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Why does fat loss seem so easy for some, and impossible for others?

Understand why, and how to succeed despite the obstacles.

There are reasons fat sticks to some like glue, while it seems to melt away effortlessly for others. There are many, but fortunately three are most common, and little known.

Even more fortunately, these problems are not nearly as difficult to overcome as you might think. I had all three.

Addiction to sugar.

Addicition is a loose term. Not all addictions work the same way, but they can generally be characterized by physiological and psychological characteristics.

Physiological addiction to sugar.

Physiological addiction to sugar comes from repeated sugar high / sugar low cycles. You eat fast carbs, your pancreas secretes high amounts of insulin, the sugar in your bloodstream is suddenly stored and this causes a sugar low. This sugar low causes a craving for more sugar, so you eat more fast carbs, and the cycle repeats itself.

Each cycle strengthens the pancreas, as if it were a muscle. Sugar peaks go higher, and so do sugar lows. The cravings for sugar get worse.

Psychological addiction to sugar.

Each time you satisfy a craving for sugar, your brain associates the relief / pleasure, a positive outcome, to eating sugar. Actually it will associate it to the type of food you commonly eat to satisfy a sugar craving, be it a candy bar, ice cream, cereal…

This is caused positive reinforcement in psychology. It is similar to training an animal. If a dog is given something to eat each time it responds as expected to a command (sit, roll over, paw…), it’s mouth will start to foam when it hears the command. If it is trained with scratching behind the ear, it will wag its tail. It’s brain associates the command with the anticipation of something it appreciates and salivates if it is food or reacts otherwise if it is an expression of affection.

Our (reptilian) brains work the same way. The candy bar is associated to a positive experience, so we writhe in anticipation every time we see it, even if there is no sugar low.

Resistance to insulin prevents sugar lows (but not sugar highs), but psychological addiction will keep us wanting those candy bars.

Resistance to insulin.

The constant repeating of high secretions of insulin causes our body’s cells to react in a way that they would when facing just about any kind of abuse. Immunization. With time, this causes the cell’s ability to uptake sugar (and various nutriments such as fatty acids, minerals, vitamins…) to diminish. This starves the cells, even if the nutrients are available in the bloodstream. If you decide to start working out, your starved cells are not going to make that easy for you.

This is why the weight loss plan requires dieting before you consider exercise. First, cool down the pancreas by giving it a steady flow of glucose, by using “slow carbs”, or low glycemic index foods. Instead of a series of peaks and lows, it deals with much more constant sugar levels. This can take care of the physiological addiction in a matter of days or weeks.

Soon, the psychological addiction wears off as well.

Take the nutrients that are known to fight resistance to insulin. Anything that will help recover insulin sensitivity, as listed in the plan.

Then you can consider exercise. Your efforts will be rewarded with burned fat instead of fatigue or drowsiness.

About diabetes.

If the process that leads to addiction to sugar, then resistance to insulin is allowed to continue, then there is a possibility that the pancreas wears down and becomes incapable of manufacturing required levels of insulin.

Low insulin and low sugar uptake capacity means that blood sugar goes through the roof. The same happens with fatty acids, that form into triglycerides in the bloodstream (by linking to glycerol) and ultimately threaten coronaries.

At this stage, you’ve become a permanent diabetes type II patient, and life sucks. 8% of Americans are diabetes patients, and naturally the ratio is much higher amongst the adult overweight population.

So start the free weight loss plan now.  

Muscle type.

Fat is burned in mitochondria. These are little structures that exist in most of the body’s cells. Without mitochondria, fatty acids cannot be metabolized. Fat loss is impossible.

Type II muscle cells (fast twitch muscle cells used in strength or speed movements) have next to no mitochondria.

And chronically overweight people often have a much higher type II to type I muscle cell ratio. This is in part what can be referred to as “bad genetics”, also known as the mesomorphic build. If the type I muscle cells are too rare, then the only solution is endurance exercise that will cause type I muscle cells to develop. But that exercise is hard to do, because it requires endurence muscle, and there isn’t much of it available.

If there is addiction to sugar, resistance to insulin, AND extremely rare type I muscle cells, weight loss becomes excrutiatingly difficult and slow. Read this article by Dana-Farber for a better understanding of this (Dana Farber is Harvard’s cancer research institution). In this case slow carb dieting, fighting resistance to insulin and aerobic exercise are all necessary.

If you’re a hypochondriac like me, you’re probably already sure you have this problem. You might, if you’re the strong, bulky type, but it is unlikely that it is bad enough to be considered insurmountable.

Now that we’re into the less common issues…

Hypothyroidism.

Less common but much better known, hypothyroidism can also make it more difficult to lose weight. I remember a few years back, hoping that hypothyroidism could be the cause of all my troubles. Get it treated, and I would be lean, without the effort!

Well, here are the facts told, not without some humor, by a trusted doctor.

(…) about two percent of the population has hypothyroidism. Women are five to eight times more likely to be hypothyroid than men.

Weight gain is prevalent, and of course we’d all like to think our weight gain is due to hypothyroidism, not to the extra bag of potato chips we ate lying on the couch last night.  Doctor John Hong.

Bad news, there is only a very low chance that your thyroid is to blame. But cheer up, because if you read the article in full, you learned that if it were to blame, you could be facing a host of other problems that you are better off without (osteoporosis, baldness – even ladies…). So the bad news are actually good news!

There is a significantly higher chance that you are affected by addiction to sugar, or the next step, resistance to insulin. Hopefully, you’ve steered clear, and will keep it that way, of diabetes.

Perhaps you are amongst the Dana Farber case study population with overwhelmingly high type II to type I muscle cell ratio. But rest assured, the chances of it being insurmountable are much lower than hypothyroidism. But it doesn’t hurt to see a doctor and talk about your options.

For most of us, slow carbs (more details on those in a later post), taking on resistance to insulin and a good old calorie deficit (see the free weight loss plan for complete details) should be enough (don’t forget cheat day!). It was for me, and I’ve had more than my share of doubts about ever being able to control weight.

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