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The currency of energy in the body is a little molecule called ATP adenosine triphosphate. Our bodies use ATP to do everything. Cyanide—the poison that will kill you in less time than you can say James Bond—works by stopping the production of ATP. Quite simply, if you stop making ATP—even for a minute—you die. Game over. When it comes to making ATP, fat is to sugar as rocket fuel is to regular gas. Any food you eat—anytime, anywhere—breaks down in the body to one of three basic structures.
Carbs break down into glucose, fat breaks down into fatty acids, and protein breaks down into amino acids.
But before these breakdown products can produce actual energy, they first need to be converted to ATP. The body prefers to save protein for making things like bones, muscles, organs and other important structures. More on this later on. That leaves two primary sources of ATP production—glucose and fatty acids. Since energy production depends upon them, keeping long-chain fatty acids. The But first I want to tell you a little about how your mitochondria longer the carbon chain that makes work.
Guess which one they like better? You guessed it. Sounds Okay—until you compare it to fat. A long-chain fatty acid produces ATPs. That means one triglyceride can generate as much as x 3 molecules of ATP, or units of energy! If one brand of gas glucose gave you a couple miles per gallon, but another brand fat gave you a couple hundred miles, which brand would you rather use? Now, what if there were a hormone that told your mitochondria to preferentially use fat for energy instead of sugar?
Well, there is. This is the good stuff! Use this, and it will have your engines revving in no time. No wonder people who lose weight feel so damn good! On the other hand, when your fat is stuck on your hips, all your body can do is burn sugar. Not only does this create less energy which is why you feel fatigued all the time , but, as we will see in the next chapter, it increases oxidation and inflammation that lead to rapid aging and chronic illness, not to mention all that extra fat you store.
You have no muscle tone. Disgusting as it sounds, your body literally starts eating itself, dismantling healthy tissue especially muscle and transforming it into sugar to keep your metabolism going. Muscle is made mainly of protein, and protein is made of amino acids.
Now you know why. This is why you keep packing on fat and losing muscle. Okay, so how did you ever train your body to do this in the first place? As always it comes down to diet and lifestyle. But let me just whet your appetite by touching on a couple of them right now. Instead, the excessive amount of blood sugar now cruising through your blood stream is going to trigger insulin, just as if you ate a doughnut or two.
But for most everything else—especially exercise—fat is clearly the way to go. Sugar burners are rarely eager to get to the gym. It would be exhausting! Sugar produces relatively tiny amounts of ATP, while fat produces a ton of the stuff. That waste overwhelms the mito- chondria, causing them to be even less effective than before at making ATP and burning fat.
But what doesn't make the headlines is that both oxidation2 and inflammation are also directly linked to a diminished ability to burn fat for energy. The less fat you burn for energy, the more sugar you burn instead. And you end up fatter than ever. The less fat you "spend" as fuel, the more fat you store—and the fatter you get.
That, right there, is a very good reason to lower inflammation and oxidative stress. What could have gone wrong? Maybe the e-mail went into the spam folder. Maybe it was captured by a virus that eats incoming e-mails. Whatever the cause, the message was never received. Well, hormones work a lot like e-mail.
We saw this in Chapter 2 when we talked about IGF-1, insulin and leptin. Good question. And the short answer is membranes. If the receptors are damaged—as they are when inflammation and oxidative damage are present—things are not going to go well. Sugar and processed carbs raise insulin. Sugar is inflammatory—as is insulin. Insulin causes fat storage—and bigger fat cells create more inflammation.
As insulin goes up, IGF-1 plummets, making it all but impossible for these fat cells to release their energy. Metabolically active tissue M. More inflammation causes more free radicals, which cause more oxidative damage which contrib- utes to further inflammation in a vicious cycle. This vicious cycle damages the cell membranes, eventually screwing up the hormonal receptors that are parked there. When the receptors are screwed up, the hormonal messages like those coming from IGF-1 get screwed up.
Every so often one of those electrons gets loose and pandemonium ensues. Free radicals that come from oxygen known, not surprisingly, as oxygen free radicals or reactive oxygen species are the most deadly and damaging.
