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?!

Magically Delicious?

It's MAGIC! That's what some people would have you believe about certain foods. You've heard of them before I'm sure – food that actually MAKE you lose weight! Everything from grapefruit to celery have been grouped into this category and I suspect many a person have made a pretty penny (or thousands) telling us all about it.

Folks, I'm here to tell you there is no such thing as Negative Calorie Food! That's an oxymoron of the likes of “jumbo shrimp,” “Dodge Ram” and “Holy War.” It just doesn't make sense. Food, by its nature, has calories.

Admittedly, the essence of most of the arguments are somewhat true (if not quite a bit off base). Celery for instance. The argument is that you burn more calories chewing it than are actually in it. Guess what? IT'S TRUE (please keep reading before you go buy a cart load). The net “negative calories” from chewing a stalk of celery is about 10 calories. You can eat yourself skinny? Puh-leeaasse!

Given that there are about 3500 calories in a pound, you'd need to eat 350 stalks to lose 1 lb. But even that probably wouldn't work because of the kind of calories you'd be putting into your system (namely celery calories). We won't go into detail on this one, but your body is not going to thank you for it and it is likely to have an overall negative impact on losing weight (I guess, in that way, it is a “negative” calorie food).

The bottom line is that some of these foods might make good snacks, but quite frankly most fruits and vegetable make good, low calorie snacks. There is nothing magical about certain ones.

Don't look for magic beans (or celery or grapfruit or whatever). Weight loss takes really serious commitment, exercise, and a well planned and monitored diet...and there's nothing magical about that. It is hard work – but it is SO worth it!

Mid-week check in and I've lost another 3 lbs. That's a total of 30 lbs so far. I've gone down one shirt size and lost about 3 inches in my waist.

I'll be on hiatus for a few days. So, in the meantime. Keep at it and use the time to think about what other fitness related topics you want to know about...and then let me hear from you!

Crunch Time?

Crunches\Sit-ups will not help you lose weight around your tummy...at least not any more than push-ups or many other exercises.

There is a long standing myth that if you want to lose that belly, you need to do more sit-ups. I can not tell you how happy I would be if that were true, but the reality is: targeted weight loss (weight loss that focuses on one specific "problem area") is a scam.

The reason for this is pretty simple actually. When your muscles burn fat (that's a big part of their fuel) they don't just burn it from the fat closest to them. Your body is a fully integrated system. When muscles burn fat, it comes from all over.

Crunches\Sit-ups ARE a great exercise. When you exercise you want to get as many muscles as possible involved and there are a lot of muscles in your mid-section. And...that washboard abs look is achieved (in part) by doing crunches. The problem is, you can actually have washboard abs but they can be covered by fat if you aren't living a healthy lifestyle.

The trick to losing belly fat is the exact same trick to losing ANY fat. Exercise (build muscle, keep your resting metabolism up) and eat a healthy diet (very little bad fats, sugars and enough protein, vitamins and fiber).

For many of us, when we start a weight loss program some of our belly goes first (probably sub-cutaneous belly fat), but that last bit (probably visceral fat) seems to be the hardest to get rid of. The trick is, just like before when you hit plateaus (I still can't believe that's the way to spell that), trust your system.

Also, now that you are in better shape, it might be time to step up the interval training a bit. So, try short bursts of whatever exercise you are doing followed by a recovery period of exercise. In other words, if you are jogging in place (a great weight loss exercise), try doing a 45 second burst of energy every 5 minutes and then resume your normal jogging pace. This has lots of health benefits, but the one I like best is that it is a very good way of encouraging your body to burn visceral fat.

So, it's not that crunches are bad – they are actually good! They just might not be doing what you think they are!

Keep at it – you can do this! And let me know what fitness tip you'd like to know about!

What Do You Want?

My message at church today (don't worry I"m not going to give you a sermon here) was “Wisdom vs. Truthiness” and I looked at how God delights daily in wisdom. As I prepared for it, I came across a story that I didn't use, but thought it would be great for this blog.

It's a story about a proud young man who came to Socrates asking for knowledge. He walked up to the muscular philosopher and said, "O great Socrates, I come to you for knowledge."

Socrates recognized a pompous numbskull when he saw one. He led the young man through the streets, to the sea, and chest deep into water.

Then he asked, "What do you want?"

"Knowledge, O wise Socrates," said the young man with a smile.

Socrates put his strong hands on the man's shoulders and pushed him under. Thirty seconds later Socrates let him up. "What do you want?" he asked again.

"Wisdom," the young man sputtered, "O great and wise Socrates."

Socrates crunched him under again. Thirty seconds passed, thirty-five. Forty. Socrates let him up. The man was gasping. "What do you want, young man?"

Between heavy, heaving breaths the fellow wheezed, "Knowledge, O wise and wonderful..."

Socrates jammed him under again Forty seconds passed. Fifty. "What do you want?"

"Air!" the young man screeched. "I need air!"

"When you want knowledge as you have just wanted air, then you will have knowledge."

...The question is “what do you want?” The last time I lost a lot of weight my parents were talking to me about it. I told them that I had arrived at the conclusion that losing weight (particularly a LOT of weight) is only for those who really, REALY want it. Sort of like the guy in the story wants air. Otherwise, you set yourself up for mild success and ultimate failure, and let's face it, we overweight people tend to feel bad enough about our weight; we certainly don't need something else to feel bad about!

You have to need it. That's what's going to give you the determination to exercise diligently, put down foods with wasted calories (like cake, chips, and yes even salad dressing), and say a polite “no thank you” when offered an extra adult beverage or bowl of ice cream.

Wanting it is not quiet enough. Lot's of us fat people WANT to lose weight. Self-help guru Tony Robbins would say that if you want something you are ensuring exactly that – that you'll continue to want it. You have to be determined to get it. It's the mindset of needing it and determination to have it that will ultimately work.

I can't help but quote Yoda here as well. when it come to weight loss, "Do or do not. There is not try."

Lost one more pound! That's five for the week - 27 total!

Seriously, let me hear from you! What would you like to know more about?