The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week (7 page)

BOOK: The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week
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From a very young age, we have trained ourselves to desire certain foods over others. We will go to great lengths to eat these foods and,
in
most cases, will have too much of them, which contributes to weight gain. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. Food-reward associations likely evolved to guide us to scarce calorie-dense, nontoxic foods in our ancestral environment. If our ancestors had access to pizza and hamburgers, they would most certainly have chosen those over broccoli.

Eating 100 calories of broccoli requires a lot of broccoli. Eating 100 calories of pizza requires just a few bites. It’s a more efficient way of consuming calories, which thousands of years ago is what our bodies
would
have wanted to do to survive in a scarce caloric environment. But we no longer live in a scarce caloric environment.

As I mentioned earlier, our main motives for eating come from our internal energy status and our external environment. When we eat to satisfy our internal energy needs, we are eating in response to our body’s hunger signals, which tell us that more calories (energy) are required. However, when we eat based on external environmental signals, we are eating for other reasons. Just browse the Web for pictures of chocolate molten lava cake and see how your body responds. If you’re like me and you love chocolate, then your mouth is probably already watering just reading these words. That’s dopamine at work once again. Those dopamine receptors are anticipating the potential reward—your eating the chocolate cake—which would flood them with dopamine and make you feel alive, at least temporarily.

As you probably know from experience, that urge then persists. It doesn’t just vanish into thin air. This is why food advertisements are so powerful. Their external signals (juicy hamburgers, fresh pizza right out of the oven) trigger one or more of our primal senses, which then prompt us to seek out that food. We don’t stand a chance.

The other reason we tend to eat higher amounts of man-made processed foods is because they provide a weaker “I’m full” signal to the brain. Normally, when you eat food, your stomach stretches, which sends a hormonal signal to your brain to stop eating. Furthermore, when food reaches your small intestine, a similar signal is sent via hormones like peptide YY3-36 and cholecystokinin to notify your brain that you’re satiated.

But here’s the thing: Satiety does not correspond to the calorie count of a food. It is mainly affected by the
quality
of the food, specifically by the presence (or lack) of certain macronutrients. Protein, fiber, carbohydrates, and fat (in that order) have the greatest satiating effect. Thus, a high-protein, high-fiber meal like salmon with lentils will keep you full longer than a high-carb, high-fat meal like pasta with cream sauce.

Food companies know these facts all too well and specifically engineer their foods to be higher in carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and salt and
lower
in fiber and protein so that your brain has no choice but to crave more of them. Furthermore, the more palatable a food, the more you have to eat to achieve satiety. That’s why, if you’ve lived on man-made Frankenfoods for years, it becomes a lot harder to give up those foods.

Let’s be honest about something—kale isn’t nearly as palatable as an Oreo cookie. That’s why we don’t willingly eat as much kale and why we can easily polish off a box of cookies in no time. We eat more of what tastes good to us.
47
Processed foods have been designed to taste great and stimulate our brain’s dopamine-releasing pleasure centers. It’s that simple.

Want a simple formula for how to eat more (almost uncontrollably)? Eat foods that taste good and are high in calories, low in fiber, and low in protein. That sounds like most fast foods, if you ask me. This is why being fat is really not your fault. If you’ve relied on fast processed foods for much of your life (haven’t we all?), then your brain has had a lot of exposure to these highly rewarding (yet fattening) foods. It recalls the taste and how good certain processed foods made you feel. And it will go to great lengths to get more of them in spite of your best attempts to eat well.

I’m not saying that eating healthy is a lost cause, because it certainly isn’t. However, it’s helpful to understand the forces at play and to cut yourself a little slack. Willpower can take you only so far. Consider the following stats at the heart of why we’ve gained so much weight in the past 50 years.


We’ve greatly increased our consumption of inflammatory vegetable fats (canola, soy, corn oils), yet animal fat consumption has actually decreased.


In 1822, the amount of sugar consumed was equivalent to drinking one can of soda every 5 days. Today, we consume that same amount every 7 hours!
48


The cost of food has plummeted since the 1930s, from 25 percent to 10 percent of disposable income, which means we’ve been able to buy and eat more food. And now 43 percent of our food expenditure occurs away from home (i.e., in restaurants, via takeout), compared to just 13.4 percent back in 1929.
49


There’s more food variety than ever before. In 1980, the average US supermarket carried 15,000 food products. By 2012, that number had soared to 43,000 food products, which means there are more ways to eat the very foods and ingredients that are making us fat and robbing our health.
50

When you combine all of these factors with the fact that food companies now engineer their foods to please our most primal desires, it’s no wonder more people are overweight and obese than ever before. Our neurobiology has remained the same, but our environment has changed dramatically. To make matters even worse, once obesity is established, overeating becomes a self-sustaining habit that is very hard to break.

Why? A big reason is the hormone leptin. Under normal circumstances, your body fat secretes leptin in proportion to its size. The more fat, the more leptin. This hormone then tells your brain’s command center—the hypothalamus—to stop eating because enough energy (i.e., fat) is present.

When you lose weight, fat stores decline and leptin goes down. The hypothalamus then kicks in and prompts you to eat more (and decrease energy expenditure), fat cells grow, leptin goes up, and food intake and energy expenditure normalize. So you’d think that having more fat would be a good thing since it tells your brain to stop eating, right?

