Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson

Author:Shawn Stevenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2016-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE LOWDOWN

If you’re focusing on cutting calories to lose weight, then you might as well go and buy yourself some larger-size clothes right now. Research shows that up to 70 percent of the weight you lose through traditional calorie restriction is coming from a loss of your lean muscle tissue. As mentioned in Chapter 11, your muscle is your body’s fat-burning machinery, and if you lose it through dieting, you’ll depress your metabolism and set yourself up for long-term weight gain.

The problem is that people are thinking in terms of weight loss instead of body-fat loss. You don’t want to lose weight. You want to lose fat. Remember, when it comes to this, it’s all about the hormones.

You have to incite your body to secrete hormones that use stored body fat for fuel, and it’s really as simple as that.

So how do we make this happen?

The first thing to understand is that you are either burning fat or storing fat—there is no in between. (Sounds very Zen, doesn’t it?) If you’re activating hormones that store fat all the time, then you’re automatically throwing yourself out of the game, even if you’re carefully counting your calories.

Your body’s major fat-storing hormone is insulin. You may think of it only in regards to diabetes, but it’s one of the most important hormones to your survival (and it can make you very fat if you don’t know how to turn it off).

Now comes the easy part. The number one thing that insulin reacts to is carbohydrates. This includes all starches like bread, pasta, and potatoes; refined sugar products like cakes, candy, and soda; and even healthier carbohydrates like fresh fruit. To your body, it doesn’t matter. These carbs come in, and insulin is turning on. Of course, an orange is better than orange sherbet in that it’s delivering healthy vitamins and minerals as well, but the carb content is going to end up as glucose in the blood regardless.

To shift your body into more of a fat-burning state, you need to put more of your focus on the other two macronutrient groups: protein and fat. A study published in the Journal of Nutrition showed that increasing protein intake led to enhanced weight loss and improved blood fat levels. And a study in the New England Journal of Medicine split 132 people (many of whom had metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes) into either a low-carb group or a low-fat group for 6 months. The low-carb group lost an average of 12.8 pounds, while the low-fat group lost only 4.2 pounds. The lower-carb, higher dietary fat group literally lost three times as much weight!

It’s not about having a low-carb diet necessarily; it’s about having a better ratio of all three macronutrient groups for you and your unique metabolism. This seems pretty simple, right? So why aren’t people doing this?

I was there on the front lines. I was sitting in the nutrition classes in college and being told repeatedly by my professors that we need to eat less fat and more carbohydrates to be healthy and maintain a healthy weight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.