The key players of nutritional health & weight control

The Big Picture

All kinds of factors play a part in our appetite, food intake, digestion, and fat storage. When and how much we eat is influenced by physiology; for example, a drop in blood sugar can make us crave a meal. Environment and learned behaviors can contribute, too. Say our partner is in the kitchen and delicious aromas start wafting out. That can whip up an appetite out of nowhere.

Obesity, Sugar, and Fat

Over the last several decades, a ton of research has been done on obesity and body weight. We are starting to understand the complex interactions between the brain, fat cells, the gut (including the critical role of the gut microbes), the stomach, and the pancreas —specifically, how all these parts of our bodies work together to control appetite, and store, and regulate body fat.

Obesity is a disorder of fat regulation and accumulation. People gain weight and become obese not just because they are sedentary and don’t get enough exercise, but because the modern diet is loaded with sugar.  

High sugar content in our diet creates excess fat. Highly refined carbohydrates, or processed sugars, spike our blood sugar, and increase our insulin. This leads to excess fat, but goes a step further: higher insulin inhibits our body’s ability to break down the fat we’ve already stored. After a blood sugar spike, what happens? We crash, and that makes us feel tired, hungry, and stressed. Highly refined carbohydrates create the greatest insulin spikes, such as junk food and packaged sweets — think Twinkies or corn chips.

Another culprit in obesity is a high-fat diet. There’s a lot of negative press about trans fats, or man-made fats, today. That’s because there’s an abundance of science about the hazards of this type of fat, including a project from Wake Forest, which shows that trans fats increase the amount of fat around the belly.

Obese people have similar taste preferences to people who don’t suffer from obesity, but they have more of a tolerance for the mixture of high fat and sugar that are present in so many of today’s foods. People struggling with obesity have had their brains’ reward system hijacked.

The Vicious Cycle of Carbs

Carbohydrates are everywhere in our society. They’re tasty, they’re cheap, and they are easy to consume. They make up a large portion of the average American diet, and a lot of these carbs come from highly processed foods. A diet loaded with refined carbs creates a powerful insulin response, which affects our storage of fat. If we eat these foods, our body doesn’t have access to all the necessary nutrients in them. One of the hooks of obesity is that when we eat these kinds of foods, we tend to overeat — not because we want to, but because we have to. We can’t access the energy in these foods because of the insulin response. Then, we crave the same kind of food again, which creates a vicious cycle of enlargement of existing fat cells and growth of new fat cells. Our brains are hardwired to get hooked on sugars, especially high fructose corn syrup, fats, and highly processed foods. The corn chips have the triple whammy! Sorry, but there is more bad news.

If you feel like you start snacking and can’t stop, it is because the sugar in many products have a unique ability to impact the brain in the same way as crack cocaine. Uh oh! 

The Appeal of Fatty Foods

The more Ghrelin (hunger hormone) we have in our gut, the more appealing we find high-fat foods. This is because of our dopamine pathways. Dopamine, another neurotransmitter, helps control the brain’s pleasure and reward center, and helps regulate movement and emotional responses. So, we not only see the reward we want—that deep-fried Twinkie—but we also feel compelled to act, and gobble it up! Once we’ve tasted the fatty, comforting food, the delicious taste of it stimulates our reward center, and reinforces our desire to taste it again.

The gut microbes are an important player in regulating our body weight. They help control our blood sugar, manage our food intake and our appetite, and help us feel full after meals. Our gut is home to many microbes that need to be treated well if we want them to work for us. Prebiotics, probiotics, resistant starches, and high fiber are all major contributors to a thriving, healthy gut. The gut biome and the brain are communicating all the time. The gut microbiota can alter the substances that can influence how our brains function.

The microbes in our gut can be valuable friends in living healthier, but the reverse is also true: if we feed them high fat and low fiber foods, the gut microbes will be less healthy, and they can increase inflammation and increase our risk for diabetes and obesity.

Protein: The Great Satiater!

Research shows that 30-35 grams of high quality protein at each meal appears to be an optimal strategy to treat or prevent obesity because of the increased appetite satiety and control. By increasing dietary protein from 15% to 30% of calories while keeping carbohydrate intake the same, there is a sustained decrease in calorie intake, resulting in significant weight loss. Plus, there is a greater fat loss with the higher protein diets as compared to the low protein diets.

Environmental Cues and Routines

A change in our environment can mean a change in our eating habits. The things going on around us play a role in appetite. For example, the temperature of the room we’re in, or of the food we’re eating, can influence how much or how little we eat. Social cues can be important too. We tend to eat what we are served. We can crave foods that are marketed to us — have you ever noticed how full and juicy food always looks in commercials? We mimic the behaviors of people around us, so if our partner eats more, so do we. If they are more or less active, so are we. If they gain or lose weight, often we do too.

Routine is important. An article in the International Journal of Obesity showed that people who started their day with a protein-packed breakfast ate 26 % fewer calories at lunch than those who didn’t. Protein, water, and fiber are all associated with improved satiety, or the sensation of feeling full.

