The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (5 page)

What’s even crazier is that these findings were just as strong in people who exercised regularly!
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,
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In our modern world, we believe that we can go to the gym for an hour and wash away all of our sedentary sins, but it just doesn’t work like that. If you work in an office, commute by car, and watch a few hours of TV each night, it’s not hard to see how you could spend the vast majority of your waking life (up to 15 hours a day!) sitting on your butt. This is a far cry from the evolutionary norms for humans and has serious consequences for our health.

Seeing mind-boggling numbers like I just showed you is one of the reasons that I now use a standing desk for most of my work. In fact, it’s just my regular IKEA desk with another box on top of it so that my computer is at eye level as I’m standing. I now spend at least half of my working day standing and only use my couch (just opposite my desk) as my temporary reprieve.

The evidence is quite clear: If you reduce the amount of time spent sitting, regardless of whether you exercise or not, you can reduce your risk of obesity and early mortality. If you did nothing more than just stand more throughout the day, your body would be primed to keep you lean and healthy. How, you ask? It’s simple, really—standing tones muscles, improves posture, increases bloodflow, ramps up your metabolism, and burns extra calories. If you think about it, it makes sense.

When you sit, your heart becomes lazy and doesn’t have to work as hard against gravity to move blood to your upper body as it would if you were standing. Similarly, since few muscles are required when sitting, these unused muscles can weaken and atrophy over time, similar to what astronauts experience when traveling in the zero-gravity environment of outer space.

In
Chapter 6
, I’ll show you some simple and powerful ways to prevent these problems from occurring—without exercising more. In the meantime, here’s a simple truth to never forget: If you don’t use it, you lose it. This goes for your heart, your muscles, your brain, everything!

Conversely, if you abuse it, you’ll also lose it. I like to say that sitting is the new smoking, but actually, the same can be said for too much exercise. Who would have thought? With all these facts about how harmful too much sitting can be, you might be motivated to rush out to the gym, but not so fast. While some exercise of the right kind is terrific, too much may also be a major reason why you’re holding on to weight.

Your body is always going, going, going, and like anything that’s constantly in motion, it’s subject to regular wear and tear. That’s why, even as a fitness coach, I don’t advocate excessive exercise. Going to the gym 5 to 7 days a week and killing yourself for up to 2 hours at a time creates a time bomb inside of you just waiting to go off. It might produce results in the very short run, but that level of intense activity is impossible to sustain. That’s precisely why pro athletes fizzle out by the time they’re 35 years old: Their bodies get beaten up and bottom out. It’s impossible to sustain decades of the intense daily exercise they put themselves through.

I played pro soccer until I was 24 and later worked with hundreds of high-level collegiate athletes. I’ve seen firsthand what too much exercise can do to the human body. I won’t lie to you and tell you that too much exercise will make you fat, because it won’t. What it will do, though, is slowly destroy your body and make you look and feel at least 10 years older than your actual age. I’ll share more of those insights and smart exercise solutions with you in
Chapter 6
, where I reveal how to train smarter using my LIFT method. For now, just understand that too much exercise (a really subjective determination based on many factors) can lead to overtraining, which has harmful effects on cortisol levels, thyroid function, and the immune system.

Research has shown that the cellular damage that occurs during overtraining can lead to nonspecific, general activation of the immune system, including changes in natural killer cell activity and the
increased
activation of peripheral blood lymphocytes. This hyperactivity of the immune system following intense overtraining can possibly even contribute to the development of autoimmune conditions, chronic fatigue, weight loss, decreased appetite, hypothyroidism, and sleep changes.
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Remember, the poison is in the dose. Too little or too much exercise can be harmful. We’re after just the right amount to turn you into a healthy, fat-burning machine. That’s what you’ll learn how to do in this book.

FAT TRIGGER #3:

Toxins

Toxins come in all shapes and all sizes—from pesticides to plastic by-products and everything in between. They are found in our foods, in the water we drink, in the air we breathe, and even within our homes. Some of these toxic compounds have been banned, but the damage has already been done as they continue to bioaccumulate in the food chain and pose long-term challenges to the farming soils throughout America.

Our bodies were not designed to process these substances. For a disturbing look at the chemicals that breach the boundaries of our bodies, check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. It’s downright terrifying. Scientists at the CDC found that nearly every person they tested was host to a boatload of nasty chemicals. They found flame retardants stored in fatty tissue and bisphenol A, a hormone-like substance found in plastics, excreted in urine. Even babies are contaminated. The average newborn was shown to have 287 chemicals in her umbilical cord blood, 217 of which are neurotoxic—poisonous to nerves or nerve cells.
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,
22

This is serious stuff. Worse yet, these chemicals have not only been building up in our environment and food supply, but they’re also abundant inside of our homes. A study as far back as 1985 revealed that the levels of numerous airborne chemicals were 10 times greater inside the home than outdoors!
²³
What’s the problem with these toxins and chemicals? Can they really harm you and, for the purposes of our conversation here, make you fat? The answer is yes and yes.

A
2008 study in the prestigious journal
Lancet
showed that environmental toxins indeed make you fat and cause diabetes.
²⁴
Toxicity is also a key metabolic problem for the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight. These chemicals contribute to weight gain in various ways, including disruption of the hormone-signaling system that regulates your metabolism, damage to and accumulation in your fat tissue, and increased risk for poisoning during weight loss,
²⁵
as these toxins are released back into the circulatory system once that fat starts disappearing.

