Are you doing everything “right” yet Not getting the Results you Expect?
When evaluating all the pillars of health, human nutrition appears as particularly convoluted. The complexity and choice or paradigms to follow can be overwhelming. Once you decide on a healthy eating regime and are following along adhering to the restrictions and guidelines set down, you expect results.
Is it well grounded to presume results are guaranteed, impartial of your individuality?
The overarching idea of adopting a nutritional strategy to accomplish a change in current health standing, usually contains one or a blend of the following;
Dietary restriction of a macronutrient or subset of the same. This would look like a restriction or elimination of sugar, animal protein, grains, dairy etc.
Restricting the time window in which you allow yourself to ingest calories (nutrients) in each 24 hour period. You may choose to eat only during an 8 hour window in each 24 hours etc.
Calorie restriction. This is accomplished by reducing portion sizes or limiting the amount of food you choose to consume over a given period.
Let’s take the goal of weight loss in an overweight male. In the discussion of the equitable reasoning of expecting results when adopting a strategy or a combination of the above strategies. One possible game plan could be to omit animal protein from your diet (this is espoused by many health advocates as a beneficial weight loss tool). You may also choose to restrict your total calorie intake aligning with the “Energy Balance” paradigm for weight loss. What if you were to continue with this for 3 months and see no results in weight loss? How would you feel? What would your next steps be?
Would you have the logical mindset to accept that your efforts may well have contributed to your health span but you may have missed something in your strategy that will allow your body to drop weight. There are so many nuances in the success of lowering fat levels in our body. Thorough inquiry and refinement by a nutritional maestro serves to give more assurance in collecting your wins. What if this said male had blood sugar issues and high uric acid, that hadn’t been considered.
Rick Johnson MD, eloquently explains how the metabolism and the critical pathway induced by fructose can increase fat storage, even in the presence of caloric restriction…
“Normally when you eat a calorie, we use it to make energy. But when you eat fructose, the energy in the cell falls before it goes up. ATP is the currency in our body that we use to make us run, walk, think, talk, everything. But to make ATP, you have to spend a little of it to make it ⇒ The process of breaking down and metabolising food or fructose requires spending a little bit of ATP before you make it more of it. But when fructose is metabolised by fructokinase, it consumes ATP in an unregulated way. If the cell sees a lot of fructose, the ATP levels can plummet by 40 or 50% in the cell and that produces a “May Day” signal, “we’re under attack, we’re running out of energy! It switches the animal into a condition in which they’re trying to preserve their energy.”
This results in reduced metabolism, reduced energy expenditure and a push of calories eaten into stored fuel. Along the journey it triggers hunger and thirst that makes you want to eat more so you eat more to restore the energy but at the expense that you’re shunting much of it into fat and into fuel storage.
“Fructose turns out to be used by animals as a mechanism to store fat.”
Returning to our example, if this guy is ingesting a lot of fructose and not necessarily via eating fruits, he may be chasing a losing battle.
Have you reached your frustration point? Comment below and let me know what is going on …