Peptide YY is released from the gut when we eat protein, and this is one of the hormones that sends an “I’m full” signal to the brain. If we don’t eat breakfast, our metabolism slows down for the rest of the day.  Research shows that skipping breakfast triggers acute insulin resistance, and elevates levels of free fatty acids (which increase inflammation) and glucose in obese, non-diabetic patients. This means skipping breakfast increases our fat storage throughout the day.

Bringing It All Together

The proper combo of proteins, healthy fats and complex carbs can keep your blood sugar from spiking and plummeting so that you feel well and energized between meals, while your body is busy digesting. It only takes your body two hours to store fat if your blood sugar gets elevated from eating too many refined carbs!

Water does a body good! H2O is a building block of our lives; it’s a fundamental need. Every bodily process we have relies on water. Even mild dehydration can make us tired, and water is also a natural appetite suppressant. Our brains can’t tell the difference between thirst and hunger—maybe some of the times when you feel hungry, or you’re craving a snack, what you need is a glass of water!

Caffeine is not only a stimulant of the nervous system, but also an appetite suppressant.           

Caffeine can aid in weight loss by increasing the amount of energy we burn, and decreasing the amount of food we eat. Both coffee and tea contain antioxidants, such as catechins, flavonoids, and polyphenols, which promote health at the cellular level. Polyphenols are strong naturally occurring substances that help decrease belly fat and weight gain. These antioxidants do pass through coffee filters. They are cancer-neutral, and coffee consumption has been linked to a lower likelihood of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events. Even further, regularly drinking tea and coffee has been shown to lower the risk of Type 2 diabetes, and improve the drinker’s level of hemoglobin A1C (an important marker for diabetes).

Then, there are behavioral changes that are key to long-term success. In many studies, using portion control to manage the size of food serving (and sometimes using meal replacements) shows the strongest evidence for the greatest amount of sustainable weight loss. Having a structured meal plan results in more successful weight loss.

Don’t take sleep lightly. During the REM sleep cycle, more calories are burned than any other stage of sleep. If you miss REM sleep, you miss this calorie burning aspect right alongside the other benefits —   mental restoration, and an increase in brain function! Insomnia also leads to less energy burned during the day.  Studies generally support the goal of 7-8 hours of sleep a night. This amount of sleep should help with weight loss, and help us avoid the mid-afternoon M&M binge.  So, get your ZZZ’s on!

Keeping the Weight Off

“Protection” of weight, or keeping weight on our bodies as a resource, is something that our bodies are programmed to do genetically. Over the course of human evolution, our brains have been wired to crave foods that are fatty and sweet as a survival mechanism. We store those foods as energy for later, when food might become scarce. If we let our body store energy up to a new, higher weight, we are re-programmed to maintain that weight. It gets set as our “new normal.” However, if we lose weight, our body doesn’t work to maintain the lower weight right away. Body weight is regulated to be preserved, not lost, so when we start to burn it off, our brain sends out a “mayday!” signal. Our appetite goes up, our metabolism goes down and we use less energy. This may be why some of the contestants on “The Biggest Loser” broke into the dining hall to eat — because their bodies were saying “save me!”

Weight maintenance is particularly challenging, because for a whole year after we lose weight, the body will work to try to put it back on.

Researchers who followed 14 contestants in the “The Biggest Loser” competition found that the participants’ metabolism went down during the show, and stayed substantially reduced for six years afterward. This was measured by their resting metabolic rate, or how many calories they burned when they were at rest. To give some perspective to that six-year reduction, studies show that patients recovering from bariatric, or gastric bypass, surgery spent much less time in the metabolic “penalty box.” Their metabolism only stayed down for a year after their operations. Plus, the contestants had lower levels of Leptin, a hormone that helps with satiety. Slower metabolism is a known consequence of weight loss: smaller people burn fewer calories than larger people.

The Psychological Players

As babies, we are dependent on our caregivers for nourishment. We learn early on that food equals love. During feedings, we are (hopefully) loved unconditionally. This can be why, later in life, we might make eating a surrogate for that same unconditional love. There is a chemical component to this feeling. Sugars are powerful stimulants of the reward circuit in our brains — sugar has even been compared to cocaine for how strongly it affects us. People who struggle with obesity have a strong tie between their inner reward system and the unhealthy foods they eat. High-calorie, high-fat, high-sugar foods can make us, well, a little high.

Food shouldn’t be your mom, your therapist, or your boyfriend; for many of us that is exactly what occurs. 

The Hard Science

In the weight loss world, the next statement is a scientific fact: reduced-calorie diets result in meaningful weight loss, no matter which macronutrients, or what ratio of fat-to-protein-to-carbs, they emphasize. Compared to no diet, all diet programs that make sure we eat fewer calories than our body burns will make us lose weight.

Any diet, if we stick with it, will result in weight loss, but sticking to it is the hardest part of any diet!      It’s much easier not to eat the calories than to burn them off.

Dr. Becky’s Health Done Right was created to help. If we can understand what is happening in our bodies, we can make smart, informed changes. We can understand the environmental and learned behavior parts of the problem, and get all the players to work with us, instead of against us. We can build a plan for ourselves with structure and lots of support. When we can do that, we can stick to it, and if we can stick to it, we can change our bodies and our lives for the better, forever!

Join https://DrBeckysHealthDoneRight.com today!