Your eating habits are sabotaging your health!
[7 Days To Permanent Weight Loss - Day 2]
Welcome back. I hope that my previous article opened your eyes about how everything you have tried or heard about dieting and losing weight is missing out on something very basic and fundamental:
Permanent weight loss is possible only through a permanent change in your body's metabolism.
Let us put this together with another fact that I mentioned towards the end of the last lesson (and is the theme of this lesson):
Your eating habits make it difficult for you to lose weight.
This is a pivotal part of this weight loss program. If your eating habits are the primary reason for which you are over-weight, then the only way to reduce weight successfully would be to turn these eating habits around so that they actually help you in loosing weight.
I'll repeat the cardinal equation of weight loss again, just so that you can keep it in mind during this article:
Calories lost = calories used up - calories consumed
I call this the cardinal equation because everything that you will learn about losing weight, whether it is about changing your eating habits, supercharging your metabolism, learning what you should (and should not) eat or simply about learning how our bodies are "programmed" to conserve calories (what we talk about in today's article), can be reduced to this simple formula.
Now that this is out of the way, let's focus on how our eating habits have evolved to make us overweight.
What Darwin forgot to tell us...
To explain this, I'm going to give you a little history lesson about evolution. This is very interesting, especially, as I can guarantee that you have never thought about human evolution in this way.
Human society has evolved over a long, long period of time. During this process we shifted from a hunting society - one that ate a lot of meat, animal fat and fruit (a high protein diet), and was physically very active - to a farming society - one in which our staple diet was grain (a high carbohydrates diet) and a relatively inactive lifestyle; a drastic change from before.
Now this alone can be interpreted as being bad for us - inactivity combined with a high-carb diet will automatically cause you to gain weight. Since you are not as active as before, you will be burning less calories (thus skewing one end of the equation). And since you are not able to burn away all the carbohydrates in your diet, they will get converted into fats and thus you will start gaining weight.
However, that's not all. This shift in dietary patterns was not interpreted by human metabolisms as being a permanent change - hard genetic patterns cannot be fully changed from the outside. Instead, during this gradual shift of eating patterns over millennia, human bodies interpreted it as if the regular supply of high-protein (and often high-fat) food was temporarily unavailable, and therefore our bodies automatically lowered their metabolism - the way a predator might slow down during winters to conserve energy. The absence of the regular food supply had caused the human body to regress into a semi-hibernating state.
This shift in social evolution inadvertently caused not just one, but two imbalances in the cardinal equation - humans become less active AND their metabolisms slowed down; they were burning fewer and fewer calories.
Still, there was one more change in eating habits that was about to happen - as eating became a social activity more than ever, and as food gathering and preparation became labor and time intensive(within this new farming society), we reduced the frequency of our meals (and increased the quantity of food per meal to compensate). This caused our metabolisms to slow down even further - a system used to eating several small portions a day interpreted this new routine as a sign of a "lack of food" and began hoarding energy (i.e. calories) as a "preventive" measure. In effect, social and economic development has directly led to the human body being, on average, more likely to "conserve" calories instead of burning them.
Your metabolism is not just slow - it's fast asleep!
So where does this leave us? Let me summarize the cold, hard facts for you:
* Our bodies are not used to eating so infrequently (3 meals a day) - this slows our metabolism down because the body is now fooled into thinking that there is less food available (less frequent meals) and therefore burns less calories during the day in order to save energy.
* Each meal is now "heavier" - that is, we are eating more in each meal (even though we are taking fewer meals). This is interpreted by our bodies as a security measure - a trigger for conserving energy. Essentially, since we are eating "more" per meal and less meals in total, our bodies interpret this as a sign that food is scarce - thus further cutting back on how quickly our metabolism burns the calories. In other words, large, infrequent meals can cause you to gain weight even if it might look like you are eating very little.
* Our bodies are not used to eating such hi-carb diets - it is a drastic shift from a natural diet of proteins and fats (with little carbohydrates, except in fruits) and is again interpreted by our bodies as a sign that since our "regular" diet is not available, our metabolisms should now be shifted into a slower gear, in order to conserve "energy" until we are able to get back on our "regular" diet. You could almost say that this single step shifts our metabolism to virtual hibernation! Furthermore, since our levels of activity are far less, we are not able to "burn" all the complex carbohydrates and these "leftover carbs" can easily add the pounds (even if you are consuming less calories than usual).
* Our bodies are not used to being inactive - exercise, or just plain activity, can cause our metabolisms to be charged up and thus make our bodies burn more calories. Without the same activity levels as before (and as a society we are getting more and more sedentary - it's the price we pay for technological developments), we burn less calories. So basically, our metabolisms, because of our changed eating habits, are being "programmed" to conserve calories. And to top it all off our lack of physical activity (sports, exercise, manual labor, etc.) means that we will be burning even less calories than before.
Any one of these facts, by itself, could be managed. If you are inactive you can probably eat a bit less and get away with it, but what if your metabolism has been seriously affected by millennia-old changes in eating habits and a damaging hi-carb diet? Can you seriously consider losing weight just by eating less (a process that will cause your metabolism to slow down even further and sabotage your weight even more)?
Our metabolism has been permanently "triggered" to conserve calories, and our eating habits, socially evolved over thousands of years, are the main culprits. There is a very good reason why exercise is recommended as the best method of losing weight - without external pressure on our metabolism, there is nothing else in our eating habits to rectify the imbalances in our metabolism caused by the imbalance of the cardinal equation.
In the next article, I'll tell you the specific steps you need to take in order to:
* Change your eating habits
* Supercharge your metabolism! ... so that you can maintain or reduce your current weight almost effortlessly and at will. In fact, I will show you how to lose weight by just making simple yet powerful changes to your lifestyle, all without doing any exercise.
All the best,
Brad Callen
Health and Fitness Consultant
http://www.dietplannerplus.com/
