In 5 Years You’ll Still be Overweight if You Keep Doing This

Somewhere around 40 percent of the U.S. adult population is classified as obese; and 70 percent are overweight.

Think about that for a moment…

Up until the 1970’s, obesity was rare, and people had virtually no idea how many calories they ate or burned. Yet, without effort, people all around the world lived without obesity.

“Sadly, obesity has come to be understood as [nothing more than] a simple imbalance of energy and calories,” states Dr. Jason Fung, world-leading expert on intermittent fasting and low-carb eating, especially for treating people with type 2 diabetes: “This is a critical mistake as argued in my book The Obesity Code, and this obsessive fixation on calories needs to stop.”[1]

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According to a Diabetes Statistics Report from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), over 30-million American adults were diabetic in the year 2014, and that number has skyrocketed exponentially since then.

Worse, before the obesity epidemic in the United States, Type 2 diabetes was practically unheard of in people under 30. But type 2 diabetes isn’t just for adults anymore. The number of children and adolescents with the condition (most of whom are diagnosed in their early teens) has skyrocketed over the last 20 years and is still climbing, prompting experts to call it an epidemic.[2]

What Caused this Rise in Diabetes and Obesity?

There are two main changes in the American diet since the 1970s. First, we were advised to lower the amount of fat in our diet and increase the amount of carbohydrates. Second, a larger problem that largely flew under the radar: the dietary advice to increase our meal frequency, otherwise known as “grazing”.

What does Grazing have to do with Type 2 Diabetes?

Type 2 Diabetes is a dietary syndrome believed to be born of too much insulin and a subsequent resistance to this excess supply.

Eating frequent meals may curtail the highs and lows of blood sugar and help you feel more stable, especially if you’re on diabetes medication, but this will guarantee that you remain diabetic, and overweight, for the rest of your life.

bodyfit-superstore-diabetes-infographic

Think of it like this: if you keep giving your body a constant supply of food (that it can produce glucose from), it will learn to depend on it for life. Your body will never need to burn the energy reserves stored as fat in your body.

If you eat a snack between breakfast and lunch, your body will try to first use that snack, instead of reaching for the energy reserves already present in your body, aka fat. Then you lose your built-in ability to endure any gaps between meals.

Each time a meal brings in sugar, the pancreas has to work overtime to produce insulin to push it into cells. Over time, the cells don’t like so much insulin muscling sugar into them and get more “insulin-resistant”.

An example of this misleading advice is The 3-Hour Diet written by “fitness expert” Jorge Cruise, which requires you to eat five times a day, including a tiny dessert. All your favorite foods, including carbs and sweets, are allowed, as long as you eat them on a strict timetable.

“Eating small, balanced meals every 3 hours boosts your body’s fat-burning potential,” Cruise says…if you don’t eat often enough, he explains, your body goes into “starvation protection” mode, conserving calories, storing fat, and burning muscle (not fat) for energy. Cruise states that if you eat every 3 hours, you repeatedly reset your metabolism so it stays in high gear, and you burn fat all day long.”

Um… sorry Jorge, but this statement is ludicrous at best. If it were true that the “human body goes into starvation mode” after only 3 hours of not eating, I highly doubt the human race would have survived this long. We would have been too busy foraging for food to eat every two hours to even procreate! Let alone make it through a 12-hour day in the fields, or migrating across continents without having to sit down, start a campfire, and eat every two hours lest we consume our own muscle mass and wither to dust.

Advice such as this, along with hundreds of other similar “nutritional experts,” have brain-washed people into thinking that if they don’t continuously eat all-day long they’ll pass out or die.

I’ve had numerous obease coaching clients practally break down in tears at the instruction of being restricted to an intermittant fasting window of 18:6 with no restrictions on how much they ate during their 6-hour eating window.

They are emphatically convinced that they could not survive 18-hours without eating.

So, what if I Eat Keto or Low-Carb food?

Sadly, this is not the answer either. While keto and low-carb foods produce less of an insulin response, any food you eat will produce some insulin. As long as there is insulin present, your body will not burn fat—period.

