You have probably been told that weight gain or obesity is caused by “consuming more calories than are burned” and the way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories. That is what I once believed too. But how do we explain the skinny guy who eats like a horse yet doesn’t gain an ounce? And what about the overweight person who looks at food across the table and gains five pounds?
The real problem lies more in metabolism and the hormones that control it. When you cut calories, you can initially lose weight. But then it rebounds and you will gain back more later, especially in the stomach area, because “low calories” or “hunger” is the trigger for the fat-storing stress hormone. We’ll get into that later.
Calories are units of energy in various foods. Hormones look at food calories differently. Without having a good understanding of hormones, it might appear that all calories are the same and if you eat less you will of course weigh less. People who tell you this have not grasped the basic physiology of hormone interaction resulting from foods. And the obvious proof of this is that you probably have been cutting calories with minimal or no effect. A theory is only as true as it works.
Even though fats have the densest calories, they are neutral when it comes to making fat. Sugar and refined carbohydrates, on the other hand, are huge triggers to fat-making hormones despite having fewer calories than fats. And although protein has calories, consuming the right amount of protein will trigger fat-burning hormones. The “right amount” is based on your body type, which I’ll explain later in this article.
You have no doubt heard that you should lose weight so you can be healthier, because obesity is a health risk causing heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and stroke. Right? People have been pushing the idea that fat directly causes these other problems. This is not true! I found it is just the opposite. You need to be healthy first before you can actually lose weight. You are fat because some area of your body is unhealthy. In other words, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, stroke AND obesity are all the result (symptoms) of the same thing—an unhealthy body. Somehow, someone has assigned obesity as a primary cause or a disease, when in reality it is an effect or result of something else. The problem with making it a disease is now it gets treated with medication, and if some non-medical practitioner treats it, he or she could be practicing medicine without a license. If you have stubborn weight problems, you have unhealthy hormones.
You can’t be fat and healthy at the same time. The body can’t and won’t release fat until it is at a certain level of health. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn why your body is holding on so dearly to fat if you understand the purpose of fat. It is a survival mechanism, and the body will not let go of fat until the sugars are not available anymore. Interestingly, sugar can come from the diet or it could come from stress. Stress triggers a hormone, cortisol, which has the ability to convert body proteins into sugar fuel.
You could force your body to lose weight by taking an appetite suppressant, drinking canned diet shakes with high-fructose corn syrup or starving yourself; but this would not be the optimum solution, as it would give you a bigger problem down the road. Jumping in and fixing your weight problem with dieting (cutting calories) and typical exercise, without first finding out what problem you have, would not be the best approach either. Losing weight would be a lot more difficult because you’d be focusing on the wrong goal—weight loss. The correct goal is to create healthier glands and hormones. The weight loss will then occur as a benefit of having a healthier body.
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