Natural Health Help

I said I’d be back to talk more about how permanent weight loss is accomplished. I often tell my patients this: There are three ways we eat- we eat to get fat, we eat to lose fat, and there is a third way, different from these other two ways of eating, that we use to maintain a healthy body weight life-long. How we eat to lose weight is different from a healthy life long diet.

Every successful weight loss diet is what is called a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet is one in which we reduce the total number of calories we eat to be less than the amount of calories our bodies need to use that day. Not enough calories from your food creates chemical signals that makes your fat cells release the fuel stored there to provide energy for your muscles.

The fuel is called ketones. Your muscles and brain prefer to use glucose, or blood sugar, for fuel. Your mouth, stomach and intestines turn your food into glucose, more or less quickly, to provide fuel for your body. Your brain really needs glucose; you muscles can use ketones when there isn’t enough blood sugar to go around.

A very important aspect of successful weight loss is how your glucose and ketones work together to fuel your brain and muscles while dieting. You can successfully use up fat cells to a certain point by limiting your calories any old way- all the crash diets you’ve ever been on, like spinach, eggs and grapefruit, or juice fasting for instance- have worked like that. The problem is you always get to a point of low blood sugar where your brain just can’t function right. I know you have been there- HUNGRY, craving all your comfort foods, very short tempered and irritable, jittery and shaky, maybe even weak and dizzy.

This is the point many people give up. They are just too uncomfortable. They give in to their cravings, eat sometimes really wildly, and then feel really bad, both physically and emotionally. People usually blame themselves, say they have no will power, and in general are pretty mean to themselves about it all. It feels like a personal failure and a very negative judgment of character. They stop their weight loss efforts and often find themselves heavier than they were before they started. If this is a familiar story to you, come back soon. I will be writing more about how this cycle can be broken and how permanent weight loss is achieved.

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