascinating study published just as I was completing the manuscript for this program suggests that what may be happening is a kind of internal housecleaning that leaves your brain and body refreshed.
Sleep is also when your hormonal symphony is tuned up, inflammation and oxidation are reduced, stress vanishes, your body relaxes, and you shift toward a fat-burning metabolism. In fact, we burn the highest percentage of calories from fat when we sleep than we do at any other time of day.
To quote the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Let me count the ways. It Sleep Architecture has many important jobs in the body, but arguably one Sleep can be divided into two categories— of its most essential functions is its involvement in the REM rapid eye movement sleep and production of IGF Non-REM sleep has four stages.
Stage one is when you move As you fall deeper and deeper into sleep, your brain from wakefulness to drowsiness to falling waves change. The brain waves in the deepest part of asleep. This is what you see when you sleep massage your pituitary gland telling it to release drag your husband to the opera and HGH, testosterone and DHEA, all of which are reparative he starts nodding off.
In stage two, eye compounds in their own right. Stages three and DHEA. Body temperature IGF No IGF-1; no fat-burning. Another vicious downward and blood pressure drop just a little more, cycle. This is when everyone in metabolism and fat burning. Leptin is the chemical that dreamland gets up to dance!
Sleep plays an important role in regulating our leptin levels Both are critical to your health. And you and in controlling our appetite.
The leptin takes about minutes. Stop eating! Lack of sleep, together with the lowered amount of leptin, will even wake you up in the middle of the night making you hungry and craving carbohydrates so you can get back to sleep. All of which, of course, increases your waistline and the size of your butt and thighs.
Ghrelin—which is produced in the gastrointestinal tract—has the exact opposite effect from leptin: it stimulates appetite. It tells your brain when you need to eat, when it should stop burning calories, and when you should store calories as fat. Leptin and grehlin create a double whammy for fat gain.
Because the decrease in leptin brought on by sleep deprivation slows down your metabolism. When leptin levels fall it has a direct impact on your thyroid. Thyroid hormone levels fall as well, and when this happens, your metabolism slows down. The good news is that the opposite is also true: Getting enough sleep decreases hunger and will actually help you lose body fat.
I am going to show you precisely how to do that in Section 3. But first, I want to dive a little deeper into the connections between lack of sleep and fat gain.
Well, sleep deprivation makes insulin resistance worse. Researchers have long known that insufficient sleep increases the risk of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and obesity. But recent research shows that even the fat tissue itself is affected.
Scientists at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles found measurable differences in how fat tissue responds to insulin after as little as four nights of restricted sleep. Afterwards, the fat tissue samples from these otherwise healthy participants looked exactly like tissue samples from diabetic or obese subjects. Basically, a mere four days of undersleeping turned these healthy folks into almost-diabetics!
If you want lots of ugly, pudgy belly fat, don't sleep and stress out a lot. It'll work like magic. This process eventually causes blood sugar to rise, which causes insulin to rise as well.
Individuals who are sleep deprived experience a whole lot more colds and illnesses. One way researchers test the relationship between oxidative stress and lack of sleep is by measuring glutathione, one of the most powerful natural antioxidants produced in the human body. Individuals who reported six or fewer hours of sleep had higher levels of three inflammatory markers.
The more inflammation you have, the less effectively your metabolism works, and the more likely it is that you become a sugar burner and you pack on fat. This quickly becomes a vicious cycle. Because that extra fat on your hips, thighs and butt are now firing out even more inflammatory chemicals see below , and creating even more inflammation. Those fat cells are little endocrine glands, which are capable of secreting—among other things— inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.
They damage the mitochondria, damage the hormone receptors, lower energy production ATP , and basically ensure that you stay stuck in a body whose engine is running on sugar. Sleep Your Way to Fat Loss Sleep is essential to memory, mood, and cognitive performance, all markers for a youthful, energetic life. The bottom line is simply this: Sleep matters. More, perhaps, than you realize.
