The Bad Side of Dieting

Word count: 956

Flashback to 2 years ago.

I was eating right, exercising right.

Frankly doing everything right.

Or at least, so I thought.

But there was this last bit of fat stuck in my belly, I couldn’t seem to break 10% without breaking myself.

And it’s an increasingly common phenomenon which is very easy to understand if you look at the mechanics.

Whether you’re a bodybuilder having to go on extremely low calories to get lean or just a regular person wanting to lean down to 8-10% body fat, there are key behaviours that you must avoid.

If, of course, you want to be lean and healthy long term, instead of sacrificing your health and well-being to look good for a summer in Ibiza.

Calorie restriction.

Many intricate dynamics take part in your metabolism.

Most of the time, approaching nutrition from a calorie and macronutrient perspective, purely focusing on numbers, is a time bomb.

What I mean by that is there’s only so much abuse your body can take before it starts complaining.

One’s nutrition should supply them not only with calories but with micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, enzymes and, most importantly, be rich in life force.

And the closer to nature the produce is, the more life force it will have.

A fresh grass-fed organic steak is going to have more life force than a steak that you can get from the standard supermarket isle.

A fresh broccoli from your garden is going to have much more life force than a frozen one from the supermarket.

When these criteria are not satisfied, we cause an elevated stress response.

Stress response

During the stress response, our Cortisol - the primary stress hormone- gets elevated, and if the response is prolonged, the cortisol rhythm becomes disrupted so that it stays chronically elevated.

This is what we call chronic stress.

(There’s a step beyond that where cortisol secretion reduces but we won’t examine it now as it takes years to get to that stage.)

So, during chronic stress, we experience disrupted digestion and blood sugar imbalances.

When our blood sugar fluctuates a lot during the day (glycemic variability)

and more specifically when the area under the curve of its secretion is increased, our insulin levels become elevated.

Insulin resistance

This leads to increased lipogenic enzymes and decreased lipolytic enzymes.

Simply explained, our body becomes primed to put on more fat than it burns, starting from the midsection.

In addition, our muscles become insensitive to insulin, leading to a decreased ability to gain muscle mass.

Chronic effects

It’s not a magical prediction that all of this leads to bad things.

People are tired all the time.

Needing stimulants to function.

Which only prolongs and perpetuates that cycle.

Their metabolism downregulates, and essential functions of the body begin to underperform to match the energy provided.

And we’re back to the beginning.

So that the yoyo effect continues.

Bad results lead to more extreme practices that only deepen the level of damage

Unless…

The inside-out approach.

Unless you adopt the inside-out approach.

The approach that I’m following to stay under 10% year-round, without counting a single macronutrient.

And multiple others have used to effortlessly begin shifting stuck weight.

So, without addressing mindset, which undoubtedly is the source of this

and you can find more of it here.

Here is what needs to be addressed in order to reverse this.

Stress levels

We need to shift the nervous system into rest and digest and teach it again that it’s not fighting for its life cause that’s what it thinks. Literally.

At any given point, we can measure our allostatic load, which is a fancy way of saying

to quantify our stress levels based on objective and subjective data.

Imagine three levels to this.

Red, orange and green.

The red being chronically stressed out of our minds.

Orange -in between red and green- being adequately stressed, needs more nourishment.

While in the green, we can handle most of the stressors that come our way with ease and resilience.

When a body is in the red and even orange, it’s leaning towards adrenal fatigue.

It’s close to what many call being burnt out.

Thus it’s hard to mobilise fat just because the nervous system is stuck in sympathetic mode.

So our goal is to shift it towards the green.

And then worry about losing weight.

Restore regular cortisol cycles.

The other colossal pillar that will contribute to a green score is circadian health.

Ensuring that our body follows the rhythms of the sun, and is getting the appropriate light signals.

See the sunrise ground, eat local and seasonal food, while blocking as much of artificial light as possible.

This alone, if not done consistently, has the potential to reverse disease, and create big changes.

Address blood sugar fluctuations during the day.

Lastly, in line with the above, we want to keep our blood sugar as stable as possible during the day.

We saw the importance of this, as it’s tied to not only adrenal fatigue but also insulin resistance.

So we must avoid processed and high glycemic foods in our day, especially during the winter months.

Bonus tip.

Don’t eat bananas in the Scottish winter.

Biologically, this signals chaos in the system.

Your metabolism is decoding the information it receives from food as binary code read by your mitochondria.

When you give it “food information” that does not match the light and other electromagnetic forms of information it receives from your environment, we get chaos.

An error in code, leading to inflammation, upon which you can read more here.

That’s it for this week.

Have a great one.

Aris