Metabolic Overdrive

When you’re stressed, you’re in overdrive. When you toss back a triple-shot espresso, you’re in overdrive. When you exercise beyond your body’s capabilities, you’re in overdrive. Overdrive is how you speed up the metabolism. This confuses a lot of people, because if they are struggling with excess weight, they assume that they want to speed up their metabolism. This isn’t always the case. 

Staying in overdrive too often can outstrip your metabolic resources. Stress and lack of sleep, for example, cause the adrenal glands to overproduce the stress hormone cortisol and keep levels elevated. When cortisol increases, so does your blood glucose, to provide your muscles with fuel should you need to run fast. The problem is that your muscle cells don’t need the glucose when you are responding to emotional stress or lack of sleep, so the hormone insulin increases to shuttle the excess glucose into your fat cells - usually the ones in your abdomen. In an overspent state, insulin does this too efficiently. Too much insulin causes blood glucose to drop too quickly. You crave the one thing that can quickly raise blood glucose: sugar. If you turn to sugar and fat - as most people under stress do - glucose rises, insulin rises, glucose falls. You’re hungry again. 

Overdrive can also result from eating a lot of sugar, HFCS and refined foods. In this case, blood sugar rapidly rises and falls, and so does insulin. To compensate for the volatility of rapid rises and falls in sugar and hormones, the metabolism runs fast. In fact many of my patients who have hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) are fairly slender. It’s not until the progress to “metabolic resistance stage” that they start to gain weight. 

As overdrive progresses, the problem magnifies. When insulin levels remain high too long and too often, your brain and muscle cells eventually stop responding. Rather than soaking up blood sugar, muscle cells ignore rises in insulin. Your body starts conserving calories, and you see the results in your gut. Your abdomen grows. Even when you cut calories or portions, you can’t seem to get rid of the spare tire or love handles. Meet metabolic resistance, also known as Syndrome X and metabolic syndrome; it puts you at risk for and can also lead to diabetes or polycystic ovarian syndrome, a condition in which women develop high levels of male hormones, cysts in their ovaries, and, frequently, infertility.

Unstable Blood Sugar/Diabetes Mellitus/Hypoglycemia Symptoms

If you answer "yes" to any of the questions below, you will benefit from making an appointment with us.
1. Are you hungry 1-2 hours after meals?
2. Do you wake up at night to urinate?
3. Are you excessively hungry or thirsty?
4. Do you crave "sweets" or carbohydrates?
5. Does anyone in your family have diabetes?
6. Do you gain most of the weight in the stomach?
7. Do you feel faint or lightheaded if you miss a meal?
8. Do you have frequent mood swings?
These are some of the symptoms consistent with unstable blood sugar, pre-diabetes, diabetes or hypoglycemia. The problem is that one hundred percent of carbohydrates are converted into glucose resulting in high blood sugar and high insulin levels. Controlling carbohydrate intake is the key to normalizing blood sugars and insulin levels. Type 2 diabetics who reduce carbohydrate intake can often decrease or eliminate the use of oral medications or insulin. Type 1 diabetics who lower carbohydrate intake can often help avoid large fluctuations in blood sugar. Because doses of insulin will need to be reduced, physician supervision is necessary.

When in doubt, eat real food

If you want to indulge in something sweet, do so, but make it a small serving of real food. Ice cream means sugar and cream, and almost nothing else. Don’t go for the low-fat or artificially sweetened varieties. These are not only less satisfying and satiating, but they also tend to cause people to lose self-control. It’s psychological. When we eat reduced-calorie foods, we assume we can have more. When we eat high-calorie foods, we assume we can have less and stick to it.

The Principle of Adding Indulgences #TheStubbornFatFix

Ok, so you know The Stubborn Fat Fix diet plan will help you drop pounds fast and stay healthy. But the problem is, it will only work if you can stick with it. What if you really love ice cream or chocolate or bread? Are you destined to a lifetime of shopping in the plus-size area of the department store? In a word, no. There are times when you’ll crave chocolate. Decades of mental and emotional programming cannot be easily undone with good intentions. Also labeling something “forbidden fruit” makes it more desirable. Our ultimate goal is to get you to follow the plan for life, not just a couple of weeks. That’s why our plan allows indulgence foods.

If you feel the need to eat something sweet

Use the fruit or chocolate option provided in your diet plan. Save your fruit for the time of day you most like to have something sweet. For many people, that’s right after dinner. Indulge in your sweet treat when you are relatively full. This will prevent you from overdoing it. In lieu of fruit, try mixing various types of spices into ricotta cheese. We prefer cinnamon because it tends to improve good sugar, but cardamom, cocoa, vanilla, mint and other sweet spices can work just as well. You can also drizzle up to 1 tablespoon of sugar-free chocolate syrup on top.

The Rest Prescription

You might be thinking “What does rest have to do with weight loss?”. We’re so glad you asked, because rest has everything to do with weight loss. Chronic unrest- lack of sleep coupled with a high-stress lifestyle- can nullify the best diet and supplement plan. We’ve seen this happen so often in practice. We counsel a patient who seems to be doing everything right. According to her food records, she’s eating exactly as prescribed, yet the weight isn’t budging. Then we dig a little deeper and learn that she’s up repeatedly at night to soothe her kids back to sleep, on the go constantly during the day, and draining herself further with intense exercise at the gym.

This type of unrest keeps the fight-or-flight response in a permanent “on” position. Our bodies are designed to handle periodic influxes of stress hormones. Triggering your fight or flight response just once a day probably won’t interfere with weight loss, because your body easily clears these hormones. Triggering it every 5 minutes? That’s a recipe for weight gain.

Here’s why. Every time you trigger your stress response, your adrenal glands pump out the stress hormone cortisol. If cortisol levels remain high- as they do when you don’t get enough sleep, keep yourself awake during the day by consuming lots of caffeine, or generally feel edgy and jittery- your entire metabolism becomes imbalanced, suppressing thyroid function, raising blood sugar and blood pressure, weakening muscles and bones, and triggering the body to store more abdominal fat. 

Sleep deprivation and our waistlines

Sleep deprivation has a direct impact on our waistlines. One in three women who experience sleep problems almost every night are obese, compared with one in five women who have trouble sleeping just a few nights a month. How many of us have said “I’ll be able to stay awake a little bit longer if I just eat these pretzels (or another snack food)”?

Sleep deprivation alters levels of many hormones, including serotonin and leptin. This makes you feel hungrier during the day, strengthening cravings for starchy carbohydrates and sweets.

This effect can begin even during childhood: a study completed in Japan determined that 6 and 7 year olds who slept less were more likely to become obese than their peers who went to bed earlier and slept longer. Children sho slept fewer than 8 hours were nearly three times as likely to become obese as children who got 10 or more hours.