Have you ever been curious why we put on weight? Here is how it happens

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If you want to slim down it is worth understanding why we get fat in the first place. The obvious answer, ‘because we eat too much and don’t do enough exercise’, is too simplistic. It’s like going to a tennis coach to improve your game and being told that all you need to do is ‘win more points than your opponent’. True, but not useful. So why has there been such an explosion in obesity, worldwide, over the last 40 years?

There are plenty of plausible explanations, including increased anxiety, stress, poor sleep and becoming less active, but top of my list is more snacking and the fact that we are eating lots more junk food – not just more cola, cake and candy, but refined carbs, up by a whopping 20% since 1980. These foods are packed with calories and are highly addictive . Bursting with sugar and processed fats, they play havoc with our hormones, and one hormone in particular: insulin.

Carbs and insulin the massive contributors to weight gain:

The thing about carbs, particularly the rapidly digestible carbs you find in junk food, but also in white rice and most breads, is that they are swiftly broken down in your gut to release a flood of sugar into your blood. The result is instant energy and a brief feel-good sugar ‘high’. But having lots of sugar in your blood is bad for your body because it damages blood vessels and nerves. So your pancreas responds by releasing a hormone called insulin. Insulin’s main job is to quickly bring high blood-sugar levels back down to normal, and it does this by helping energy-hungry cells, such as those in your muscles and your brain, to take up the sugar.

But if you’re constantly snacking and doing very little to burn the calories off, your body will become less and less sensitive to insulin. So, your pancreas has to work harder to produce more and more insulin. It’s like shouting at kids. The more you shout, the less attention they pay. Two bad things now happen:

1. Your fat cells become large and inflamed, as your body tries to cram more and more energy into them. At some point you exceed your ‘personal fat threshold’. There is no space left to store fat safely, so it begins to overflow into your internal organs, such as your liver. This is how the French make foie gras, their famous liver pate. They feed geese so much starchy maize that their livers are soon bursting with fat. This ‘visceral’ fat – which also infiltrates your pancreas and wraps itself around your heart – is much more dangerous than fat on your buttocks or thighs. It leads to something known as metabolic syndrome, which in turn leads to heart disease, diabetes and dementia. If you want to see what it looks like, visit thefast800.com where there is an image of what my insides looked like before I lost weight. Not for the squeamish.

2. Despite carrying around too much fat, you still feel hungry all the time. That’s because you now have high insulin levels, which encourage continuous fat storage. Which means there’s less fuel around to keep the rest of your body going. 

It’s as if you’re constantly pouring money into your bank account, and then finding it incredibly hard to get it out again. You have money, but you just can’t get at it. High levels of insulin prevent your body from accessing and burning its own energy supply. So, despite the fact that you are carrying around lots of energy in the form of fat, your muscles and your brain can’t easily access it. Deprived of fuel, your brain tells you to eat more. So you do. But because your high insulin levels are encouraging fat storage, you get fatter while staying hungry. In other words, if you have a weight problem it may not be because you lack willpower or you’re greedy. It is more likely that, like one in three Americans, you are insulin-resistant and therefore have too much insulin washing around in your blood. Does this sound crazy? What I’m describing is based on the work of some of the world’s leading metabolic specialists. Dr Robert Lustig, a renowned paediatric endocrinologist who has treated thousands of overweight children, points out in his excellent book, Fat Chance, that understanding insulin is crucial to understanding obesity. ‘Insulin shunts sugar to fat. It makes your fat cells grow. The more insulin the more fat.’ Dr Lustig blames the modern diet, rich in sugar and refined carbs, for pumping up our insulin levels, a claim supported by many other leading obesity experts, including Dr David Ludwig, a paediatrician from Harvard Medical School, and Dr Mark Friedman, head of the Nutrition Science Initiative in San Diego.

As Ludwig and Friedman have put it:
‘The increasing amount and processing of carbohydrates in the American diet has increased insulin levels, put fat cells into storage overdrive and elicited obesity-promoting biological responses in a large number of people. High consumption of refined carbohydrates – chips, crackers, cakes, soft drinks, sugary breakfast cereals and even white rice and bread – has increased body weights throughout the population.

What else damage can raised Insulin Do to you:

If you are insulin-resistant and your body is forced to go on producing lots of insulin, this will not only keep you hungry, it will contribute to many other diseases. It will increase your risk of developing dementia, breast and bowel cancer, contribute to high blood pressure and raise your cholesterol levels. In women, raised insulin levels lead to acne, mood swings, excess hair growth, irregular periods (polycystic ovaries) and infertility. The good news is that, if you change what you eat and lose weight, your insulin levels will come down. Cassie, a nurse with type 2 diabetes who lost 20kg doing the 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet – the key tenets of which are incorporated into the Fast 800 approach – was not only able to come off all medication but soon became pregnant, after many years of trying, with twins! ‘You have not only freed me from food and put me back in charge of my life, but helped me make a miracle possible – which I thought would never happen.’

Credit: The Fast 800