So hopefully you are now beginning to understand why “grazing” is so bad for fat loss. And, how this dietary advice may have been one of the leading culprits in the rise of obesity.

To further elaborate, let’s look at my favorite “Two Compartment” analogy from Dr. Fung that I use to explain this dilemma to my clients:

“When you store food energy (calories), it is stored as sugar (glycogen) in the ‘fridge’ and fat in the ‘freezer’. But you must burn through the sugar first before you can start burning fat.

So, now you want to lose body fat. The first thing you need to do is clear out the sugar in your refrigerator. However, if you are continually filling up your fridge 3-6 times a day with sugar, then you will never start burning the fat in the freezer.

The calories in calories out (CICO) method ignores this two-compartment problem and pretends that all calories are stored equally and burned equally (single compartment), even though this has been known to be false for at least 50 years.

This is the equivalent of the standard calorie restricted grazing diet of eating 3-6 meals a day with a relatively high carbohydrate (50-60%) content.

You imagine that since you are filing up the fridge with less glucose, it will eventually empty. However, this does not happen. Why? Because, as you start putting less food in the fridge, your body senses that and starts to get antsy. So, it starts to make you hungry and want to eat more. If you don’t fill it up, it will decrease your metabolism so that it is burning less energy.”[3]

Need more Proof?

This was not merely an American phenomenon. More recently, China has followed in America’s footsteps with increased snacking.

Large scale surveys show that from 1991 to 2009, the percentage of children and adults who regularly snack has skyrocketed. Children aged 13–18 went from 8.7% snacking to 46.3% snacking — a more than 5-fold increase. Adults showed a similar rise from 8.7% to 35.6%.

The result? Along with this increase is a huge increase in the prevalence of diabetes and obesity in China.[2]

How is Insulin a Dieter’s Worse Nightmare?

There are two phases of insulin secretion. In phase 1, the pancreas creates and store insulin, in preparation for a meal. This goes on for about 10 minutes and then insulin is released. In phase 2, the pancreas produces more insulin to deal with the full meal. The insulin now stays in the bloodstream for 2-3 hours after the meal is consumed. Additionally:

Grazing puts a strain on the pancreas because it is not given a gap to produce and store insulin for phase 1 of secretion. The pancreatic beta cells are working continuously, which is a sure way to develop type 2 diabetes.
Having high blood glucose damages the pancreatic cells that produce insulin and this is often known as ‘glucotoxicity’
Repetitive high blood sugars lead to insulin resistance which put more stress on the pancreas to produce insulin
This insulin resistance triggers the accumulation of visceral fat – muffin tops, love handles, or a protruding belly
And, as a vicious cycle, visceral fat is inflammatory fat that exacerbates insulin resistance

Why Would Doctors and Nutritionists Tell Us to Graze?

The reasoning for ‘six meals a day’ is rooted in the fear of ‘hypoglycemia’, or low blood sugar. This is far more likely when you are on medications to control your blood sugar. That’s why hypoglycemia is listed among the top side effects of most diabetes medications. So, in effect, your doctor asks you to have six meals a day so that there is always a steady supply of sugar in your blood for the medicines to control!

In a 2014 study, researchers in the Czech Republic found that eating two large meals each day may be better for controlling blood glucose levels and weight. One of the recognized measures of diabetes, the levels of fasting plasma glucagon (a hormone that promoted glucose secretion by the liver) had fallen in those individuals eating two meals a day but increased in those eating six meals a day.

In a report published by the New York Academy of Sciences, it was stated that all-day grazing can put one at risk of type 2-diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

This risk increases when insulin levels spike after eating foods that have high glycemic values. Victor Zammit, head of cell biochemistry at Hannah Research Institute, Ayr, Scotland, says that “when eating three meals a day (even high G.I ones), the insulin levels have sufficient time to even out throughout the day.”

The conclusion is that fasting, or restricting calorie consumption to a short window of your day is the way to conquer fat loss.