Sadly, that’s not what happens. As with many other hormones, the more that is present and constantly knocking on the door of its receptor site, the greater the likelihood that you lose sensitivity to that hormone. Essentially, you stop responding to it. In this case, too much body fat leads to leptin resistance, which means that leptin’s “I’m full” signal does not reach the brain and you end up eating more and more food.

Leptin resistance is also significantly associated with inflammation response in the hypothalamus. Research has shown that C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation) binds to leptin and attenuates its physiological functions.
51
So, anything that creates inflammation in your body (think gluten, dairy, alcohol, rancid vegetable oils, etc.) can eventually disrupt leptin signaling in the brain, which means that you’re more likely to eat more food than your body really needs. It’s
also
well known that fructose consumption causes leptin resistance,
52
so put down that can of soda or sugary bottled juice!

As you can see, an arsenal of internal and external factors influences how much we eat. And it seems when we override our internal needs by continually giving in to external temptations, our internal regulation of food intake eventually becomes severely disrupted.

An altered internal physiology, along with the external presence of foods engineered to be extremely tasty—high in sugar, fat, and salt and low in satiety-inducing protein and fiber—explains why we’re fatter than ever before. It’s also part of the reason why we’re more likely to eat cheesecake after a big meal, even though we’re stuffed, than a boiled potato.

Even though you do your best to eat well, you’re still at the mercy of your environment, which can have a powerful effect on your food choices. For instance:

1.
If a food costs less and takes little effort to prepare, we tend to eat more of it.
Food companies know this. It’s part of their gospel. After all, would you be more likely to eat a piece of chocolate cake sitting right in front of you that costs nothing or to run to the store, buy the ingredients, and make it yourself? I think the answer is obvious. That’s why having readily accessible, convenient foods in your house is a disaster waiting to happen. Food that is immediately accessible is more likely to be eaten than food that takes more effort to prepare.

2.
If we eat with lots of people, we tend to eat more.
53
I’m a big fan of social gatherings where we share food with friends and loved ones. It’s one of the joys of life. However, the research shows that when we eat with six or more people, we tend to eat 72 percent more calories. I think that’s partly because we get lost in conversation and the social ambiance and become less mindful of what and how much we’re eating.

3.
Stress can make us eat more.
In the short term, stress causes the hypothalamus to provide corticotropin-releasing hormone, which suppresses appetite. The brain also sends messages to your adrenal glands to pump out the hormone adrenaline, which triggers the body’s
fight-
or-flight response and temporarily puts eating on hold. But if stress persists, it’s a different story. The adrenal glands release cortisol, and cortisol increases appetite. Sadly, it doesn’t increase your appetite for healthy foods. As you likely know, when you’re stressed, you seek out foods high in fat, sugar, or both, which seem to calm the brain by inhibiting further activity in the parts that produce and process stress and related emotions.

4.
Lack of or poor-quality sleep can make us eat more.
Sleeping and eating are intricately related.
54
Animals subjected to total sleep deprivation for prolonged periods end up eating dramatically more food.
55
In humans, the effects of lack of sleep or poor-quality sleep are similar and could be a significant contributing factor to our weight-gain epidemic. In 1960, American adults slept an average of 8 to 8.9 hours per night, whereas in 2002, research conducted by the National Sleep Foundation indicated that the average duration had fallen to 6.9 to 7 hours.
56
,
57

Normally, sleep is facilitated by a rise in melatonin and a drop in cortisol as the sun begins to set and our environment gets darker. During sleep, we see a greater release of growth hormone (for building and repairing cells) and a decrease in adrenal stimulation. However, inadquate or poor-quality sleep disrupts all of these responses, more readily activating our stress-response pathways, which tell our bodies to hold on to fat.

Additionally, sleep loss alters the ability of our hunger hormones—leptin and ghrelin—to accurately signal caloric need to the brain, leading to excessive caloric intake when food is freely available.

I hope you’re getting the message that not enough or poor-quality sleep has dramatic and unwanted effects on your body that compel you to eat more food and gain more weight. In
Chapter 8
, Sleep Your Way Thin, I’ll show you the best strategies to help you sleep better.

Michelle’s Story

What Michelle went through on this program was nothing less than a transformation.

When she first started the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet, Michelle weighed 155 pounds, but the weight was just one of her troubles. She was suffering from regular bloating and acne and, what’s worse, had trouble fitting into her clothes. She was so insecure about her stomach that she’d taken to wearing her shirts untucked in an effort to hide it. Miserable, she rarely found the energy or inspiration to cook much other than pasta or unhealthy, easy-to-prepare meals.

Michelle soldiered on, however, relishing the meals on this plan and committing herself to the workouts. The pounds melted off as the weeks passed, and soon, she started wearing her shirts tucked in again. Her hair was fuller and stronger, and her acne was gone. By the time she completed her third round of the 21-day program, she weighed 137 pounds—a weight loss of 18 pounds!

PULLING THE TRIGGER ON FAT

In this chapter, I’ve summed up the major fat triggers literally forcing your body to gain weight. Many are beyond your control, while
others
are directly influenced by your daily actions. The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet is designed to eliminate (or at least minimize) each of these triggers, while resetting your metabolism so that you can start burning fat 24/7.

The exciting thing is that no matter how far gone you think you might be, there’s always hope. There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. It doesn’t matter if you weigh 400 pounds or 160 pounds and just want to lose a few pounds, this program can help.

BOOK: The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week
9.74Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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