When I was 10 years old, my parents got divorced and I lived with my dad. My dad, being a single parent and a teacher, was busy all the time. Most of our meals often consisted of hamburger helper, cereal, and frozen pizzas. That was just the norm back then and all my friends ate the same way. This was back in the late seventies, early eighties. We had a lot of TV dinners and budget gourmet meals. They were just convenient, and it was what we had.
When I got to college it was more of the same. I didn’t really have a lot of money, and being a poor college student, it was all about hot pockets and ramen noodles. If you were lucky, you got a nice little, Tortino’s party pizza that you could roll up and eat. It’s just the way everybody ate. When I started my weight loss program, I did not know how I should structure my eating plan. My diet had always included a lot of bread and carbs and that was just because it was what we had always done. It was how I was raised and it is how I got through college. I know I’m not the only one, and I think a lot of people have experienced this.
This was one of the reasons that I had become so dependent on sugar and wheat. It is not by accident that you find carb heavy products to be the cheapest items in the stores. I do believe that is one of the problems that we currently have in our food industry. I had no idea how that was affecting me. When I got out of college and started getting into the power lifting world, it was all about how much weight I could lift. I learned very quickly when I hit that a plateau and my workouts weren’t progressing, I could pack on a few, three, four, maybe even five pounds, and I would get a little stronger. I loved the sport, I wanted to be as successful as possible. Of course, that’s what I did. I would do whatever I needed to do to get stronger, even if that meant putting on more weight. Sometimes, I would eat a lunch that consisted of three sandwiches. Other times, when I would go to McDonald’s, I would order three double cheeseburgers. Looking back, I realize that is a lot of bread.
At the time, everyone in society was eating high in carbs. If you look at the food pyramid, even the government was telling us that most of our diet was supposed to be carbs. At the time, the food industry was telling everyone that the problem wasn’t bread and carbs; it was the fat content. If you’ve been following the standard nutritional guidance for the last couple of decades, you may be surprised by this. We’ve been told again and again that in order to lose weight and stay healthy, we just have to reduce the amount of fat in our diet. Now, I know just how wrong that is.
As a result of this advice, companies started to create all sorts of low-fat foods, but the problem with taking fat out of a lot of food is that it doesn’t really taste that good. Fat is what gives everything its flavor. For example, my favorite cut of steak is a ribeye. I love a good marble to ribeye and the reason I like that is because you know that the marble fat is what gives it the taste and it tastes great. When fat was taken out of foods, the food companies would make up for the lack of flavor for sugar. They end up adding tons of sugar and wheat as well. However, they’ve created different names for the sugar.
If you look at your ingredients list, you’re going to see a lot of chemicals in there that you have absolutely no idea what they are. Now, why on earth do they need to put all of that in there? Since we’ve been told to always eat plenty of whole grains, we have been having cereals and breads several times per day. When you add up the people and all our love of pasta, pizza, and carbs, it’s no wonder that a big part of our diet is made up of sugar and wheat. So, what does all of this have to do with gaining weight?
Well, that’s where a little hormone comes in that you may have heard about, and that hormone is insulin. Insulin will take sugar, including the carbs that are broken down into the sugar molecules during digestion, out of the bloodstream. Then what is needed to use to run the body and the STEM is stored as glycogen, which is the glucose or the sugar. They get stored for short term in the muscle. Then the rest, is then turned into body fat. Therefore, what doesn’t get used for energy, it can’t be stored as glycogen and it gets stored directly as body fat. Think of insulin as the on and off switch when it comes to body fat. If insulin is in your bloodstream, you can store more body fat, but only when insulin is depleted can you start to burn fat and lose weight. Now, this is a very important key concept to remember because this is what will affect your ability to lose weight. That’s why intermittent fasting works so well to burn fat and drop those extra pounds. During the hours that you have spent fasting, your insulin drops until you get to a level low enough for you to allow yourself to burn fat for energy. That will continue until you eat your next meal, and then insulin goes back up and you go back to burning sugar for energy. This is also why low carb diets work so well too; the same principle applies. On the other hand, if much of your diet is made from sugar in wheat, you will end up accumulating more body fat instead of burning it, with the result being that you’re going to gain weight.
What is the solution? First, you’ve got to cut sugar and wheat from your diet. You must do it and then you’ve got to start making some delicious fat burning recipes like the ones found in our new four-week weight loss system for busy moms and dads. Let’s dig a little deeper into what happens when it comes to accumulating and burning body fat and what insulin has to do with it. Once you understand this process and how it works, you can start to adjust your diet and how frequently you eat to give you plenty of fat burning time. I promise you; it doesn’t have anything to do with going on long runs or spending hours in the gym each day. When we eat, our body will break down the food and convert it to glucose.
