What Makes Us Fat

Originally Posted by Pam Turner on 01/06/12:

I wanted to write a bit about how grain based foods and sugars, especially those in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which is found in just about everything, have caused the obesity problem we have here in the USA. Sadly, as other countries adopt our eating habits, their health declines as well. Society's that never had obesity problems with their traditional diets.. now do.

We have been told for many years by our government what we should eat and how much. We had the "Food Guide Pyramid" which our children were taught in school and physicians and nutritionists passed on to patients. We were taught that our diet should be based on grain...11 servings a day with lesser amounts of proteins, veg, fruits and very limited fats. We were told that natural foods like coconut oil, butter and animal fat which had always been a part of our diets were suddenly bad for us and they were replaced with vegetable oils and hydrogenated margarine and shortenings. During those years the health of this country has gone consistently downhill. What were once rare diseases like diabetes, cancers and vascular disease are now common and even expected. If the counsel we have been subjected to was sound, why have we become so sick and fat? How could we still be so wrong?

The body has a very small need for sugar and once a person's intake exceeds that it gets stored as fat. Grain based foods get converted to sugar quickly and cause insulin spikes. Insulin is the body's fat storing hormone. It tells the body to store fat rather then use it for energy. Most of us have way too much insulin circulating due to our high sugar/grain diets. When you consider the fact that for decades the USRDA told everyone to eat low fat while eating 11 servings of grain a day it is no wonder why we are all struggling with our weight. They use grain to fatten livestock for slaughter. In a way, we have been too.

Grain has always been the biggest crop in the USA. So big in fact that we shipped it out to other countries just to get rid of it. Telling the US citizens that they NEED 11 servings went a long way to converting that abundance of grain in to cash.

I get asked all the time about what to eat to maintain once the weight is lost. It's simple really. Don't eat grain and don't eat sugar. You will never be fat again. Focus on healthy sources of fats and protein and vegetable with very limited fruits and grain. We humans were not designed to eat grain. If we were we would have the kind of teeth that could grind it up and we would be able to eat it as nature made it, whole..raw..and unprocessed, but we don't. Good way to lose a tooth! The teeth we do have tell us that we are designed to eat animal, vegetable, fruit, nuts and seeds. If you can chew it raw, it's food for you. Sugar was only meant to be eaten in season. Consider this.. in most parts of the world that have winter weather we see that the fruits ripen in the summer and late fall, natures way to fatten people up for when food is less available. Dietary sugar makes fat. Dietary fat makes energy.

Here is an excerpt from an article about this subject that explains it well. It's talking about the mistakes we make in diet and exercise and how the body responds:


Dr. Doug McGuff is an emergency room physician and an expert on exercise and diet. He explains:

"Your skeletal muscle – if you're lucky – can hold maybe 250 grams of glucose, and your liver holds about 70. If you take 320 grams of glucose as what your storage capacity is, you can kill that with a single trip to Starbucks. Once you go beyond that, your body is going to find some sort of way to deal with those excess carbohydrates.

If your glycogen storage is full, your body has nowhere else to put it. So instead of going all the way through this metabolic pathway, it… produces body fat. That's called the novel glycogenosis. We are in the midst of a very bizarre, evil-scientist type experiment in the Western world, because we are dumping into our bodies an amount of carbohydrate and, in particular, refined sugars, that are way above the capacity of our metabolism to handle normally."

The result of our modern diet, which is loaded with grains and sugars (especially fructose), is a large percentage of obesity, and people that are overweight. This can be turned around, however, using a wise combination-approach of a high-fat, low-carb diet and high-intensity interval training.

"Through an amplification cascade, when you're doing a high-intensity exercise, you very aggressively empty sugar out of your muscle cells. By doing that and combining over the low-carbohydrate diet, you start to heal the metabolism," Dr. McGuff explains. "They are able to access their energy source finally. That's how they can turn things around."

It's crucial to remember that you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet, and the first step toward improving your diet is to cut out as much sugar/fructose and grain/carbs as possible. Your diet actually accounts for about 80 percent of the health benefits derived from a healthy lifestyle, with the remaining 20 percent coming from exercise. That benefit ratio could lean even higher toward diet, according to Dr. McGuff:

"The standard American diet is highly inflammatory. It produces systemic inflammation of an order that is almost beyond belief. In that state, if you do exercise of any significant stress, you're just adding inflammation on top of the inflammation, and you're actually putting yourself at a bit of a risk. I advise people to get their diet straight and then exercise. "

If you are worried about maintenance, don't be. You can be very happy and satisfied on a no-grain eating plan. If you get back to how nature intended us to eat, which has been the path of evolution for us as well as all the other living things on earth that have not become extinct, then you can live a healthy life free of obesity and dieting. Cambridge is a jump start to get the weight off fast. The rate of weight loss accelerates the metabolism's ability to begin healing because body fat causes many negative effects to your overall health, far more then you can imagine. Body fat affects you hormonally, skeletally, mentally, chemically and prevents full mobility of the body. I think it is safe to say that there isn't a single cell that isn't in some way affected by obesity. Having an overabundance of sugar in the system also encourages systemic yeast overgrowth, a whole other problem many people are now suffering from that has been discussed previously in other articles. We all want to be healthy, vital and active. Getting back to eating the way nature designed is the natural way to maintaining a slim body and a healthy life.