You probably know that your thyroid gland (and its hormones, especially T3) controls every aspect of your metabolism and thus how your body uses energy (or burns calories). Well, it’s been shown that toxins have an inverse relationship with thyroid hormone function, so as levels of toxins in the blood go up, levels of biologically active thyroid hormone, T3, go down.
²⁶

To make the toxin-fat connection simple, here’s a synopsis of how it all goes down in your body (based on our current understanding): Toxins negatively impact gene signaling within your fat cells and induce new fat cells to form while simultaneously increasing inflammation. Then, since many of these newly formed fat cells are themselves damaged by the toxins, they become metabolically impotent, which means they are unable to make leptin (the hormone that tells your brain that you have enough calories).
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28

These damaged fat cells can swell like balloons as they fill up with more fat and toxins, making them unable to efficiently perform their normal functions. This leads directly to increased risk for type 2 diabetes via suppression of the important fat cell hormone known as adiponectin,
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,
31
which normally increases insulin sensitivity and reduces tissue inflammation. Considering their direct impact on thyroid function; fat cell number, size, and function; and type 2 diabetes, I’m sure you can see that ridding your body of toxins is imperative for successful weight loss and overall good health.

Inside
The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet,
you’ll discover how to purge your body of toxins through food and exercise alone. As you do so and we reduce the amount that continues to come in, your body will inevitably reset itself back to its factory-installed fat-burning settings.

FAT
TRIGGER #4:

Deadly Belly Bugs

Most people are not aware of this, but the contents of your entire digestive tube (from mouth to anus) are actually considered to be
outside
your body. Its role is to selectively absorb nutrients, while keeping out dangerous compounds. What passes through the intestinal/gut walls is then considered
inside
the body. The rest is normally expelled in the stool.

A healthy gut is critical for ensuring that this process runs smoothly and that your body stays in good health. Since the beginning of time, we have evolved with numerous microorganisms that live on and in us, surrounding us at all times. In fact, we have 10 times more bacteria in and around us than we do human cells. This microbiome is critical to our health. Without it, we’d be dead. Unfortunately, many people suffer with a host of health issues (including weight gain) because this microbiome is completely out of whack.

Let me explain: Your gut (or large intestine) is host to hundreds of different types of microorganisms—trillions, in total numbers. These microorganisms communicate with your immune system and help to keep you healthy. But things can quickly go wrong if the balance of these microorganisms shifts in the wrong direction.
Dysbiosis
—the imbalance of good to bad bacteria—is a far too common problem in today’s excessively clean, sugar-laden, and antibiotic-happy world.

Antibiotics—I call them A bombs—wipe out all bacteria in their path. The problem is that the bad kind have a tendency to flourish afterward much more rapidly since they’re left unchecked by the good bacteria. This can lead to a vicious cycle of lifelong bacterial-related illnesses and a severely compromised gut. When you combine over-medication with food choices—like sugar—that feed our bad bacteria, it’s no surprise we’re dealing with more health problems than before.

A big reason for my developing an autoimmune condition when I was 17 years old was that my gut was severely compromised from years of dietary and medication abuse. Because I had eaten the very foods known to harm the sensitive gut lining and feed bad bacteria, like gluten and sugar, respectively, it’s no surprise that this happened to me.

When
you look at the rampant increase of autoimmune disorders today, it’s pretty simple to understand what’s happening: We are eating foods that hurt our gut, which in turn makes our gut more permeable to larger food proteins, or leaky. These larger proteins, which should normally be further broken down before being absorbed, seep into our bloodstream, which triggers an inflammatory immune response. The body responds in this manner since it considers these proteins foreign and potentially dangerous, even if they’re seemingly harmless foods.

With constant exposure, these proteins can eventually trick our immune system into attacking our own body because many (for instance, gliadin from wheat and casein from dairy) closely resemble the proteins of our very own tissues. This is known as molecular mimicry, and it’s one of the leading causes of a host of health issues. Take, for instance, Hashimoto’s disease—a type of autoimmune disease that accounts for 90 percent of hypothyroidism cases, in which constant consumption of gluten (specifically, the protein gliadin) can turn the immune response against the thyroid. It’s all because the protein in gluten resembles our thyroid tissue. Gluten isn’t the only cause, but it plays a big part.

But let’s bring this back to the gut and how it might be setting your body up to store too much fat. One such way is via the generation of toxins called lipopolysaccharides (LPS) that arise as a result of bacterial imbalance within your gut. These toxins have been shown to stimulate the formation of new fat cells, thereby promoting weight gain.
³²
In addition, these cause leptin resistance, which significantly impairs your brain’s ability to respond to the “I’m full” signal you get after eating. Thus, you tend to eat more.

It’s not just the toxins coming from bad bacteria that prove problematic. The composition of bacteria within your gut can also be a big factor that determines whether or not you’re set to gain and hold on to weight. A 2010 study in the
British Journal of Nutrition
showed that among 50 women, reduced numbers of the bacteria
Bifidobacterium
and
Bacteroides
and increased numbers of
Staphylococcus
, Enterobacteriaceae, and
Escherichia coli
were detected in overweight compared
with
normal-weight women.
³³
Obviously, certain bacteria are not as desirable as others.

The dietary approach you’ll discover in this book will help foster the good bacteria and starve off many of the not-so-good ones so that you can enjoy better health and easier weight loss. The best part is that this will all happen as a strategic by-product of simply eating the healthy foods you’ll enjoy on the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet.

FAT TRIGGER #5:

Sugar Overload

It’s fitting to follow the section on gut health with a discussion of one of the foods that’s playing a leading role in ruining it—sugar! If you’re someone who has a sweet tooth, then you undoubtedly know how challenging it can be to kick those sugar cravings. Sugar is an addictive drug, and it lights up pleasure centers in the brain in a way similar to what happens when we take hard-core drugs like cocaine and heroin.