Workouts

#63 Do You Even Eat Bro?

Good Morning!

Welcome to Fit Friday, where I write about a health topic, tell you about the progress in my personal health and fitness journey, what I’m doing at the gym, and some of the meals I’m planning on eating next week. If you’ve been reading my health blogs so far, the format should be familiar to you already.

Today I’m going to write about my progress so far and reflect on each of the times I saw significant weight-loss progress in my current health and fat-loss journey.

#60 Health Blog – What’s Leptin?

Good Morning!

What’s Leptin? Leptin a hormone produced by your body fat that is used by the brain to regulate hunger, the metabolism, and stress hormones.

The amount of leptin in the body is determined by how much body fat you have. More body fat equals more leptin.

When you are leptin sensitive, where the brain ‘sees’ the leptin, this process works correctly.

When there is excess fat on the body, the brain will raise the metabolism and lower hunger to reduce the amount of stored energy to the ‘normal’ level.

It’s the feedback loop your body uses to tell you that there is enough stored energy and that you don’t need to keep eating.

Unless of course you’re leptin resistant.

#58 Health Blog – Fasting Burns Fat

Good Morning!

In the last two health blog posts I’ve written about how and why we store fat. This post is going to cover the easiest way to get energy out of the fat cell.

To quickly recap

Insulin is ‘the fat storage hormone’.
Eating carbs will cause insulin to go up in body.
Any excess energy not used from what is taken into the body will be stored in the fat cell.
If Insulin is always high, you will not be able to use your stored fat.
The only way to use the stored energy from the fat cell is to
- be in a caloric deficit when the metabolism is still high
- glycogen in the liver and muscles constantly needs to be replenished
- have low insulin level
The easiest way to get into the state where all three of these conditions are met, is fasting. Fasting is when you don’t eat anything at all.

Let’s examine how fasting accomplishes this.

#56 Health Blog – Let’s Get Serious About How Body Fat Works

Good Morning!

I want to start out by saying that we still don’t know what causes obesity as a matter of general consensus. This kind of seems crazy to me because the current evidence is so compelling, but information like this takes a long time to spread throughout the medical community and then even more time for people’s individual opinions to change. So all I can do as an individual is use what works regardless of what the medical community says. *shrug* I might being wrong in my choosing in the very long term, but I guess it’s what’s working for me to become less obese in the short term.

On Monday’s post, I wrote about the lecture I watched of Gary Taubes explaining the cause, or why we get fat, that being the carbohydrates we eat makes the hormone insulin increase in our bodies which makes us store any excess energy as body fat.

What I learned yesterday while reading “The Obesity Code” by Dr. Jason Fung*, is what is needed to make fat storing actually happen.

#54 Health Blog – Why We Get Fat

Good Morning!

Last night I watched a lecture given by Gary Taubes, the author of the books Good Calories Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat.

He examines what we think we know about obesity and explains that the driving force behind fat accumulation is the hormone insulin and what upregulates insulin is carbohydrates.