- "The man who makes everything
that leads to happiness
- depend upon himself, and not upon
other men,
- has adopted the very best plan
for living happily."
- Plato
Why Obese People Cannot Lose Body Fat
There are several hormones that impact
how many ingested calories are stored as body fat. If any of these
hormones are out of balance, a person can gain weight even though they
may eat less food. One hormone that exerts a significant effect on
hunger and fat storage is insulin.
Insulin is produced by beta cells in
the pancreas mainly in response to high levels of glucose (sugar) in the
blood. Insulin enables the liver to store excess serum glucose. Insulin
also stimulates the liver to form fatty acids that are transported to
adipose cells and stored as fat. The net effect of insulin is the
storage of carbohydrate, protein, and fat in the body.
A poor diet can induce the pancreas to
secrete large amounts of insulin. Aging people also experience metabolic
disorders that cause the hypersecretion of insulin. Eventually the cells
in the body become resistant to insulin (by decreasing the number of
insulin receptors).
As cells become insulin resistant, the
body stabilizes blood glucose by producing higher levels of insulin. The
effect of high insulin production is weight gain. The long-term result
is often Type II diabetes in which blood glucose levels become unstable
even though insulin levels remain dangerously high.
As people accumulate excess body fat,
they develop a chronic condition known as hyperinsulinemia, meaning the
pancreas constantly secretes too much insulin and the body is unable to
effectively utilize it.
A novel approach to fat loss has been
developed based on the established fact that overweight people have too
much insulin in their blood. Insulin causes sugar and dietary fats to be
converted to body fat. Excess insulin prevents stored body fat from
being released, even when a person undergoes severe calorie restriction,
such as in crash dieting.
Poor diet, obesity, aging, and
metabolic disturbances result in the excessive secretion of insulin, a
factor in the development of Type II diabetes. Suppressing excess
insulin production is a crucial and often overlooked component of a
fat-loss program.
The role of excess insulin in causing
weight gain has been an accepted scientific fact for years (Beeson et
al. 1971; Woodward et al. 1989; Heller et al. 1994). Building on this
observation, some scientists have postulated that it is impossible for
people to lose significant body fat as long as they have insulin
overload.
A noticeable effect of surplus serum
insulin is constant hunger, which results in a vicious cycle in which
overeating causes more and more body fat to accumulate, which in turn
causes even greater amounts of unwanted insulin to be secreted from the
pancreas. We now know that hyperinsulinemia predicts diabetes mellitus (Haffner
et al. 1990; Kekalainen et al. 1999; Weyer et al. 2000). Even in
children, serum insulin levels are far higher in obese than in non-obese
children of the same age.
Source: worldhealth.net
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