And the cellular, mitochondrial and DNA damage they do contributes to accelerated aging, and just about every disease that comes to mind. Mitochondria are making free radicals all the time, just through the process of ATP production. But normally, the mitochondria also contain a ton of homegrown antioxidants—like glutathione—which help quench any fires the free radicals might be starting.
They become even more damaged, less able to respond to hormonal messages, and less effective at producing energy ATP. Okay, that covers oxidative stress. Sugar burning actually sets off a fire throughout the body that causes more fat to pile on. And this same fire is now known to be at the heart of every age-related disease known to man. They turned out to be right. Inflammation is a part of virtually every degenerative disease on the planet.
The thing of it is, there are two types of inflammation—acute inflammation and chronic inflammation—and they are very different in their effect on the body. The area gets red, swollen with fluid, and hurts like heck. Chronic inflammation is bad news. Little injuries—pockets of inflammation—arise in, for example, the vascular walls, ultimately leading to plaque. Yet most of the time it flies under the radar with few symptoms much like high blood pressure, or diabetes.
To make matters worse—obesity itself is a known contributor to inflammation. They're actually quite metabolically active. Those fat cells are constantly pumping out inflammatory chemicals of their own such as inflammatory cytokines. You can think of those fat cells as little inflammation factories. So the more fat you have, the more inflammation you have. The more inflammation you have, the more damage to the mitochondria. The less ATP you make, the less energy you have, including energy for fat burning.
And, as you've guessed by now, the less energy you have, the hungrier and fatter you get. Let Me Count the Ways! While many things can cause inflammation, the list of usual suspects is pretty short. And at the top of the list—far ahead of almost anything else—is poor diet. Arien van der Merwe. This is not the place to go into the advantages of an anti-inflammatory diet for fat loss. But it is the place to point out that of all the foods we consume, sugar is one of the most inflammatory of all.
Not only does sugar stimulate insulin, which drives up inflammation and drives down IGF-1, but sugar is inflammatory all on its own. So when you have less IGF-1, your body has a much harder time cooling off the fires of inflammation. Insulin is reduced, IGF-1 goes up, and inflammation is reduced. Oxidative stress is also reduced. Then your hormones can start to get the right messages to your cells, and your mitochondria can start burning fat effectively.
Environmental toxins lead to inflammation and oxidation as well. Psychologically, it keeps you craving sugar in much the same way as smoking creates cravings for nicotine. That means less energy ATP , more cellular damage, a down-regulation of hormone receptors and a jumbled hormone symphony that keeps fat-burning messages from being effectively sent and received.
I know. It sounds like a lot—and it is. Hormones, stress, toxins, diet, even emotions—all work together to nudge you towards either sugar- burning or fat-burning metabolism.
One of them makes you fat, sick, tired and depressed. The other makes you lean, healthy, vibrant and energeic. But first we need to talk about glycation—and how it makes your body into a sugar factory.
And ATP is required for fat burning, as well as every other activity. Both inflammation and oxidative damage harm those membranes and the receptors that live on them, interfering with the hormonal messages you need for a fat-burning metabolism. The more fat you have, the more inflammation you have. The more inflammation you have, the more damage to the mitochondria, the energy factories within the cell.
The more damage to the mitochondria, the more fat burning is impaired. It creates massive amounts of oxidative damage and inflammation, damaging the mitochondrial fat-burning furnaces.
Pour sugar in the gas tank. When you put sugar in a gas tank, you basically blow out the engine. The whole mechanism gets sticky and gummed up. The car owner is, needless to say, seldom amused. When you pour sugar in your body, it's basically the same thing. You gum up your internal combustion engine—your metabolism—and you get fat. This process is called glycation.
Glycation is what happens when excess sugar in your bloodstream hooks up with slippery proteins making them sticky, and, ultimately, turning them into toxic little molecules that effectively turn off your fat burning engines. And help to keep you a sugar burner—big time. Proteins in the bloodstream look like little tadpoles. These little slippery substances can travel easily throughout the bloodstream, getting in and out of tight narrow places like small blood vessels.
