When you start your fat loss journey, it may seem overwhelming with so much information that is available from online, from your physician, from your trainer, and from your peers. From both physiological and personal experience perspective, I found that there are 2 key factors that you should be mindful of as you start your journey. Those 2 are your digestive health and your insulin production.
Control Your Digestive Health
Your digestive system involves so many parts such as mouth, esophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas, intestines (large and small), rectum and anus. Some of the cause of fat accumulations is do to issues with one or more of organs within the digestive system. Some of the conditions you may experience with digestive system problems can be hyperinsulinemia, bloating, sudden allergy symptoms, skin irritation, constipation, and poor recovery from physical activities.
Majority of time, these problems rise because of overconsumption of processed food, sugar, alcohol, smoking, and consuming food too frequently. These habits may lead to slowing down the digestive process and can cause fermenting of food within our body.
Can you imagine that the food you ate is clogged in your body and getting rotten? What would you do when you see a rotten food in your fridge?
Our intestine is responsible for not just absorbing food but it is also a borderline patrol. Which means when nutrients comes in cells in the intestine detects it then absorb into the body. When foreign substances such as, virus or toxin comes in the cells can reject it and send it out from the body. Therefore, when the condition of intestine is good then you may not get sick easily.
This leads to the first habit for fat loss. Get your digestive system under control. To do so few things must happen. First, cut out processed food, sugar, alcohol, and smoking. This will help stop damaging your system. Second, you will need to start consuming natural food sources like meat, chicken, vegetables, fish, fruits and so on that are not highly processed. Third, increase your fiber and water intake. Fiber will help bind with toxin in your system and flush them out. You may want to strive for getting 30g of fiber per day. Increasing water intake will help you hydrate but also help move those clogged waste materials in your body out. May not need to be a gallon but you should be going to the bathroom more frequently than you normally would.
Manage Your Insulin
One thing that I've learned through my personal fat loss is to assume you have health issue. Even if the blood testing doesn't show any signs of problems with cholesterol, HbA1c, fasting blood sugar level and so on but you're accumulating body fat then most likely you do have some metabolic issues.
Overall, if you can create a habit to control insulin, majority of issue can be solved. Before going into habits, I need to be clear that insulin is neither good nor bad. It has a role of storing and it is very vital role in our system. With a proper management of insulin, our health can improve dramatically.
Insulin level will increase as we consume food especially food that are high in sugar. Over production or frequent production of insulin may lead into a condition called insulin resistance, where the receptors in cells is resisting to receive insulin because it reached the limit. Insulin sensitivity is typically determined by how much muscle mass the person has. More muscle you have more insulin receptors are available, which can keep the insulin sensitivity to be higher than those with less muscle mass.
Second key habit is to manage your insulin. Throughout the day, you want to create down time for the insulin secretion. While the insulin is being produced, the body is in storage mode, not using mode. If you are wanting to lose fat, you want the body to be using the fat not storing it. Therefore, consuming high amount of sugar or frequent consumption of food will be contradicting with the fat loss process.
To manage your insulin this involves, cutting down sugar and alcohol, manage your meal frequency, strength training and sleep. Sugar and alcohol does elevate your insulin. First habit is, during fat loss, you may want to avoid sweets, lattes, alcoholic beverages and so on to keep the insulin manageable. Second habit is to keep the meal frequency to 3 meals a day. You may hear 6 small meals are better for fat loss, but it is not. This will put both digestive system and insulin production at work all day long and become counter productive for the fat loss. Keep the meal frequency a 3 meals a day. You can try 12-16 hour intermittent fasting to keep the meal frequency to 2 meals a day but make sure you are getting adequate amount of protein to maintain the muscle mass. Third habit is building muscles with strength training. 2-3 times per week of 45 minute sessions of strength training can help sustain and even build muscles even during the fat loss. More muscle mass you have better the insulin sensitivity will be. This may help reduce HbA1C. Lastly, sleeping less than 7 hours a night seem to have correlation with elevated HbA1C and fasting blood sugar level. To minimize the accumulation, work on getting at least 7 hours of sleep a night. If you are not able to get enough sleep, try 20-30 minutes of napping.
Looking at the 2 key components for fat loss, it is nothing new to you. Instead of looking into drugs or type of diet to follow, work on correcting the bad habits that you are already aware of. Try for a month and see what happens.
Kota Shimada
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