All you need are a few simple techniques. These simple techniques will further shift you from a sugar- burning metabolism to a fat-burning one. When leptin levels fall, so does thyroid, the master regu- lator of the metabolism. Well, unfortunately, the same thing could be said for modern humans and stress.
But stress is a lot more than a mild annoyance. And stress is probably the single most potent enemy of a lean waistline and a long life on the entire planet. Stress can and will shorten your life. If longevity and health are something you want, if you want an effective, efficient, fat-burning metabolism, ignoring the role of stress is just not an option. The stress response is a complex, multidimensional set of biochemical and hormonal responses and signals that affect virtually the entire body.
You can measure levels of specific stress hormones in the blood, urine and in limited cases, saliva. These mechanisms were designed to save our life in an emergency. All of a sudden, a saber-toothed tiger comes charging at you.
What do you do? Well, obviously, you run like hell. Or you pick up a stick—or the nearest object you can use as a weapon— and prepare to do battle for your life. But even before your conscious brain registers the get- butt-in-gear command, a number of important physiological events occur that prepare you for action.
The hypothalamus then shoots a hormonal signal to the pituitary gland, which in turn sends a hormonal signal of its own to the intended target of all this rapid-fire communication: a pair of pecan-sized glands perched atop of the kidneys called the adrenals.
Once they receive the message, your adrenals send out powerful hormones—cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline—which accomplish a number of things. They get your heart racing. They shut off other metabolic operations that might siphon away energy needed to fight or run for example, digestion and tissue repair. Cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline are known as the fight-or-flight hormones, precisely because that is what they prepare your body to do. So far, so good.
This is how nature intended it. The stress hormones are like first gear for the body, turbo- charging the engine to prepare for an emergency. But nature meant for the stress response to be used in emergencies. Nature did not mean for that particular pedal to be pressed to the metal all day long. When you face an emergency, these short-term physiological changes are absolutely necessary for your survival. Constantly elevated cortisol means a nightmare of aging, disease and fat storage.
One of the things cortisol does is to tell the liver to quickly dump a lot of sugar into the bloodstream. It does this any time your brain senses an emergency or a need for immediate energy. And where does it get this sugar from? From glycogen, the storage form of carbohydrate in the body. This process is called glycogenolysis.
It gets worse. Cortisol also sends a message to the body to break down muscle. It does this to get at the amino acids that make up muscle, because some of those amino acids can be converted to sugar.
When you're stressed it's easier for your body to get energy this way than going to your fat stores. So there goes your M. Guess what happens when your insulin levels stay chronically elevated by ongoing stress?
Your IGF- levels drop like a rock. But the connection between chronic stress, cortisol, and IGF-1 is even more nuanced than that. You see, cortisol tends to take over the show when there is a lot of it hanging around.
That makes it very difficult for other hormones, like IGF-1, to do their job. For one thing, cortisol takes up space on cellular receptors where IGF-1 would otherwise send its fat-burning messages. Cortisol also sets off a set of biochemical responses that drive down the production of compounds like testosterone and DHEA, which as we learned in the last chapter are critical for the conversion of HGH to IGF- 1.
All of this is fine when your muscle cells are rapidly trying to metabolize energy to enable you to run like hell from the saber-toothed tiger, or shimmy up the nearest tree to escape a marauding bear.
There is no saber-toothed tiger. Your stress response was set up to deal with those physical emergencies that required immediate fuel for the muscle cells, but those are not the emergencies that trigger the modern-day stress response. Today, most people have chronic mental stress. So now you have chronically elevated cortisol telling the liver to keep dumping more sugar into the blood stream to deal with a perceived stress, while chronically elevated insulin keeps sucking up that sugar and storing it away in your fat cells.
Welcome to sugar burning hell! The excess cortisol and insulin trigger the desire for more quick-fuel carbohydrates. Why does this happen? Because stress makes your body believe you are in fight-or-flight mode and require sugar for fuel.
