Toxic Waist?

Alcohol isn't the only thing your liver treats as toxic waste...and they all can lead to a toxic waist (I'd like to apologize for that pun). There are plenty of other things we put into our system that stunt the liver's ability to function at full force. Every time we do it, we are limiting our body's ability to metabolize (particularly fat) and ultimately encouraging it to store up fats rather than burn them off.

The list of “toxins” (clearly, these are not all actually toxic, they are just sort of treated that way) is both somewhat expected and surprising. I'm not going to go into great detail here; the fact that they distract your liver from it's metabolic duties is the most important thing. Each can contribute to an unhealthy live and besides weight problems (including weight gain, difficulty losing weight, pot belly, cellulite), an unhealthy liver can also cause\contribute to indigestion, acid reflux, gall stones, vomiting attacks, constipation, depression, anger, poor concentration, overheating of the body, sugar craving, heart disease, high blood pressure, clogged arteries, strokes, fatty organs, weakened bones and allergies (just to name a few).

The list includes:

• Food additives and preservatives
• Alcohol
• Pesticides
• Antibiotics
• Sugar (BOTH natural and artificial)
• High Fat Foods
• Carcinogens

We won't go into great detail here in terms of what to do about this (that's for the next post), but a few things are just obvious: avoid junk food (gobs of sugar, fat, additives and preservatives), buy from local farmer's markets (less pesticides), drink less alcohol, avoid sweet stuff (even artificially sweet), grill but grill lightly (not too much char) and go easy on the antibiotics.

It's pretty clear that a healthy liver is essential to both weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight. So what do we do to get back to having a healthy liver? Three things: 1) reduce\remove, 2) restore and 3) repeat. In the next post we will also look at each of these.

Don't Drink and Loose Weight

I have good news and bad news. First, the good news: less than 5% of the calories you consume in alcoholic drinks are turned into fat (let the wild rumpus begin!...just don't do it drinking – you haven't heard the bad news). The bad news is this: it's not the calories in the drink that make you fat – it's the alcohol (let the wild juicing parties begin?).

How does alcohol make you fat if so little of it is converted to fat? Let's review. From a past post entitled, Last Call For Alcohol:

“While the calories aren't converted to fat, adult beverages have a really devastating affect on your body's ability to burn fat. Here's the geek-lite of what happens. Your body converts a tiny bit of the calories into fat. It pushes the rest of it on to the liver (cheers!) and the liver, using alcohol dehydrogenase (a very useful little enzyme), converts it into acetate (specifically into acetic acid, then acetate). What's acetate? Well, it's basically a fat and it gets delivered directly to your bloodstream.

At this point you may be saying, I thought you said alcohol mostly was converted into fat? But that's not what I said. I said it wasn't converted to the kind of fat that gets deposited on your belly or other places. It does get converted into acetate (a kind of fat) and delivered directly to the bloodstream. The acetate in your blood stream then becomes your body's main source of fuel. Not needing the stored fat for fuel, your body shuts down most of the system that handles that function (research suggest that fat metabolism can drop as much as 73%). The problem then is, it's not like a light switch, once it is off it takes it a while to get fired back up.”

So, it both stops you from burning stored fat AND it shuts down metabolism (and your metabolism starts up slowly). If you are drinking most nights, you are fighting a vicious and ultimately losing weight loss battle. By the time you finally 1) burn off the acetate floating around in your body and 2) finally get your metabolism turned back on, you are reloading the system.

Time to get all science-geeky on why alcohol has this affect. Your liver actually has priority levels in determining where it puts its energy. Job #1: process alcohol and turn it into acetate. While it is busy doing this, the metabolic process (specifically the processing of fats) takes a back seat and your metabolic rate slows to a crawl. Worse yet, now that all that wonderful acetate is coursing through your veins, your liver can take a break, even after it has processed the alcohol, because right now your body has a ready energy source. That means, for quite a while after you drink, you are not only not burning stored fats...you are also storing more fats! (the circle just gets more and more viscous...but we are not even done yet).

There is one last thing that we need to talk about – Fatty Liver (seriously? My LIVER can be fat...good grief, that just doesn't seem fair). The heavy use of alcohol (considered to be more than 6 servings at once or more than 4 or so servings a week) on a consistent bases is one of the causes of a fatty liver. Another cause is being obese (the ultimate 'you're fat because you are fat' slap in the face).

