Why is it So Difficult to Lose Weight

Here are the reasons why it is So Difficult to Lose Weight

Why is it so difficult to lose weight? How often have you heard people saying that and that they work out so hard, lose a little, to gain it all back later? Why don’t we lose weight when we eat less and work out more?

One of the reasons is because our bodies maintain a perfect balance at all times.

Our body works like a computer program. We are perfect machines keeping a constant baseline. Our fat cells have a biochemical metabolism that controls them. We also have behavior, genetic makeup, and the food environment of modern living.

We are having a collision between our ancestral genetics versus our new modern life and habits. And that is affecting the way people are gaining weight

What we eat is important because it tells our metabolic system what to do. For thousands of years, we’ve been surviving with food scarcity. Now, there is an unprecedented abundance of food—enough to fill every fat cell in the body and keep them filled.

To understand how the body stores and keeps fat, we must first understand fat cells, how they work, and why they are there.

Fat cells have several essential functions: energy storage, organ protection, cushion, heat generation, and many metabolic functions. You are born with a certain number of fat cells, and there is nothing you can do about that

Once a fat cell is born, it aims to fill itself with fat. If fat levels drop, the leptin hormone will signal your brain to become hungry and lazy. The energy that is not lost is stored as fat. Your body is a perfect machine that maintains everything in balance, including your fat levels.

Think of fat cells as birthday balloons; when empty can be stuffed into a small bag, but when filled can fill an entire room. Fat cells don’t want to be trimmed down. They are designed to do just that; hold on to fat, and not let go.

We are genetically programmed to keep our fat because fat is energy, which means survival in times of famine. Our ancestral family had to work hard to accumulate that good protective fat. The problem is that we barely have any famines (not true, in some parts of the world); instead, there is an endless overabundance of caloric foods.

We have machines performing the work for us to do our heavy work. Most people think that your fat cells are filling up because you eat too much and exercise too little, but that is not the complete story.

How we gain fat has a lot to do with what we eat and how much energy we spend; that is true, but there is more to this story.

It is easy to notice how everyone is eating too much and doing too little, but it is harder to see what is at work under the hood or how this energy is stored. There are many other environmental factors, such as how much we sleep, our stress level, and how much time we spend in front of a computer at work.

These contribute to our obesity epidemic but are simple associations, not the cause. We fill fat cells at an alarming rate because of insulin and how much we have in our bloodstream. There is no fat accumulation without insulin. Insulin makes your fat cells grow. Insulin turns sugar into fat and allows it to go into fat cells.

It's not a problem in regulated amounts, but that is not what’s happening today. Today, adolescents have twice the insulin they did in 1975. High insulin accounts perhaps for 75–80% of all obesity. Insulin can be increased in different ways:

1. The brain can immediately signal your pancreas to make an extra amount of insulin (hyperinsulinemia) in response to highly refined carbohydrate meals.

2. If you eat certain foods, you can build fat in your liver, which will make the liver sick and create insulin resistance; in turn, the pancreas has no alternative but to make more insulin.

3. The other problem is stress. When your stress hormone cortisol level raises, two things happen; it will make your liver and muscles more insulin resistant, thus raising your insulin levels even more and driving fat into fat cells. In addition, people can increase their insulin levels by taking anti-inflammatory steroids, anti-psychotics, and hypoglycemic agents to treat diabetes which is notorious for driving insulin levels up and causing excessive weight gain.

These spikes in insulin become part of the metabolic pathway program, which controls our body's energy consumption and storage. Once this metabolic program is in place, it becomes much harder to change anything and thus lose weight.

These biochemical pathways are indeed robust. So, how can we get our fat cells to slim down? Not easy. Once a fat cell is filled, it doesn’t want to give up what it has gained.

One of the main reasons losing weight is so difficult is that when we lose fat, we also lose leptin, the brain signaler that regulates our appetite and how much fat we need inside fat cells. It is a feedback loop, so what are our options?

Here are a few things you can do to restore the fat-burning abilities found in your body. When it comes to burning fat, how you do it matters more than what you do.

1. Take cold showers. They will activate a hormone cascade that will make your metabolism faster, create brown fat and teach your body to burn fat for energy.

2. Intermittent fasting. It will allow you to eat just about any diet you desire. You’ll teach your body to burn fat for energy, activate your fat-glucose-burning switch, and lose weight.

3. Exercise for 15 minutes in the morning before breakfast after consuming caffeine. Here is a great way to wake up in the morning and prime your body to not rely on energy from what you eat but rather on your stored energy sources.

It is not about calory in and calory out. We must change all the markers that alter our metabolic system to produce less insulin and combat stress simultaneously. And of course, eat less and work more. We need to regain our ability to have insulin at a reasonable level. Once that is achieved, less fat will be driven into fat cells. If this program is not changed, the body will do a great job keeping your fat cells filled with fat.

Dr. Lustig’s documentary is a life-changing educational leap for anyone interested in undertanding the problems we face with modern liviving, food and disease.

Photo by Roberto Hund