So What Makes Us Fat?

If there is one thing that is consistent about Western society, it is the tendency towards portliness as people age. This has been going on for so long that it is generally expected. A second more troubling tendency is that of obesity in young and middle aged people. Obesity has been accused of many evils in society, including high blood pressure, heart disease, atherosclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, even cancers.... If it is such a problem, why are so many people fat?

Everybody knows what makes people fat, don't they? Obviously it is eating too much. That and being lazy. Sedentary lifestyles contribute to the obesity epidemic, which causes all these terrible disease conditions. Somebody started measuring the energy content of foods in the form of Calories (in fact they are kilocalories), and decided that the First Law of Thermodynamics applies to obesity: Energy in minus energy out equals weight. If only it were that simple....

What if I were to tell you that this is all EXACTLY BACKWARDS?

This requires a long and complex explanation, which I will provide elsewhere. Here I will summarize what I know to be true.

We get fat because we eat the WRONG FOODS. Foods that make us hungry, rather than make us satisfied. Foods that turn on the fat storage machinery in our bodies, rather than encourage the body to use its stored energy (fat). Foods that trigger the hormonal stimulation in the body that actually causes all of those disease conditions, plus more. Those foods? CARBOHYDRATES.

If you eat a diet that is predominently carbohydrates, you train your body to secrete massive amounts of insulin, and at the same time you damage the body's ability to absorb that same insulin. As time goes by, the level of insulin in the blood rises, and as the insulin level rises, the waist measurement of nearly everyone gets bigger. For some of us the insulin producing and using machinery breaks down completely, and we become Diabetic.

A high level of insulin in the blood is directly related to:
  1. Hunger - the presence of Insulin makes you feel very hungry, and hungry for carbs in particular
  2. increased Blood Pressure - due to Insulin's tendency to cause water retention
  3. Storage of excess energy as fat - the presence of the hormone Insulin tells the body to store energy as fat
  4. Sedentary behaviour - the body slows down under the influence of Insulin in order to fulfil the demand to store energy as fat
  5. Elevated LDL cholesterol and suppressed HDL cholesterol

Ask any farmer that raises animals how you can go about fattening a steer or a pig for market.  For thousands of years they would tell you, you feed the animal GRAIN.  How does a bear gain fat in order to be a able to hibernate all winter long?  The bear eats BLUEBERRIES.  Blueberries?  Yup.

Grains and fruits.  Carbohydrates.

If your diet is made up predominantly of carbs; if it is made up predominantly of starchy carbs (Potato, Pasta, Bread, Corn products), then you very likely are already on the treadmill that results in an obese body.

If you have ever discussed being overweight with a doctor, or your mother, or nearly everyone else, you probably were at the least treated like, and usually told directly, that you were overweight because you eat too much, and you don't get enough exercise.  This has been the universal condemnation of the obese forever.  Brute force diets are directly descended from this line of thinking.  To lose weight, you have to starve, and you have to ramp up your energy expenditure so that you burn more calories than you consume.  They even make reality TV shows now where they starve people and put them through boot camp.  Do the people lose weight?  Certainly.  Can they keep it off?  I seriously doubt it.

Obesity is NOT the cause of anything.  Obesity is a SYMPTOM - a symptom of a serious Insulin disorder.  If you correct the Insulin disorder, the body will naturally recalibrate itself, and the excess fat accumulation will be eliminated, naturally, effectively, and without hunger or absurdly, even dangerous levels of physical activity.

The great misfortune is that this fact seems to not be terribly well understood by the medical establishment.  When I asked my Doctor to test my serum insulin level, at first he said he wouldn't.  Thought there was no point.  Doctors cannot do anything to artificially lower your serum insulin level - it would kill you.  The only way to lower your serum insulin level is to drastically reduce glucose-generating food consumption (carbs), and to attack the problem of insulin resistance.  Insulin resistance is improved through exercise far more than anything else.  Some supplements help:

- Chromium Picolinate

-R+ Lipoic Acid in combination with Evening Primrose Oil

- Metformin, a standard prescription Diabetes medication.

'Exercise' does not mean killing yourself!  My exercise of choice is an ancient stationary bike; I quickly got to riding for 45 minutes a night, which translates to 20 miles on the odometer.  I ride at a decent clip but do not push - I simply want to get the big muscles in my legs hot, which improves my circulation and over time improves my muscle's ability to consume the insulin/glucose that arrives at the Insulin receptors.