Think of a visual image for sugar—I vote for cotton candy. Now put those things together—cotton candy and a nice slippery protein like a tadpole. When you eat a high-sugar diet—or a diet that converts to sugar quickly—meaning a diet rich in bread, cereal, pasta, rice, potatoes and all the other processed carbs—that excess sugar gets right into your bloodstream. Which leaves you with a heck of a lot of excess sugar in your bloodstream.
Inevitably, some of that excess sugar starts bumping into the slick proteins and gumming up the works. These sugar-sticky proteins are now called glycated proteins. Glycated proteins are toxic and make your cellular machinery run less efficiently. They exhaust the immune system. And they contribute mightily to the diseases of aging, and even to aging itself.
And that alone is guaranteed to keep your metabolism running on sugar, your skin wrinkly and your belly bulging. And it ages you just like the hot noonday sun ages unprotected skin. Eventually, these sugar-coated, sticky proteins clump together in bunches and form what scientists call AGEs—which stands for advanced glycation end products—partially because these proteins are so involved in aging the body. They age you, and they make you fat. Glycation and oxidation are actually two sides of the same coin.
Glycated proteins generate the very agents of oxidative damage—free radicals. These, in turn, create more damaged proteins which then hook up with one another and become AGEs, producing even more free radicals and more inflammation, and continuing this awful cycle of inflammation, destruction, metabolic damage and aging. This makes sense since AGEs are created by having too much sugar in the blood, which drives up insulin and drives down IGF-1 production. Even more fascinating is a study published earlier this year that suggests IGF-1 may be directly implicated in glycation and that a decline in IGF-1 could be a driving factor in the accumulation of glycated proteins in the blood.
The take-away point here is that glycation, oxidation and inflammation reinforce themselves in the nastiest of vicious circles, crippling your metabolism and aging you faster, and your levels of IGF-1 are a driving factor in this process—the more you have the less oxidation, inflammation, and glycation you tend to suffer from.
This inflames your body, damages your cells, and inhibits your hormonal symphony. Now your mitochondria become overwhelmed. ATP production slows and your energy along with it. Your body shifts further and further into sugar burning, sputtering along, using this toxic fuel like an engine trying to run on sugar-coated gasoline. The result? You stay fat, sick, tired and depressed. What element in the diet causes hormonal disruption, sending insulin through the roof, causing IGF-1 to plummet, dysregulating leptin, and setting you up for a sugar-burning metabolism while shutting down fat- burning?
What element in the diet contributes to inflammation and oxidation? And what element in the diet could possibly be responsible for the consistently elevated blood sugar that ultimately leads to glycation, causing even more inflammation and more mitochondrial damage and a further impairment of fat burning and energy production?
Sugar is inflammatory, it creates oxidative damage, it causes glycation, it disrupts the hormonal symphony and sends the wrong hormonal messages. And it compounds all that by damaging the ability of the cells to receive the hormonal messages in the first place. Another way you get ready-made AGEs in your diet is through carmelized foods.
We saw this in the case of one of our own team members, who eats as well as anyone I know, works out routinely, gets plenty of sleep and whose blood sugar and insulin measurements were just fine. Hemoglobin A1c is an important marker for long-term blood sugar, and measures the amount of elevated blood sugar over time. Doctors use Hemoglobin A1c scores of over 6 to diagnose diabetes. Stress was causing him to burn sugar for its quick impact.
His blood was flooded with glucose, that lead to more glycation, and his hemoglobin A1c skyrocketed. Case closed. Stress matters. And in more ways than we might think. I think stress is so important that I consider it one of the five major pathways to a fat-burning metabolism, which is why I devoted an entire chapter to it in this program. But first I want to talk to you about the real pitfalls of dietin.
When levels are low glycated proteins accumulate more quickly in the blood. Many diets fail because—whatever other good things there may be in those diets—they do not help you make the shift to a permanent fat-burning metabolism. They ate these foods when they could. They didn't have set meal times. Our metabolism adapted under feast or famine conditions. That's why we humans have an exquisitely tuned system designed for storing calories—we needed to be able to survive when food was scarce.