High levels of cortisol shrink an important portion of the brain called the hippocampus, which is essential to memory and thinking. Mental stress also triggers the adrenal medulla to produce excessive amounts of adrenaline and noradrenaline. The noradrenaline constricts blood vessels, increasing blood pressure, which can lead to hypertension over time. And chronically elevated stress hormones lower immunity, which is why marathoners often get sick the week after competing.
Stress has a powerful effect on cancer. Scientists from Wake Forest University School of Medicine found that the stress hormone adrenaline causes changes in prostate and breast cancer cells that may make them resistant to cell death. M, PhD, an assistant professor of cancer biology and senior researcher on the project. The study followed middle-aged Swedish women for 38 years and found a strong—and disturbing—link between common stressors and dementia later in life.
Calming exercises, such as deep belly breathing, yoga and tai chi, engage your relaxation response. This cools down your stress response and helps rehabilitate your body. They are like replenishing food for the soul, this is why they are such an important part of any fat-burning strategy.
Think of your relaxation response as your inner grandmother. When you let her speak, words of wisdom and solace often pour fourth. These messages temper the frantic shouting of the stress response. They help you live longer and they help you live better.
And they help you move towards a healthy, robust, fat-burning metabolism. And nowhere is the connection among all those things more apparent than in the role of stress. Bottom line: We need to take stress a lot more seriously than most of us have been doing. Managing it is truly one of the major pathways to health, vitality, and a fat-burning metabolism. And the nice thing is that stress reduction can be as simple and easy as taking a few deep breaths.
It also sends a message to break down muscle. They reduce the stress response taking you out of sugar burning territory. Would you be happy about that? I didn't think so. Toxins damage cell membranes and block hormone receptors. Some toxins can even behave like hormones, making them effective hormone mimics more on this later. This means more oxidative damage with less ability to fight it. Put more simply, they force you into sugar-burning hell, and they keep you there.
The problem is, we are. By some estimates there are nearly 80, chemicals available in the United States that have never been fully tested for their toxic effects on our health and environment.
And, in case you were wondering, many of these chemicals are recognized as carcinogens. So how does this happen? How do we get exposed to all this stuff? Good luck with that.
The Toxic Substances Control Act allowed an incredible 62, untested chemicals to remain on the market when it first passed. In more than 30 years, the EPA has only required that about of these chemicals be tested, and has partially regulated a grand total of five.
The rest have never been fully assessed for any toxic impact on human health. They prohibit you from burning fat effectively, they cause you to age more quickly, and they are one of the root causes of a wide variety of chronic illnesses.
Specifically, it depends on the ability or inability of those hormones to get their fat burning messages through to the cells. Toxins interfere with the beautiful, harmonious music of your hormonal symphony by turning it into a toxic cacophony of sugar burning and fat gain. How does this happen? Toxins Destroy Your Cell Membranes The primary way toxins damage your cell membranes is through the process of inflammation. Cellular detoxification becomes compromised, largely because the antioxidant factories of the mitochondria that would normally handle that become overwhelmed.
Daniel Pompa. Diseases occur due to cell membrane inflammation and not just of the outer membrane, but also the inner mitochondrial membrane, where inflammation can drastically affect all cell function and energy.
And when cell membranes are damaged, nutrients have a harder time getting in. If the membrane is compromised, it's like shutting down the only road to and from the city—eventually everything needed for the city to function and survive is going to be kept from entering and the city the cell will eventually break down.
The message gets sent back undelivered. And toxins—along with the unholy trinity of inflammation, oxidation and glycation—are one of the reasons. All four damage those receptors. Either way, fat burning is compromised and you remain a sugar burner. The point here is that everything that needs to happen for effortless and efficient fat burning is compromised by things like inflammation, oxidation, glycation and toxins.
That includes the energy production factories in the cell mitochondria and it definitely includes the hormone receptors that live on the cell surface. These stealth molecules look very much like ones our body recognizes and knows what to do with, but they're as real as a twenty dollar Louis Vuitton bag. A random molecule that interferes with the way your molecule works because it looks just like it reminds us that in this sense we have more to fear from friendly looking chemicals than from monstrous ones.
