2012/02/24, 02:06 PM
(Edited:
heraldstorm
- 2012/02/24, 02:14 PM)
There's a lot of discussion these days on dieting. It's a multibillion dollar industry. Most everyone has heard of the TV show, 'The Biggest Loser'. You may have seen workouts offered by Tony Horton, a popular personal trainer for some of Hollywood's brightest stars (not that that is a valid credential, mind you). Opinions and facts alike are everywhere you look. Some of the information is driven by a desire to sell product. Some of the information is driven by a desire to see a healthier population. Some of the information is for fame and notoreity. Some of it is just plain common sense. Either way, to make sense of what's right and wrong, you have to understand a little basic physiology and vocabulary. That's what this next bit is about.
Everyone out there says "be a label reader". I've said it myself, but what does it mean? How does the information on the label apply to me? More importantly, if I read the label, will I be able to lose weight? Hmm. Not directly. Reading is exercise for the brain, not necessarily the body, but it's still valid.
To understand why people get fat, you have to understand how the body works. Why do we eat? Eating food is the primary source of getting energy. Just like a car, our body requires fuel to run. That's where calories come in. A calorie isn't something your body processes directly, like Vitamin A or protein. A calorie is a measure of energy...specifically, the amount of energy required to increase the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celcius, or 4.2 kilojoules. Enough chemistry for now...Calories are measures of energy. They give us an approximate idea of how much energy we will get by eating an item of food. Your body can do one of two things with energy: use it, or store it.
When we take in more energy than we use, it is stored. It is stored, in fact, in many ways, but the kind we're focusing on here is in large fat cells. Fat cells are large indeed, and they're light. That's why you can't always rely on what the scale says when you're exercising and dieting. You can lose fat mass, and gain muscle mass. Because muscle weighs more, you won't see a change in weight, and you may even see a weight gain. Don't freak out and throw in the towel. You need to stick with any program for at least 6 weeks to get an accurate view of how your body is changing and reacting to the program. Back to physiology, and please, stop distracting me!
We now know that we put energy into our body...through food, not from an electrical outlet! Get your hands away from there! How does the food get from our plates to our cells? Well, that's a very long process I'm not going to cover here, but suffice it to say that chicken breast goes in and a whole bunch of breakdown occurs. Your body breaks down the chicken into lots of lean protein (good!) a tiny bit of carbohydrates (this kind is good!) a tiny bit of fat (not the stored kind, the fuel kind) some minerals like iron and calcium, etc. What part of that is energy? Well, primarily your body's cells can use energy in many different forms. The kind I'm going to talk about comes from two places, fat and carbohydrates. Examples of fats are butter, lard, olive oil, flaxseed oil, etc. Examples of carbohydrates are potatoes, beans, grains such as wheat and oats, etc. The majority of your cells prefer to get their energy from glucose. Glucose is one of the products of carbohydrates. Some tissues, such as the heart, cannot process glucose, and must get their energy from fatty acids. Fatty acids are a product of breaking down fats.
There are good and bad kinds of carbs and fats. Saturated fats are the least desireable kind. This is common in lots of animal fat such as lard or butter derived from milk. Another bad nutrient found in anmial fats in high amounts is cholesterol. Cholesterol is known to be a contributor to heart disease, clogged blood vessels, and other life shortening results of your body trying to metabolize cholesterol. This is one of the reasons "Low-fat diets" are so popular among dieticians. Another thing about fats to know is that they are more calorically dense than other nutrients. 1 gram of fats can contain almost twice the calories than 1 gram of some carbohydrates. That means you eat a little and get a LOT of calories...that's more calories for your body to process. If your body can't process it, it gets stored as fat cells. There's also another side of the fats coin which I'll discuss later.
The bad side of carbs comes from refined carbohydrates...This is the stuff you find in white bread, chicken nuggets, frozen pizza, corn dogs, etc. Pretty much anything that goes from the bag, to the microwave, to your plate is going to give you more than you bargained for calorically. What you're getting is either downright harmful to your body's metabolism, or at the kindest, it isn't the most efficient energy. Like sodas and candy, you're putting high calorie sugars in your system, and you're not getting any nutrition out of it. What you want to shoot for on a diet is to only put things in your body that have nutritional impact. Does it make you full as well as give you energy? Does it help build muscle along with contributing calories? Is it something that benefits your body with the energy cost you're paying for, or is it "empty"?
Some of the negative effects of sugars like glucose, sucrose, fructose, etc? Well the first thing that comes to mind is diabetes. The reason diabetes is so common in obese folks is that all the extra fat they carry around tends to saturate the blood with sugars. Remember, carbohydrates break down into sugars. If those sugars aren't used, they're stored. Your body is constantly converting fat to energy components. If they aren't used, they are stored again, but when you have that much fat mass, you're saturating the blood with sugars and fatty acids. Over time, your body cannot keep up with the constant influx of sugars, either because it's not producing enough insulin (it's just worn out, darn it) or the cells aren't responding to insulin. There are also congenital forms of diabetes that are due to genetics, but we're focused on how we impact our own bodies. Diabetes can range from inconvenient to life threatening. I've known people that have lost limbs due to diabetes.
So, we know having a lot of excess fat is bad. Decidedly, emphatically unhealthy. And we know that fat comes about (without considering genetic predispositions or glandular malfunctions) by taking in more calories than we burn. So, we can either eat fewer calories or burn more calories. Preferably, when you're trying to lose weight, you do both. That's why I wrote this book of a post in an exercise forum. Diet goes hand in hand with exercise if you're trying to lose weight, and I want folks to understand that you can't simply go to the gym and throw around a medicine ball for a few minutes. You have to do cardio, you have to build muscle mass, and you have to modify your diet.
One final word on fats and carbs. In and of themselves, they aren't bad. Most dieticians will (grudgingly) admit that your body can get along just fine without either one. You see, your body can generate the glucose or fatty acids it needs to as long as it has enough of the bare essential nutrients (No, you're going to have to google that, I'm not going to give you everything). The place you always end up at, though, is that we eventually get hungry. We have to eat something, and foods don't contain just one thing. If they did, eating wouldn't be nearly so fun. Fats add flavor. They fill us up and keep something in our stomach longer. It's similar to fibrous foods...if you eat a lot of foods high in fiber, you feel fuller longer. Anyway, you have to eat something, and that's probably eventually going to contain carbs and/or fats. So, you have to know about what your body does with this stuff, so that you know you must exercise to help your body burn off excess energy. This isn't the nervous tick kind of burning off excess energy, this is the go climb a mountain or a brisk jog around the neighborhood kind of burning. If you search hard enough, you'll find tribes of people that have high fat, low carb diets. You'll also find that due to their extremely active lifestyle, they don't have a problem with obesity. You'll also find that some people (mostly in America) have low fat, high carb diets that are obese...mainly because the food manufacturers try and slide under the carpet that they love bad carbs. Bad carbs are much more easily converted by your body than good carbs. What's better, a veggie sandwich on white bread, or a veggie sandwich on whole wheat bread? Or a three bean salad in olive oil and red wine vinegar or a plate of instant mashed potatoes? It's all in how refined the carbs are, and you want the complex kind, not the refined kind, and you absolutely MUST exercise.
So what are you waiting for? Why are you still here? Get out there and lift something heavy, or go chase a car or something! And that peanut butter and jelly sandwich better be on 100 percent whole wheat bread, or you're going to pay for it!
If you have read this far, thank you, and please let me know. If you enjoyed this, likewise, let me know. I may write another in the future.
-Herald
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