Health
Without a doubt, the most important thing you can focus on is your health, if you want to fully enjoy live and all it has to bring. Good health feels great, which makes it an attractive deal!
However, not everyone can hold up their hand and say they are enjoying good health. There may be any one of many reasons for that, but getting to the underlying cause is the first step toward changing that.
Being overweight might seem like a likely cause of ill health. However, the excess weight is just another symptom of the same underlying cause of the bad health.
So many people try to lose weight by going on a diet or going to the gym, but in many cases they are doomed to fail if the underlying cause is not dealt with first.
Insulin Resistance
A surprisingly high percentage of the population are insulin resistant. This means the cells of their body are not allowing insulin to do its job of providing the nourishment each cell needs for growth and well being.
How does this happen?
It generally happens when a person has been maintaining a high blood sugar level for a long time, due to faulty diet, or not following healthy eating ways.
Each time you eat foods that contain sugars (mainly carbohydrates, but that's a topic for a whole article on its own), your blood sugar level spikes. The body reacts to this spike by releasing insulin to lower the blood sugar level by taking the glucose to the cells that need it and the surplus goes to the liver to be converted into fat for storage.
Eating Too Often
Normally, this is not a problem and the body gets the energy it needs. However, when the body gets an almost continuous supply of glucose from food that just keeps coming all day long, every day, the pancreas is forced to increase the amount of insulin to deal with it.
Over time, cells become overwhelmed by so much attention from insulin that they start to resist it. When that happens, the cells are deprived of the nutrients they need to produce energy, despite the availability in abundance.
In an attempt to redress the balance, the body demands more insulin to copr with the rising blood sugar levels. Here is the problem.
High Blood Sugar Levels
High levels of insulin floods the body, but because the cells will not accept the payload of glucose, it is all taken to the liver to be converted to fat. All the while, the blood sugar level stays high.
The symptoms of insulin resistance are ones many of us already know, we just don't know that insulin is the culprit.
Those symptoms include weight gain, with a lot of fat accumulating around the belly (visceral fat), high blood pressure (due to high blood sugar), excess hunger (because the cells are not getting the energy they need) including craving for high sugar or high carb foods, pre-diabetes leading to type 2 diabetes and also fatigue.
Most people associate the symptoms with being overweight, but being overweight is actually another symptom of insulin resistance.
How to Reverse Insulin Resistance
The best way to reverse the problem is to attack the cause head-on.
That means getting insulin levels down. The only way to do that is to effectively stop eating for a while.
You may have heard of this. It's called fasting!
Fasting is not dangerous, as so many ill-informed so-called experts may try to convince you. A perfectly safe fast can last for 24 hours as long as fluids are taken (that means plain water or herbal tea with absolutely no sugar or sweetener).
You don't even need to go straight for a 24 hour fast. You can build up to it gradually over several days by doing what is known as intermittent fasting.
Intermittent Fasting
This is simply a case where no food is eaten for several hours each day. It is not hard to abstain from eating anything for a few hours.
And when you time your intermittent fast to include the 8 hours or so that you are sleeping, you can actually achieve a respectable fast and not even have to feel hungry for most of it!
The trick is to stop eating as early as you can manage. Certainly you should not eat or drink any sweetened liquids after 8pm.
Go To Bed on an Empty Stomach
If you are just starting out, that's a good place to begin. If you stop eating by 8pm, you will go to bed with an empty (or partially empty) stomach.
That means you will not be using energy to digest food while you are sleeping (an often unrealized cause of poor sleep quality for many people). When you wake next morning, drink a glass or two of plain water and then do something that will take your mind off eating breakfast for as long as you can.
The longer you can go before you eat again, the better.
Delay Breakfast
Many people starting out on this strategy can easily manage to put breakfast back until 10am. To begin with, if that's feels difficult, eat earlier the first day, but start pushing the time back each day after that as you get used to it.
You'll find that you can do it without feeling too much hunger or discomfort.
When you've achieved not eating from 8pm until 10am the next morning, you will have just done a 14 hour fast!
In that time, you will have done so much good for your body that you maybe haven't done since you were a kid! Now the task is to increase that fasting time.
Eighteen Hours
Ideally, you want to extend the period of no food to 18 hours or more every day. This will give your body time to readjust itself to a long period of no insulin and gradually, over time, your cells resistance to insulin will be reduced until it is no longer an issue.
While you're working on increasing your daily fasting time, you should also incorporate some light exercise into your mornings to boost the happy side-effect of this, which is you will be burning fat!
After just two weeks of doing daily 16-18 hour fasts, you will notice that your clothes feel loose. Stepping on the scales will reveal the reason for this. You will have lost some weight!
Keeping Fit
Once you have eliminated the underlying cause of insulin resistance and lost the excess weight to return to your natural weight, a major part of maintaining a healthy weight is keeping yourself healthy and fit.
You may not be all that surprised to learn that most people who are at their correct weight are those that generally eat wholesome, healthy food and not too much of it. They expend energy by exercising or doing a job that entails a lot of physical work or a lot of running around the place.
Either way, they are getting the two most important factors that determine a healthy weight and that is a good diet coupled with enough exercise to burn as many calories as they are consuming.
This is an important factor that anyone who is worried they are getting overweight should take into consideration. You can't expect to stay slim and eat too much, eat all the wrong foods and lead a sedentary lifestyle as well.
Something has to change and the only person who can make that change is you.
Stay Active
So if you are spending too much of your time sitting down and not moving about, make some time to get up and do something even if it seems trivial to you. Like walking around the place, running up and down some stairs, walking to close by places instead of taking the car, visiting the local pool and doing some swimming etc.
On top of that, if your diet leaves a lot to be desired, change it for a better one and be mindful of portion control!
Improve Your Diet
You can easily substitute all of the junk food you used to eat for some healthy stuff and stick with it. If you feel you have to eat bread with every meal, try cutting it out for a few meals until you don't want it any more.
You'll be surprised at how soon you don't miss it any more and you'll feel a whole lead better. You'll enjoy experiencing less bloating and feeling less sluggish and lethargic after meals along with some weight loss.
If you habitually eat biscuits or cookies with every cup of coffee, try cutting down on the number of cups you drink in a day, while limiting yourself to only two biscuits with a cup. Then cut that down to nothing.
You'll soon get used to eating fewer then you can go the whole way and simply stop buying cookies and biscuits altogether, so there is no longer any temptation!
There are loads of ways that you can improve your eating habits while getting more exercise and before you know it, your weight will return to its correct level and you'll be feeling fitter and healthier into the bargain.
Latest Posts
Please see below for the list of latest article titles posted in this category: