It Not So Much What You Eat But When You Eat It

So some of you may say I have tried eating right before and after workouts but I have not seen any or little results. You may have even ate 3 meals a day and not snacked at all but still little to no change. See it is not about what you eat as much as when you eat it. I am not saying that you can eat what you want. If you still eat junk all the time you will get junk results. Kind of like a computer crap in crap out!

Lets take a moment to look at God's design of the body and how the body burns fat. The body responds to foods through insulin production as insulin is a transporter moving food through the body. Once the food is consumed insulin is produced to wrap around that food and move it to the proper destination. The type of food consumed dictates the amount of insulin needed starting with sugar which requires the most and ending with fibrous carbs that require the least. ( sugar, fat, complex carbs, lean protein, fibrous carbs).

So the type of food you eat dictates the amount of insulin production. As the body spikes in insulin it has to react, in the high levels of insulin ,fat stores remain stored and are not utilized until levels return to normal. Essentially it takes 2-3 hours for this to occur and at that time fat stores are used. Fat stores are only used for a short time, in waiting to long your body starts to go into survival mode and will ounce again store the fat and burn your muscle instead. So the key here is to eat every 3-3.5 hours with small meals in order to burn through fat stores long enough without dipping into muscle.

So your probably asking yourself, Why does insulin have such an effect on my body loosing body fat? Well your pancreas has two hormones that come and go through it (insulin and glucagon). Glucagon is often referred to as the fat release hormone, as it releases fat from your fat cells and allows the body to burn them. Insulin and the fat release hormone have a direct effect on one another. If insulin is high than the fat release hormone will be low and if the insulin is low than the fat release hormone will be high. (you want the fat release hormone to be high :).

So if you think of the pancreas as a triangle you have on one end of the pancreas glucagon and on the other insulin. The trick is to get the glucagon up and keep the insulin down. See the picture below.The question of calories is always a means of frustration within body fat loss. The way your body works is that the food you consume is partially burned up through your metabolism and the rest of it is stored for later use. If the body doesn't use the needed food in that day it will then store it as fat. The best way to understand this concept it to know that the average man may burn 1500-1700 calories at rest during a day, so any calorie amount above that must be burned off through daily activities. For myself, eating 2500 calories a day would allow me to maintain my current body type without growing any muscle or loosing any muscle. If I wanted to gain muscle I would eat 500 calories more each day and lift a lot of weights. To loose body fat I would eat 500 less calories per day (while eating all good foods) and continue my same exercise routine.

With all this in mind lets look at how the body metabolizes different types of foods.

Your metabolism processes what you put in it........if you ate 100 calories of each of these foods listed below your bodies metabolism would only use between 3 and 70 of those calories depending on the food you ingest.
•sugar 3 cals burned in a day
•Fat 5 cals burned in a day
•Complex carbs 15 cals burned in a day
•Lean Protein 25 cals burned in a day
•Fibrous Carbs 70 cals burned in a day
•The best foods to consume are: complex carbs (up until dinner), lean protein (all day), and fibrous carbs (eating mostly veggies and one fruit)

Now if you understand the design you may understand where your frustration comes from. For me I would go to the gym workout extremely hard and go home and eat a 100 calorie pack or two (which are typically filled with sugary carbs) and this would elevate my insulin level thus making it impossible for my body to burn fat. Once I realized how my body worked I no longer worried about calories as much as the foods that I choose to eat. I also did not worry about starving myself, to the contrary I worried I was not eating enough.

Where are you at? Have you made the commitment and are you willing to make a change? I will be blogging on some of the set backs I faced in the next week so stay tuned. As always if you have questions send me a message and we can discuss them. To Him who is able, To Him be all the glory!