How do Diets work? — The Surprising Truth which no one told you
Understanding of How Diets Work is the key to your Health and Happiness
One critical aspect of Wisdom is to identify gaps in your knowledge.
Limited knowledge is dangerous as the mental models formed from limited knowledge do not reflect reality and hence will never yield the desired results.
For more than ten years, I was in the over-weight category. I had literally given up on getting fit because the Mental Models I had, said to me that I was too lazy to be fit.
I had joined Gym. I was too lazy to continue. My attendance was less than 10%.
I started waking up at 5:00 am to Jog. I was too lazy to continue that also.
I was not the dieting type as even slight gap in eating would cause me splitting headaches.
I had been on my path of Wisdom for more than 7 years but everything seemed hollow to me as my paunch belied whatever Wisdom I felt. My Wisdom seemed fake to me.
I didn’t know that my biggest lesson in Wisdom was yet to come — the lesson which will reveal the Mega-Illusions of Life to me.
The Lesson: I was Over-Weight not because I was Lazy. I was Over-Weight because I did not know how Body Physiology works.
Once I understood how Body Physiology works, I lost over 10 kg in 2 months without doing any exercise. Moreover, since then, I have been able to successfully maintain my weight for more than 3 years now.
The objective of this post is to reveal the basic mechanism of how all diets work based on how our Body Physiology works. You start gaining weight whenever you violate the principles of this mechanism of Body Physiology. And you always maintain weight if you abide by the Body Physiology.
Hence, in a way, all diets are equivalent may it be Calorie Restriction or Intermittent Fasting or even Keto Diet. All the nonsense discussion on which diet is better, is simply Explicit and Systematic Mayatic Pollution which is stopping you from getting Fit.
Once you understand the mechanism given below, you will have the freedom to choose any diet of your liking.
Most of us just eat without knowing how our body processes and stores energy.
I never knew that there is not one but two types of energy stores in the body!!
Understanding No 1: The Body has Two Stores of Energy — The first is Glycogen and the Second is Fat
Glycogen stores only 2000 Calories of Energy and Fat can store unlimited amount of energy.
In fact, even though your body only requires around 2,000 calories of energy per day, most people have Fat stores as big as 20,000 calories to over 100,000 calories.
Glycogen is primarily stored in the Liver and near to the muscles. Fat is stored all over the body in fatty tissues.
The second part of the stunning learning is the manner in which Carbohydrates are actually processed and stored in the body. Note that, Carbohydrates in the standard diet constitute almost 60% to 80% of diet of most people.
Understanding No 2: If you eat something which has processed carbs or sugar, then it immediately increases the blood sugar.
This is where the hormone Insulin comes into the picture. Insulin’s function is to maintain the blood sugar levels. Excess blood sugar damages the body and the job of insulin is to take out the excess blood sugar and send it to the liver to be stored as glycogen.
In the Liver simple sugars are recombined into more stable form of Glycogen.
Now, remember Understanding 1 that Liver can only store upto 2000 calories of Glycogen. So what happens if Glycogen stores are full?
Understanding No 3: If Glycogen stores are full in your body, then the liver will process the excess sugar brought by Insulin into Fat and deposit the same into your fatty tissues.
The above process of conversion of glycogen into fat is called as “ de novo lipogenesis “.
When we are not eating, the body still needs to function. For doing this, the body is required to use the stores of energy. And this is where things get really interesting and explain a lot about why the Obesity epidemic is happening.
Understanding No 4: The body always prefers to use Glycogen as a source of energy because the body expends lesser energy to access glycogen energy.
Simply, our body is lazy. It does not like to spend energy. It takes the body around 4 ATP molecules (ATP is Adenosine triphosphate, the energy currency of body) to generate 10 ATP molecules from Glycogen for a net gain of 6 ATP. For using fat, it takes body around 10 ATP molecules to generate 30 ATP of energy. Hence, being Penny-wise-and-pound-foolish, even though there is more return on Fat, the lazy body always uses Glycogen first.
Understanding No 5: Till the glycogen store goes down to zero, the body will not use Fat as an energy store.
This is the most important understanding which blew me. Combined with the above understandings, you can see the implications.
Understanding No 6: Even though, the body is storing more than 20,000 calories to 100,000 calories of Fat, this energy store is not accessible to the body till the Glycogen store is reduced to zero.
Hence, you can see from Understanding No 6 and Understanding No 3, if the Glycogen stores are not reduced to zero, the Fat stores are necessarily a one way ticket!! You keep on depositing into Fat stores but you never withdraw. No wonder, people find it so difficult to reduce weight.
Now here comes the common theme of all Diets.
Understanding No 7: All diets work by first exhausting the 2000 calories of Glycogen stored in your body only after which the Fat burning starts.
Moreover, when the Glycogen reduces to zero, since Glycogen store is not full, the body stops Lipogenesis i.e. converting glycogen to fat and you stop getting fatter.
Hence, to maintain weight and being healthy it is very important to reduce Glycogen to Zero and all diets target the same process.
These diets include the:
- Low Carb Diets such as Paleo Diet and the Keto Diet
- Vegan Diets which remove simple carbs from diet
- Calorie Restriction Diets
- Intermittent Fasting or similar diets such as 5–2 Diet, Longer Fasting diets
- Diets such as GM Diet etc
Finally, what role does exercise play?
Exercise builds strength and keeps you toned. But its contribution to weight reduction is highly doubtful as billions of people around the world can testify.
Conclusion:
People failing to loose weight are not lazy — they are just not eating as per body physiology.
The New Mantra for Weight Loss is — To Kick-Start Fat burning, Reduce Glycogen stores to Zero (or at least keep them well below their threshold of 2000 Calories).
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Originally published at https://kindlethemaster.com on February 25, 2020.
