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.