What is the problem and how did you get fat?

What Foods Make You Gain Weight?

Over the past 30 years, what we have been told is healthy food and what we should eat, has actually created overhunger and overdesire.

The low fat craze doubled the obesity population, because of the increase in packaged, low fat, high sugar and white flour foods.

The cholesterol fear was kicked off in 1997, when the media publicized researcher, Ancel Keys, theories about dietary cholesterol and heart disease. He warned Americans away from meat and eggs and recommended we decrease our fat consumption.

He later admitted, unfortunately to much less media attention, “There’s no connection between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in the blood.”

New studies confirm that saturated fat is NOT linked to heart disease.

In 48 clinical trials, with over 65,000 participants, they found that a reduction of dietary fat had NO effect on mortality, cardiovascular mortality, heart attacks, stroke, cancer, or diabetes.

Psychology Of Overeating

All of the food marketing in our country is based on taking advantage of our desire for pleasure with the least amount of effort.

Our brains are wired for comfort: we automatically seek pleasure, avoid pain, and reducing effort by doing what we always have done.

Most of us were never taught to manage your emotions.

So we don’t know how to cope with our difficult feelings, so we distract ourselves with food, alcohol, screen time, etc.

Food Portions

We have come to believe:

• It is normal to overeat.
• We need 3 meals a day, plus snacks and dessert.
• Food is entertainment and all events should include large amounts of food.
• Overeating has become an acceptable way to avoid pain, seek pleasure.

Why Am I Fat?

Our brains are designed to reward us for, what in the past were, life-preserving activities.

Food provides that reward in the form of serotonin/dopamine/desire.

All of the cues around food create neural-pathways that remind us how important it is to get it again and repeat.

When you concentrate and refine food like sugar or flour, you get even more of a reward response in the brain.

This leads your brain to believe that concentrated foods are important to keep eating.

Dopamine creates more and more desire for the food.

But as we eat it, the flood of dopamine down regulates the receptors, so we need more and more to get the same good feelings.

This increases and perpetuates your desire.

Brain Neuroplasticity

The more you do something and the more you practice something, the stronger the neural pathway becomes.

Eventually eating more and more refined foods to feel good, becomes your unconscious habit run by your unconscious mind.

This is why you often feel out of control and as if you are eating against our own will. (This is never true, it just feels that way sometimes.)

The good news is that our brains are “plastic.”

You can change those ingrained pathways by replacing them with new ones.

To do this you need to interrupt your old habits, by changing your actions and denying the old rewards.

Hormones Affect Weight Gain

There are three main hormones to be aware of when it comes to weight gain and weight loss.

The most important hormone is insulin. Insulin is a storage hormone.

Insulin, insulin resistance and diabetes have skyrocketed in our society, because of the increase in consumption of high sugar and high starch foods.
The obesity epidemic is caused by too much insulin in the blood.

Whenever insulin is present in the blood after eating food, your body does not burn or utilize your fat as fuel.

Insulin also affects the presence and effectiveness of two other important hormones: ghrelin and leptin.

Ghrelin lets you know when you are hungry, but it is negatively affected by artificial foods, because it doesn’t recognize or register the caloric intake.

Leptin is the hormone that lets you know we are full and don’t need more food.

It also lets you know it’s time to move your body.

It is blocked by an excess of insulin.

Physical Hunger vs Withdrawal vs Cravings vs Emotions

Physical hunger is a sensation like the feeling of emptiness or the growling of your stomach.

The sensation is physically in your body and typically comes and goes until you satisfy it.

If it is physical hunger, normally you will not have to satisfy it immediately.

Cravings, on the other hand are a desire created in your mind for a specific food or type of food.

Withdrawal is the sensation you get both mentally and physically from lack of sugar, coffee, flour, etc.

Emotions are vibrations felt in your body caused by your thoughts.

Why Am I Not Losing Weight

When you get hungry normally it will come on as a wave and then retreat again.

If you don’t eat right away, your body will access fat storage for fuel.

If you have too much insulin in your bloodstream, your body will be unable to access fat stores and you will get hungrier.

Remember Ghrelin stimulates hunger.

Eating lots of refined food keeps your ghrelin from working properly and makes you think you are always hungry.

And when there is too much insulin in your bloodstream, it blocks the Leptin, which lets your brain know you are full and have plenty of fat in storage, so you don’t need to keep eating.

Balance Your Hormones To Lose Weight

So my goal in helping my clients lose weight is to keep their insulin as low as possible.

Remember Insulin is raised every time you eat and drops when you are not eating.

Insulin is artificially raised when you eat sugar, flour and other refined foods.

Liquid sugar in soda is one of the main culprits in insulin excess.

By eating little to no sugar and flour, your insulin will drop dramatically.

By eating less often, you give your body the chance for your insulin to re-sensitize and your leptin and ghrelin to adjust and start working.

So the way to have permanent weight loss and easily maintain your weight isd to re-balance your hormones to create the correct hunger signals in your body.

How To Become Thin

I have created a weight loss program that will help you finally learn how to stop your over desire for unhealthy foods and recalibrate your hormones so you naturally eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full.

Most importantly, you stop resisting and struggling with food.

It is just like most of us to have to resist or struggling not taking heroin.

If that sounds amazing, click the graphic below to set up a time to speak to me about it.