How your diet is making you fat

In the dictionary diet means:

“The kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats”

Simple right? It’s just about what you eat and that’s your diet. I don’t want to get into a debate about which diet is the best or anything like that, I just want you to know two things. 1: All diets work (to a point) and 2: They don’t work too. What do I mean? Most studies done on conventional/modern diets don’t normally go any further than 4-6 months, I guess it might have something to do with people going back to old eating habits, and that’s the rub. It’s our habits (read dictionary meaning again) and one other thing, which is mentioned a little later on. The main thing that needs to change is our eating habits. This isn’t normally down to us cutting carbs or fats, eating just protein or drinking your meals, it all comes back to an individual gradually changing their bad habits for good ones. I would love to say it’s simple or easy and can be done in 8-12 weeks; unfortunately it has no time frame. Not that a person would need to stick to just one-way of eating either. It is not a one-road destination; there are many paths towards your goals.

Earlier I wrote that all diets work (to a point). Let me explain that a little here. Bottom line we are all the same, well built the same. We have the same organs, we are made or carbon and water we have blood and so on. The thing that makes us different, at least inside is the hormonal response to what we put in our bodies. When person A starts to follow a particular diet programme they could get the right hormonal response and lose body fat, this could work either short or long term for them as their body might actually like that way of eating. Person B sees it working or reads about it so decides to give it a shot. Again it might work for a while for that person, then natural cravings/habits start being triggered and person B can’t keep up with the diet. They can become frustrated and could just give up completely. One big reason why it didn’t work for them could be that their body might require or use energy slightly different from person A and that the diet restricted something that they should have.

Most if not all diets work on what I refer to as the “yo-yo” business model. They entice you with a way to lose weight. Though for most people when they leave the programme or stop following it they normally end up putting the weight back on, sometimes even more weight than what they started with. This isn’t so much a flaw in the diet; it just means it wasn’t for them. For hundreds of years people have been losing and controlling their weight. In today’s world it’s what ever diet is popular, endorsed by a celebrity or who shouts the loudest about why the diet they are telling you about is the right one for humans and so on. What isn’t mentioned in a lot of diet programmes (only some) is it all comes down to your hormones. Yes hormones control everything in our bodies, even how much muscle or fat we can add to them. Modern diets have you focus on a particular food, amount or the macronutrients of your food. Your hormones will react to all food and drinks that enter your body. What is not being said is that hormonal responses are subjective to the individual. You can’t package hormones as a diet really; it’s quite a hard sell.

Following the wrong way of eating for an individual could also back fire for them. Like I mentioned, my “yo-yo” view on modern diets, what they tend to focus on or push on you is the idea of weight loss. Your weight isn’t really the problem, it’s the extra weight brought on by fat gain, and fat loss/reduction should then become the message/goal. Normally when we lose weight (it being made up of everything in our bodies) we wont only lose fat we can lose muscle and water too, mostly these. Especially as muscle loss happens our weight goes down, our health goes down too as now we have more fat than muscle on our bodies. When we decide to come off it and go back to eating normally we gain extra fat, why? It all comes back to our hormones, they haven’t changed or the response hasn’t. Muscle stores glucose, glucose is our main energy source. With less muscle we have less ability to store glucose. The hormone insulin will then have to store it elsewhere; this is normally in our fat cells and they will keep getting bigger. Not many diets have this in mind, some do like a fasting protocol, though you don’t need to fast to lose weight (unless it works for you of course). Also all diets restrict you from eating to much added sugar and processed food, this creates the right hormonal response too.

Fibre is like our safety net. It will slow down glucose absorption in the small intestines, this then allows you to use up glucose from the muscles so once glucose is in the blood there is now room for this new lot of energy and very little will become fat. Also adding a few pounds of extra muscle would also go along way to help the body rid its self of that extra fat. With fibre and extra muscle we then will be able to use up the extra energy that is stored in our fat.