Fast forward to the present. So you get fat. No surprise there. But you want to do something about it. So you go on a conventional diet.
But when you just cut calories, without paying attention to what foods they come from, you run smack dab into three of the biggest dieting pitfalls that ultimately just make you fatter than you were prior to starting the diet in the first place. Low leptin is a powerful signal to eat.
Remember when we talked about the relationship between leptin and thyroid? When that happens, your IGF-1 drops. That means your M. Your thinking slows down, your digestion grinds to a halt-- even your heart is weakened. This makes total sense from a survival point—store every drop of energy you can! But it does. Your ability to store fat—just as a pure survival tactic—has gone up, up, up.
Your body is on high alert, waiting eagerly for some extra calories so it can pack some fat back on. Now you go off your diet. Want to guess what happens? You gain back all the fat back, and then some. You are eating the same amount of calories as you did before you dieted; the only problem is that now your body requires less food. Your previous level of calorie intake is now seen to be excessive. And the excess calories have to go somewhere—and guess where?
So the average diet is actually designed to make you fail at burning fat. It slows down the exact processes you need to get that stubborn fat off your tummy, thighs and hips. One way it does this is to raise blood sugar. First, your stress hormones rise. Cortisol will use anything in its bag of tricks to raise your blood sugar so it can keep you alive in what it perceives as an emergency.
One of the things it does to accomplish this is to break down muscle, because the amino acids that make up the protein in muscles can be readily converted by the body into glucose sugar , as we previously discussed. Essentially your body eats up its own M. Cortisol breaks down muscles because your body perceives this crazy diet of yours as a famine, and that definitely qualifies as an emergency from an evolutionary standpoint.
Remember, cortisol broke down some muscle in a desperate effort to create more sugar. Since muscle burns a lot more calories than fat does after all, it's where most of your energy-producing mitochondria are , your resting metabolic rate—meaning how many calories you burn while just lounging around—has just effectively slowed down. You now have less muscle, and muscle burns more calories than fat.
This leaves you in almost the identical situation from Pitfall 1 in which your hormones directly cause your metabolism to slow down. You eat less, but your metabolism is slower. You have less M. Fat loss comes to a standstill, you eat even less, you become frustrated and you give up! To continue the sailboat analogy, it would be like you had a ton of wood in the stowage space, but that room is painted shut! Meanwhile, grehlin—the appetite reinforcement hormone—is now elevated, reinforcing the hunger signals of decreased leptin.
Your thyroid production has dropped down, meaning your metabolism is slowed and whatever you do eat is likely going to wind up stored as fat. Willpower, Willpower, Who's Got the Willpower? Eventually you let go. I know a little bit about addiction and willpower, and no one has more respect for self-discipline than I do.
Not that I have that much more self-discipline than anyone else, but at least I have a healthy respect for it! You can get off drugs and never use them again. You can stop drinking—or smoking—and after a nasty little withdrawal period, you never need look at let alone indulge in those substances again.
Which makes food—specifically sugar—one of the hardest possible addictions to break. The feeling of being deprived of your favorite foods—especially since you still have to eat and those foods are always around—can be a huge challenge. How do you avoid all three of these pitfalls that seem inevitable? Are we all just doomed to gain fat as we age? Of course not. It does this by: 1. Preventing the metabolic adaptation that happens with traditional dieting, leading to the dreaded plateaus and inevitable regains.
Offering you an easy way to stop relying on willpower. The solution is so simple it's almost mind- numbing: You get to eat all the foods you love. The pitfalls of conventional dieting are avoided, and your days as a sugar burner are numbered. Let the fat-burning games begin! In addition, the hunger- stimulating hormone ghrelin, goes up. Nutrition is definitely the most important pathway to becoming a fat burner, reversing aging and staying healthy.
So just by your food choices alone, you can direct hormonal traffic in favor of less insulin less fat storage and more IGF-1 more fat burning. That means you'll turn from a sugar-burning monster into a fat-burning machine. Ever wonder why when you eat too much sugar your energy plunges not too long afterwards? The cells are too busy stuffing themselves with sugar. Nothing, that is, except be damaged by the inflammation and oxidation caused by high- carb diets, about which more in a moment.
