Are your eating choices not only putting a lock on your fat cells, but resulting in more fat added to the store?
If you are having problems releasing weight, then you must know about the likely culprit: Insulin.
While God created the Insulin hormone to keep our blood sugars balanced, our modern diets tend to keep Insulin, the ''fat storage'' hormone, working overtime!
You'll see how from this quote from an article written by Dr. Arthur Lavin. I know you will find this eye-opening:
More than any other hormone, insulin is the hormone of storage. Think about the function of eating food associated with fuel. Once the ''gasoline'' (sugar, fat, and protein) is poured into our body as we eat, the body must decide: Burn it or store it?
If insulin is around, the decision is made: STORE IT.
So anything that stimulates insulin production, pushes what you eat into storage. This has implications regarding the main nutritional emergency of our era, obesity. Insulin is a key player in this epidemic.
Clearly eating too much is the true heart of the obesity epidemic. But WHAT you eat, can have a tremendous impact on whether insulin is pumped into circulation and forces what you eat into storage.
Sugar is the top stimulation for insulin production. Eat a bunch of celery and not much insulin will gush to store fuel, but eat a bag of candy and insulin will indeed gush forth, pushing that candy into glycogen in your liver and fat into your fat.
This is a quick path to obesity.''
- Dr. Arhur Lavin, Food: How Fats, Sugars, and Proteins Go to Work
This quick video also shows you this process in action:
So if you want to release excess fat, the key question to ask yourself is:
- How much overt sugar (candy, cake, ice cream, doughnut, cookies, sugar-filled drinks, etc.) are you eating regularly?
- How much covert (undercover) sugars (foods that the body breaks down into sugar quickly - simple carbohydrates like breads, pasta, crackers, etc) are you eating regularly?
If you are overeating and the foods you overeat are rich in sugar and simple carbohydrates, then that is the perfect storm for fat storage.
To me, it's like trying to blow your nose with a handkerchief full of sneezing powder! You are sabotaging yourself from the start.
Each of our bodies vary in the amount of sugars/carbs they can process at one time. I call this the ''Sugar tank.''
I discovered that I have a small sugar tank. The reason why I gained so much fat after high school, with my weight increasing to 240 pounds and a size 22, was that my body was having to pump out insulin constantly, struggling to cope with all the sugar/carbs I was feeding it.
With amounts that overfilled my small sugar tank, what choice did I give my body? It had no choice but to store the excess sugar (overt and covert) as fat to keep me alive.
My body was always in fat storage mode vs. fat burning mode. It sapped my energy and left me feeling depressed, frustrated, and discouraged.
Even worse, it left me feeling emotionally loopy!
But praise God, He showed me the right way to eat so that my body functions at its best and my emotions remain stable.
In that way, I can get on with my Father's business!
That is why it is pointless to compare your eating habits to what someone else can or cannot eat.
The wisest thing to do is to discover what foods do and do not play well with YOUR unique chemistry and work with that, focusing on the ones that help you feel and function well, and replacing those that don't.
This is a way to put 1 Corinthians 6:12 into practice:
All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
- 1 Corinthians 6:12
In other words, you can eat anything, but you shouldn't eat everything - especially if fat loss is your goal!