So how do you stop your body going into starvation mode and piling on fat?
The answer is simple – don’t starve yourself. You do not have too go hungry to lose weight.
The biggest breakthrough in the area of dietary intake in recent years has been the advent of the glycaemic index. Essentially, it measures how quickly a particular food is converted to glucose. As we have seen, your body can only tolerate a certain range of blood glucose levels. If it’s too low, you run out of energy, and if it is too high, your bloods injects insulin, which converts your glucose to fat.
This is the reason why so many overweight people are diabetics. They have been eating so much sugary food that’s their pancreas (the organ at produces the insulin) gets worn out. That is, it has been so bombarded with simple sugars, it is simply worn out from all the insulin it has had to produce.
So toss out your calorie counter, and get a list of foods and their glycaemic indices.
If you eat food that has a low glycaemic index, which are usually complex carbohydrates, your body will break down the carbohydrates as required to produce the glucose. So this stops you putting on weight.
But how do you lose weight that you might already have?
Well, if you are eating well, lots of filling vegetables, meat, and complex carbohydrates, your body will feel no need to store fat, and so will attempt to shed the fat that it has.
The only issue here is that the energy contained in fat, since it is more condensed, is not so easily acquired as the energy in carbohydrates. In other words, fat cannot be metabolised as quickly as carbohydrates.
So all you need to do is choose an activity that doesn’t require quick energy – something like walking.
If you are walking, your body has time to break down the fat to produce the required energy, and there is absolutely no exercise anywhere that is as good for fat loss alone as walking.
So there you go – don’t starve yourself, eat food that is low in glycaemic index, and walk a lot, and the fat will just melt away.