Every religion in the world encompasses intermittent fasting. Beyond the spiritual benefits, modern research is proving that there are clear health benefits to such practices, especially intermittent fasting.

Fasting Allows the Body to Burn Off Excess Fat

Here’s how. When you eat food, a part of it is stored away for later use and insulin is the key hormone which enables storage of food energy.

Insulin levels rise when you eat, and the excess (glucose) can be stored in your liver as glycogen or as body fat. When you fast, the insulin levels fall, and the brain starts signaling the body to burn stored energy, since no more food is coming in.

Dr. Julian Whitaker, M.D. says “As your glycogen stores are progressively exhausted, your liver starts converting fat into ketones, which the brain and other tissues use as fuel. This fat-burning state is called ketosis.”

Remember that it is too much insulin that feeds insulin resistance and diabetes. By fasting between meals, or, as your ability to go without food improves, by fasting for even longer periods of time, you reduce the level of circulating insulin in your blood and train your cells to get more “sensitive” to the available insulin.

Working with a trained medical practitioner or functional nutritionist, you can plan your meals and your fasting such that you not only control your diabetes, but begin to reverse it. If you eat 6-7 meals a day, you can transition gradually to fewer meals.

intermittant-fasting-bodyfit-superstore-1 A 12-hour fast between dinner and breakfast is often the easiest goal to accomplish (since most of it will be spent sleeping). This can have a dramatic impact on your fasting blood sugar levels.

A 2005 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology showed that intermittent fasting increased insulin sensitivity at the whole-body level. Insulin resistance or poor insulin sensitivity is now being thought of as the key cause for not just type 2 diabetes but many other chronic diseases as well, including obesity.

Important note: If you are on diabetic medications, you must involve your doctor/diabetes educator before experimenting with intermittent fasting. This is critical, because lack of regular blood sugar, when combined with medications, that lower blood sugar can lead to low blood sugar or hypoglycemia.

Avoiding the “F” Word?

Fats reduce cravings, give feelings of satiation and are an essential component for the body to be able to function well. Trans-fats, often derived from fried food, are the dietary fats that cause trouble and need to be avoided.

After painting fats as the villain for nearly 6 decades, the FDA revealed in 2016 that this propaganda was a result of the sugar lobby “massaging” research data to prove this false accusation!

A study conducted at the Institute of Internal Medicine and Metabolic Diseases in Italy showed that a high-monounsaturated-fat (MUFA)/low carbohydrate (CHO) diet was effective in reducing blood glucose levels in non-insulin-dependent patients. (There was a decrease in both postprandial glucose and plasma insulin levels).

Another study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2010 proposed that the palmitoleic acid, which occurs naturally in full-fat dairy products, protects against insulin resistance and diabetes.

People who consumed full-fat dairy had higher levels of trans-palmitoleate in their blood, and this translated to a two-thirds lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to people with lower levels.

Another recent 2015 study published in the American Journal of Nutrition concluded that there was a decreased incidence of type 2 diabetes at high intake of high-fat dairy products but not low-fat dairy products.

The study indicated a protective role of fat from dairy and suggest that dairy fat may also have played a contributing factor to previously observed protective associations between dairy intake and type 2 diabetes.

The Take-Aways:

Stop grazing and snacking in-between meals
Intermittent fast by eating your daily food intake in a smaller window of time.
Experiment on works best for you and gradually increase your fasting time.
Shoot for a fasting:feeding window of 16:8 or 18:6.
Switch to good fats. Particularly Omega-3 fats which are found in flax-seed oil and walnut oil. And, fats from food sources like avocados, organic ghee, grass-fed and organic butter, virgin cold pressed olive oil, virgin cold pressed coconut oil are great for diabetics.
Swap how your low-fat dairy for full-fat dairy
Work with a functional health coach for guidance and accountability.

BodyFit Coaching has a number of different programs that may work for you. Reach out to Patty@BodyFitTelemed.com for more information or if you have any questions.

All the best on your journey to health and fitness!

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