Hormone Controlled Fat Storage
Many times is see patient for weight loss consultation before and after surgeries or for Age Management Medicine.
They often tell me that they exercise and eat a low fat diet but they are unable to loose any weight. As part of the discussion I tell them that, “your body does not know what a low fat diet is.”
The reason for this is due to the hormone Insulin. If you eat any carbohydrates either complex or simple, the sugar that is produced stimulates the pancreas to release insulin. As we age our bodies tend to over shoot the amount of insulin that the pancreas puts out. This usually will make us crave more carbohydrates several hours after consumption of previous carbohydrate.
Insulin’s over all job is to store all types of excess energy whether sugar or fat as well as to instruct the liver to convert any glucose that can’t be stored in the liver or your muscle into fat.
You only have limited amount of storage space for sugar. Sugars are converted to starch for storage in the liver and the muscles under the influence of insulin. Unfortunately we only have 2 days worth of energy storage for sugars. All other sugars that can’t be stored are converted to fat and stored in fat cells.
Americans rarely empty out any of the sugar’s storage space because we eat a lot of carbohydrates. Therefore all the sugars consumed in a day is usually converted to fat and stored in fat cells. Therefore any low fat, normal to high carbohydrate diet can make you fat.
So the trick is to limit the amount of carbohydrates in the day to a smaller amount so your liver and muscle can make room for future carbohydrates. This is the basis for Atkins and Sugar Buster Type diets. Each utilized the hormone level of insulin and glucagons to manage energy being burned as fat. They reduce the amount of sugar stored in the liver and this induces the production in the liver and muscle of enzyme pathway that burn fat. Normally these pathways are at very low levels because the body doesn’t need to use them because so much carbohydrate is around.
Our bodies are pretty smart and it does not care what we want. It will function only as it is designed. It doesn’t feel compelled to make you happy or sad. It just does what it is designed to do.
So lower carbohydrate diet make most people loose weight. Eating low glycemic index carbohydrates is better than simple sugars because they don’t tend to spike our insulin levels too high and cause us to crave more carbohydrates.