The point is that when you eat badly, energy production suffers. Less energy means less fat burning. So we need to turn down inflammation, and that means dramatically reducing our intake of sugar.
In fact, one of the most inflammatory things we consume on a regular basis is not sugar at all. These so-called innocent oils are contributing to the breakdown of your mitochondria and your ability to burn fat.
Our bodies make inflammatory chemicals series 2 prostaglandins , and they make anti-inflammatory chemicals series 1 and 3 prostaglandins. We make the inflammatory chemicals out of omega-6s vegetable oils and we make the anti- inflammatory chemicals out of omega-3s fish oil, flaxseed oil. You do need both—and if our diets contained an equal amount of each of them, everything would be hunky-dory. Saturated fat or even Where are all those extra omega-6s coming from?
One analysis was jointly done by You guessed it. Vegetable oil. The worst thing and twenty-three years. The conclusion? The bottom line is too much vegetable oil contributes abstract to inflammation; inflammation keeps you in sugar- burning territory.
Instead you're going to eat luscious grass-fed butter and coconut oil, and other wonderful saturated fats that have been shown to reduce your inflammation, keep you satiated and help you burn fat. Relax when you see those fats in the recipes.
Now another food we need to discuss when it comes to inflammation is gluten. How to Set Your Body on Fire with Bread In the last few years, two books have come out that I consider to be among the most important books on nutrition written in the last decade. And what both these books have to tell us about grains will set your hair on end. This connection could be adding inches to your waistline with you even knowing it.
Gluten—as you may know—is a component in grains, predominantly in wheat, but also in barley, rye, spelt, kamut and—more often than we'd like—oats, only because of cross-contamination with gluten grains. For many people, grains may be—and often are—a powerful modulator of inflammation.
And let's not forget that nutrition doesn't only impact inflammation, it also influences the whole evil set of triplets—inflammation, sure, but also oxidation and glycation. Because food and supplements are our only external sources of antioxidants. And you can keep insulin quite low and IGF-1 nice and high with just fat and protein. Vegetables have nearly no effect on blood sugar and are virtual nutritional powerhouses, literally shoveling antioxidant protection into your bloodstream with every bite.
That's why I want you to eat vegetables—because of the fiber, the nutrients, the antioxidants, the phytochemicals, and all the other health-giving compounds found in the plant kingdom. And if you need to bring it back down to practicalities, remember what oxidative damage does to your mitochondria.
Hint: the key word is damage. Finally we have the last enemy of the fat burning metabolism, glycation. And how do you think all that excess sugar gets into the bloodstream to create the glycated proteins and, ultimately, the AGEs in the first place? Through diet. And in the case of glycation it happens in two insidious ways. First, by eating the food that keeps bumping your blood sugar up. The more sugar floating around the bloodstream, the more opportunity for some of it to glom on to proteins, making them sticky and ultimately leading to AGE formation.
But the other way we increase AGEs through our diet is to just swallow those bad boys whole, which is exactly what we do when we eat highly caramelized, or browned foods. And frequently does. So you see, nutrition really is the Macdaddy of the pathways to health. And that includes your mitochondria, and it includes your cell membranes, both of which are absolutely vital for an efficient, fat-burning metabolism.
See, a diet like that—which, by the way, is a very healthy way to eat—has some potential pitfalls. So let's look a little more carefully at how we are going to do this. Some folks in the low-carb community believe we should replace most of those carbs sugars and starches with more protein, while others believe we should replace them with more fat.
Both make very persuasive cases. I do believe we need a certain amount of protein at each meal to get the real metabolic advantages of protein. I tell you this because it is critically important that you do not try to do a low-fat version of this program.
Then, after ten days on a higher fat, moderate protein and low carbohydrate diet, you're going to have a carb feast. Yep, you read that right. After ten days you're going to do a carb feast. It allows you to avoid all of the metabolic adaptations and other pitfalls I described in the last chapter. You eat really low carb for a period of time, which accomplishes two things: One, it depletes your glycogen stored sugar stores, which is important because it's harder to burn fat for energy when your body has plenty of it stored as carbs.
