Smart for Life Cookie Diet

The balance between the effects of your body’s fat burning hormones and fat storing hormones is the determining factor in whether or not you lose weight.  While the individual fat buring hormones are greater in number than the fat storing hormones, the fat burners are weaker.  As a matter of fact, the entire effects of all of the fat burning hormones combined can be completely negated by a high level of insulin, the most powerful of the fat storing hormones.

Because of this, it is important to understand how the hormones that control body fat interact with each other and the factors that control the relative effects of these hormones. With this understanding, it will become much easier to spot the mistakes you may be making in your weight loss program and to correct those mistakes to obtain the most efficient fat burning.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to concentrate on maximizing the effects of the fat burning hormones. The primary ones are adrenaline, thyroid hormone, growth hormone, glucagon, testosterone, and insulin-like growth factor. While a detailed explanation of how each of these hormones works is beyond the scope of this article, there are some basic factors that will promote the fat burning effects of these hormones.

To stimulate the release of the fat burning hormones and to maximize the action of them, there are three major factors to consider. These are diet, exercise, and sleep.

With regards specifically to your fat burning hormones, the diet aspects may not be what you are expecting.  When it comes to the hormones that stimulate fat buring, the most important thing is keeping the liver as healthy as possible.  The liver processes and activates many hormones, including the ones that promote fat burning.  An overworked liver becomes less effective in processing hormones and the effects of the fat burning hormones may decline as a result.   Of course, drinking too much alcohol or consuming too many medications will hurt the liver, but many people are unaware of the damaging effects to the liver of a diet that is too high in fat and/or animal protein.

Perhaps you or someone you know has tried the Atkins diet and did well at first, but then hit a point where the weight loss stopped. This is actually to be expected because the Atkins diet is very hard on the liver over the long-term. While the low-carb aspect of it is good, the excessive fat and animal protein, particularly combined with the lack of healthy nutrients from vegetables and fruits, will make the liver tired and sluggish, and the result is decreased effectiveness of the fat burning hormones.

While there are other aspects of diet to be considered with respect to minimizing the effects of the fat storing hormones and providing lose weight help, the main concept here is to eat a diet that maintains the health of the liver.

The next factor in maximizing the work of the fat burning hormones is exercise. There is much debate over what type of exercise needs to be done to promote weight loss. Although the most popular view is that low intensity, high duration exercise, such as exercising for an hour or more at one’s “target heart rate” is the most effective type of exercise for fat burning, this is simply not true. Now before someone emails me research that proves this type of exercise burns the most fat, we need to make a distinction between the fat burned at the time of exercise and the overall fat burning effect of exercise.

Low intensity, long duration exercise does burn more fat than high intensity, short duration exercise or interval training during the exercise session. But because of the hormonal effects of high intensity exercise, the overall fat burning effects of high intensity exercise are considerably greater than for low intensity exercise, even when the low intensity workouts are much longer. High intensity exercise significantly enhances the function of certain fat buring hormones and raises the body’s metabolic rate for 12 to 24 hours, so increased fat burning continues for up to a day after the workout is completed. With low intensity exercise, the fat burning effects mostly stop at the completion of the workout. So, a single high intensity workout can produce many times the fat burning effects of a low intensity workout.

Closely tied to the effects of high intensity exercise on fat burning is the effect of sleep. One of the reasons that high intensity exercise stimulates metabolism is that it stimulates the release of growth hormone, which we mentioned earlier is a fat burner. This brings me back to the importance of the liver. The liver converts growth hormone to insulin like growth factor, which stimulates fat burning to keep your blood sugar levels steady when you go for long periods without eating. For most people, the usual time when they go the longest without eating is when they are sleeping. When you do not get adequate sleep, you don’t produce as much insulin-like growth factor, and therefore you don’t burn as much fat.

For the majority of people, about 7 hours of sleep per night is enought to provide maximum effects from the fat burning hormones.  Because of the effects of light on the pituitary gland (which produces growth hormone), nighttime sleep results in better production of growth hormone, and therefore results in better fat burning effects.  Night shift workers are advised to make their sleeping area as dark as possible for their daytime sleeping.

In conclusion, to maximize the effects of your fat burning hormones, it is very important to eat a healthy diet that supports the function of the liver, to do high intensity exercise, and to get adequate sleep. Failure to handle any one of these factors will decrease the effectiveness of your weight loss program, and can lead to frustration when you are trying your best to lose weight.

For more information about the balance between fat burning and fat storing hormones and how they effect your ability to lose weight, visit Dr.Best’s website and download a free copy of the 49 page Ebook, The Total Solution For The Weight Loss Impaired. 

Thank you for visiting our Cookie Diet website today. We hope you join the program and start losing weight.