Baker is talking about are often referred to as hormone mimics. And of the hormone mimics, xenoestrogens—chemicals that behave like estrogen but are foreign to the body—may be the most destructive. These compounds—found throughout our environment and often lurking in the most innocent of places— react with our body the same way hormones do, but they have devastating results. Incidentally, one of the best reasons for eating organic is to minimize exposure to these chemicals. But phytoestrogens are lightweights in the hormonal disruption sweepstakes, compared to the really dangerous man-made stuff made by pharmaceutical companies, or pesticides like atrazine that are notorious for causing reproductive cancers.
Another class of xenoestrogens is phthalates, which are industrial chemicals used to give flexibility to plastics, but which, in men, interfere with the normal action of testosterone.
Among their many negative impacts on your health, these xeonestrogens wreak havoc on your testosterone levels. This not only means reduced sex drive in both men and women , but also reduced IGF-1 levels. Remember, testosterone is one of the chemicals that is required for the transformation of HGH into IGF-1 in your liver.
Doctors have been postulating about the effects of environmental toxins for a long time. He stated that these endocrine disrupters may play a role in a range of problems, from developmental and reproductive abnormalities to neurological and immunological defects to cancer.
They make you old and sick as well. Toxins Directly Damage Mitochondria One important thing to know about mitochondria—besides the fact that they are ground zero for fat burning in the cells—is that they are very sensitive creatures. And like all sensitive creatures, they are easily hurt. Take mercury, for example. But mercury does a number of other awful things which can indirectly keep you stalled in a sugar burning metabolism. Chief among them: mercury damages your mitochondria.
But mercury goes one step beyond just generating more free radicals and oxidative damage. What is the result of all this mitochondrial damage? Fat burning slows to a crawl, if it even happens at all.
Your body shifts toward a sugar-burning metabolism, and your fat stays safely locked away on your hips, butt, thighs and stomach. And you stay fat not to mention sick, tired, depressed and old! It performs thousands of functions every day. But what you may not have been aware of before reading this book is that it produces a number of important chemicals as well, including IGF Phase 1 is dependent on a group of powerful enzymes known collectively as the Cytochrome P enzyme system, while Phase 2 is dependent upon amino acids.
Both phases of detoxification depend on certain critical key nutrients. Phase 1 detoxification removes the toxins and packages them into little metabolic equivalents of garbage bags. Phase 2 actually throws the garbage bags out. Phase 1 is highly dependent on the antioxidants from brightly colored fruits and vegetables, while Phase 2 is highly dependent on specific amino acids that a relatively higher protein diet will provide.
Sound familiar? Then it will start naturally producing IGF-1 for you once more. Keep this going, and your house will be filled with black soot. Well, that's exactly what happens in your cells when you are exposed to toxins. Because your built-in cellular defenses are overwhelmed. See, your cells contain a whole antioxidant system designed to keep themselves healthy. Preventing that rusting—quenching those free radicals—requires antioxidants.
And in a healthy, functioning fat-burning metabolism, those antioxidants—with long names like glutathione, catalase and superoxide dismutase—do a fine job. But problems occur when we ask that system to do too much. Which is exactly what happens when we overwhelm our bodies with sugar, empty calories that contain no additional nutrients, and expose it to toxins.
Now the cells antioxidant defense factory is overwhelmed, and all hell breaks loose. The fire grows at the same time your ability to put it out grows weaker! This is definitely not a good thing when it happens in your cells, but that's precisely what you get when you overwhelm them with toxins. This turns fat burning down even further and is a central factor in virtually every disease we know of including Alzheimer's, obesity, diabetes, heart, disease, and cancer.