Here's the problem with a fatty liver – once it heads that way, it likes it. Rather than being a fat burning and pumping station, it starts being a fat storing station. In doing so, it starts slowing down metabolism. The result, particularly in middle-age (30-60), is a liver roll around your mid-section (some call it a beer belly or love handles).

The condition can be reverse and you can start losing weight again. The difficult news is that depending how severe the condition is, it can take three to twelve months to get it back to a fully functioning fat burning and pumping station.

In future posts, we'll be looking at just how to do that...but a good place to start is in limiting your alcohol intake.

Liver Delivery

I'm beginning to think the most important organ in weight loss is your liver. It's not really surprising that it took so long for me to figure it out. Let's face it, if you are not a doctor or nurse (or thought about being one), how many of us really know all the things in which the liver plays a role?

Well not only is it a lot, most of them are directly connected to our weight and, therefor, weight loss. There are far too many of them, so I'm going to try to cover this over the next few post rather than in one very LONG post. I hope to convince you (and me, for that matter) that taking care of your liver (even doing somethings to help it out!) is of vital importance if you want to lose weight and stay healthy!

The first thing we need to do is understand why it is true. So, we need to develop a better understanding of what it is that the liver does.

Your liver performs a lot of different essential functions for your body including: protein synthesis, detoxification, production of digestive chemicals and glycogen storage. Most important, in terms of weight loss, it plays a major role in metabolism. The two large blood vessels that are connected to the liver (portal vein and hepatic artery) divide into capillaries and ultimately connect to the lobules of the liver. And here's the part that matters when you are trying to loose weight – those lobules are made up of millions of tiny little hepatic cells...and those hepatic cells are massive metabolizers!

Now among the liver's other jobs is pumping metabolized fats out of the body – that's right, it's BOTH a fat burning and fat pumping organ – NICE! Here's the thing though, if you aren't doing your part to help it function at it's best, then your liver doesn't pump all the fats out, many of them are recirculated...which contributes to being overweight.

On top of all that, if the liver is damaged by toxins (busy cleaning them up) or clogged up with a lot of waste, it is not able to remove the fat that circulates in your bloodstream and ultimately that fat will collect as fatty deposits on organs (visceral fat) and under the sin (subcutaneous fat).

Bottom line: if you want your liver to deliver on all of it's vital functions; if you want to maintain a healthy body and weight – keeping your liver happy is vitally important. So, in the next few posts, I'll look at some of the things we can do to help it out a bit.

Too Long...Too Much

OK, so it has been way TOO LONG since my last post and (I suspect not so coincidentally) I have gained way TOO MUCH weight in that time. Along with some friends (and friends of friends), I have started an exercise accountability group called Synergy Energy (join us if you'd like). But I've found that while it is encouraging, there really doesn't seem to be a way for it to hold the members accountable, without it being overly intrusive in people's lives.

Well, that set me to thinking about who we should be accountable too (don't worry, the preacher isn't about to step into the pulpit on this) and I couldn't help but conclude - ourselves.

The reality is, there is very little in this life over which we can actually have complete control. Oh, we like to think we do, but that's just a facade we design for our own sense of comfort. I'm not saying that that is a bad thing; in many ways it is the ultimate coping mechanism. But there are a few things over which we do have nearly complete control. One of those is our weight.

Now it is true that there are those who have medical issues that cause them to have much less control over their weight, but even in those cases they can choose to be at the healthiest weight they can manage. And it is also true that it is much harder for some people to maintain a healthy weight than others (dang metabolism!), but it is also true that someone who is 5 foot 6 inches has a much harder time of dunking a basketball than someone who is 6 foot 6inches, but Spud Webb not only did it but he also the NBA dunk contest in 1986.

The point is we tend to let our self prescribed "realities" dictate what we believe we can and can't do. That's true in general and it is true for weight loss as well.

I, like many other people, tend to pretend for the preservation of my own positive self image that there is just too much going on in life to do what it takes to loose weight and keep it off. I tell myself I have too many responsibilities and too little time, to lose weight. Which is a real blessing when you think about it - I get to have my cake and eat it too (quite literally and quite unfortunately). I get to be fat and not feel too bad about it because I have excused it away and managed to preserve a bit of a positive self image (albeit contrived) as well.

Life is to short to live in this constant state of self created false reality (unfortunately, for those of us who are overweight, life is statistically shorter than those who are fit). So, today I jump back on the fitness wagon...time to stop being under-fit.

Whose with me?!