Two, it trains your body to run on fat, or fat metabolites. So far so good. Worried about your IGF-1 levels plummeting when insulin is spiked? The insulin spike goes up and down so fast, it barely has any effect on IGF Then you start again with a low-sugar eating plan, continuing the path towards fat burning but without the metabolic adaptations that can slow you down, depress your thyroid, eat up your muscles, and make you cranky as heck.
And before you know it, carb feast is here again. Remember, the nutritional goals for this program are: 1 Eat healthful and delicious foods that provide the broad spectrum of natural antioxidants, anti-in- flammatories, protein, fat and fiber. The bottom line is simply this: The food you eat, over time, will direct your body to run primarily on sugar or primarily on fat. It is also an important contributor to detoxification.
Some eating patterns increase insulin the fat storage hormone making it more difficult for IGF-1 to do its job. A number of important studies in the last few decades have documented a powerful association between lack of sleep and obesity. Lack of sleep—or the wrong kind of sleep—has a profound effect on four important hormones that help regulate appetite and fat storage. Lack of high-quality sleep basically makes your hormonal symphony sound like a kazoo.
Sleep is a big part of an anti-aging lifestyle. Without sufficient amounts, you age faster. Sleep affects how we work, how we relate to other people, how we make decisions, and how we feel in general. Not getting enough sleep can depress our immune system and raise our stress hormones. The right amount of sleep—and, equally important, the right kind of sleep—is absolutely essential if you want to make the transition from sugar burner to fat burner.
Geneticists and anthropologists tell us that our specific human genome has only changed 0. Therefore, whenever possible, I think it makes sense to look to what our human genus was programmed for when it comes to basic things such as food, exercise and sleep. It's what we evolved to eat, what our systems were designed to run on best. Prior to electricity, we listened to our biological rhythms, which were in sync with the rhythms of the earth.
We slept when it was dark out, and awoke when it was light. We spent plenty of time in the sun. We moved around a lot.
And when it was dark, we sat around the campfire and went to bed and slept like babies. When the sun rose, we started the day. This, if you will, was the natural order of things. This is the factory-specified sleep pattern for healthy humans. It keeps your hormones running like a purring cat, replenishing healing chemicals for cellular repair, rejuvenation and maintenance, moderating glucose and insulin sensitivity, releasing growth hormone and the anti-aging hormone melatonin , and keeping stress hormones from running amok and forcing you into sugar-burning hell.
This factory-specified sleep pattern has been as wildly disrupted by modern life as our factory-specified diet has been wildly disrupted by processed foods. The restorative power of sleep is well known, but scientists have been unclear about just why this is so. However, a fascinating study published just as I was completing the manuscript for this program suggests that what may be happening is a kind of internal housecleaning that leaves your brain and body refreshed.
Sleep is also when your hormonal symphony is tuned up, inflammation and oxidation are reduced, stress vanishes, your body relaxes, and you shift toward a fat-burning metabolism. In fact, we burn the highest percentage of calories from fat when we sleep than we do at any other time of day.
To quote the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Let me count the ways. It Sleep Architecture has many important jobs in the body, but arguably one Sleep can be divided into two categories— of its most essential functions is its involvement in the REM rapid eye movement sleep and production of IGF Non-REM sleep has four stages.
Stage one is when you move As you fall deeper and deeper into sleep, your brain from wakefulness to drowsiness to falling waves change. The brain waves in the deepest part of asleep. This is what you see when you sleep massage your pituitary gland telling it to release drag your husband to the opera and HGH, testosterone and DHEA, all of which are reparative he starts nodding off.
In stage two, eye compounds in their own right. Stages three and DHEA. Body temperature IGF No IGF-1; no fat-burning. Another vicious downward and blood pressure drop just a little more, cycle. This is when everyone in metabolism and fat burning. Leptin is the chemical that dreamland gets up to dance!
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