In case you're dizzy from all the science stuff in this chapter, let's break it down to the basics: 1. To have a smooth running and fat-burning metabolism, you have to take care of your cells, specifi- cally the cellular engines known as mitochondria. The mitochondria are easily damaged by toxins, but they fight back with their own powerful antioxidant army. But even that powerful antioxidant army is powerless in the face of accumulated toxins, inflamma- tion, oxidative damage and glycation.
Supporting that intracellular antioxidant system and detoxifying your body is essential for staying young, happy and healthy, and is essential for fat burning. And that's exactly what we are going to do in this program! While a structured detox program is beyond the scope of this program, in Section 3 I will provide you with tons of foods filled with natural anti-inflammatories and antioxidants.
The nutrition program in The Metabolic Factor is designed to help you detoxify your body naturally. In Section 3 we will also discuss some ways you can reduce your toxic exposure and reverse the effects of toxins you have already endured.
Follow these steps, and you'll clean out the cellular gunk that's holding you back from that fat-burning nirvana you've been dreaming of! These toxins are known as hormone mimics or en- docrine disrupters. They not only interfere with fat burning, they also play a role in a range of chronic diseases. Your liver becomes overwhelmed and can no longer do its job correctly. Not even close—in fact, I am going to recommend something completely the opposite.
Let me explain Oh, and I almost forgot: Berardi also happens to have a PhD in exercise physiology. He worked on a study at the University of Texas that put sedentary participants into one of two groups. Group one just kept on doing what they were doing, exercise-wise, which was basically nothing. Group two was given a week program of hours of activity per week. The program was designed by Berardi and overseen by both a weightlifting coach and a group exercise coach. However, those subjects who exercised, and shifted their diet to include more protein and fat and less carbohydrates, saw a number of significant improvements in strength, cardiovascular fitness and blood lipid levels.
I have a theory, and I'll tell you about it in a moment, as well as the solution to the problem! But first, let's take a look at data that shows where exercise does have a tremendous impact—in slowing down the aging process.
If there was a drug on earth that could accomplish all those things, the pharmaceutical companies would be lining up for the chance to make it, and it would be the biggest seller of all time. In addition to all the amazing stuff listed above, exercise is also a terrific stress reducer. Exercise Reduces Stress A study of stressed-out women found that exercising vigorously for an average of forty-five minutes over as short a period as three days caused changes at the cellular level.
The exercising women had cells that actually looked younger. Exercise Boosts Brain Function Research by Arthur Kramer at the University of Illinois showed that six months of moderate exercise actually increased the volume of both the grey and the white matter in the brain, proving that exercise can build up your brain. A pretty moderate level can do the trick, in this case, just walking forty-five to sixty minutes, three times a week. One theory is that it does so by increasing blood flow to the brain.
And, of course, exercise has a profound impact on one of the hormones we most care about when it comes to losing body fat—our old friend insulin. Exercise Improves Insulin Sensitivity Remember, insulin—the fat storage hormone—escorts sugar into the muscle cells where it can be burned for energy.
When you exercise, you create a demand in the cells for immediately available energy, which is usually sugar. That means insulin now has somewhere to go with its sugar payload. It takes it into the exercising muscle cells, which are more than happy to welcome it in. It also mean you have less circulating insulin in your blood, making room for the all-important IGF-1 hormones to send their fat-burning messages. This alone makes exercise worth the price of admission, since insulin resistance is at the heart of obesity and diabetes, and probably involved in heart disease as well.
In any case, insulin resistance will keep you from burning fat any day of the week. Exercise helps reverse it. And the more you do it, the better it is. One study looked at people who were already walking—folks in the National Walkers Health Study—and divided them into four groups, depending on how much walking they did per week. Those who walked the most had double digit reductions in their risk of dying from either cardiovascular disease or diabetes.
In this study, after twenty-four weeks, walkers saw significant changes in hs-CRP, the best measure of systemic inflammation I know. And that was in addition to a significant drop in BMI, waist circumference, fasting blood sugar, triglycerides, and a significant increase in HDL cholesterol.
However, exercise by itself is a pretty sucky way to lose body fat. Take the data from the National Weight Control Registry.
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