I mentioned bore that there is sugar in the blood. When that sugar starts to accumulate, this is the glucose in our bloodstream. Now, if that’s left unchecked and those levels continue to rise, that could cause some serious damage over time. Therefore, we have this built in mechanism that pulls excess sugar from the blood and the hormone in charge of that, as I mentioned earlier through that process, is insulin. Insulin has that ability to pull the sugar from the blood by unlocking the self. Think of it like the key. It unlocks the cell in order to allow that glucose to enter the cell to be able to be used as energy. If it is not going to be used as energy because you have enough of it, then it will store that glucose for the short term in muscles or the liver in the form of glycogen; however, if not used, it will turn it into body fat for long-term storage
The problem is that while you have insulin in your bloodstream, you can’t pull fat out of the adipose tissue, which is fat tissue. You can’t pull fat out of that tissue to burn for energy. For that to happen, you must first deplete your insulin in your system by keeping your blood sugar low. Once the insulin in your body has been produced to the high levels of blood sugar, and once that’s depleted, your body can start to access the stored sugar and it will start with some of the short term storage and the glycogen. Once that’s depleted, it can start using the energy stored in our fat cells. It’s no wonder why it’s so hard to lose weight. This is a complicated process that involves insulin and your blood sugars.
That’s why it’s almost impossible to burn body fat by eating six or seven small meals a day or even snacking as you go along. If you’re doing that, it doesn’t even matter how healthy those snacks are because any food, anytime you eat, will cause your insulin levels to go up. With that, any fat burning comes to a screeching halt, no matter how hard you hit the gym or how far you run. That’s why I’ve always said you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. It is about working out, but that diet is key. If you don’t have that piece, you’re not going to be successful. So, what’s the solution? The key to manageable weight loss is intermittent fasting, if you are making sure the foods you’re preparing have minimal impact on your blood sugar.
Basically, you just skip eating. Skip food for long stretches of the day, including the eight hours you spend sleeping, maximizing the time that your body is forced to burn fat for energy. Then you follow that up with healthy meals that’ll keep you feeling great and more importantly, keep your metabolism running high. The best way to do that is to minimize the impact of insulin. When you do eat, the key is to cut as much sugar and processed carbohydrates, particularly wheat from your diet as possible. Sugar and wheat are the biggest offenders when it comes to raising your insulin levels through the roof, which is why those food companies don’t want you to know that. They just want you to be independent on that sugar and wheat because you’re going to start craving more and more of it.
Of course, it turns into more profits for them. For example, when you start to eat a bunch of cookies, cake, bread, pasta, and pizza, you start putting on weight. However, cutting those foods from your diet as much as possible, we’ll do the reverse and it will give you a much better shot at burning off all that extra body fat. Therefore, I want to give you some quick tips to get you started. These are fast and easy ways to cut as much of the sugar and wheat that you’re consuming right now from your diet. So, the first thing is to cut out soda and fruit juices. Stop drinking a bunch of sugar and empty calories by cutting out the soda and fruit juices, and don’t think that diet soda is an easy fix.
The studies have shown that a sweet taste of an artificial sweetener can actually make you even hungrier. Save those sweeteners for other occasions. Instead, stick to water, black teas, sparkling water, and the likes. Drinking soda is nothing more than a bad habit and it may seem hard at first, but after a few weeks, I guarantee you’ll hardly miss it. Next, skip those fancy, coffee drinks and creamers. They are more often filled with more sugar than your soda. Stick to plain coffee and add some cream to it if needed or switch to black tea. It comes in all sorts of different strengths and flavors. Speaking of flavors, there’s a lot of flavored coffees on the market as well that tastes amazing, black or with a little splash of cream. Just make sure you’re very careful with those flavored coffees because some of them do have a lot of hidden sugars.
You also need to read what’s on that ingredient list. Look out for healthy wheat and sugar free breakfast options. If you’re intermittent fasting, you probably not even going to be eating breakfast, depending on the timeframes. However, sometimes we just miss eating a good breakfast and there’s nothing wrong with eating breakfast food at lunch. When you’re ready to break your fast, we want to give you some good options. Somehow, we have gotten accustomed to eating nothing but sugar and wheat for breakfast. There’s cereal, there’s pancakes, there’s donuts, there’s waffles, and the likes. Instead, stick to lower carb options like good old-fashioned bacon and eggs. You could also have a fruit and veggie smoothie to end your fast. Find a few sugar and wheat free breakfast options that you like and stick with those. But, if you’re intermittently fasting, you can just skip breakfast altogether.
Now, let’s talk about lunch. Lunch isn’t just about sandwiches, like many of us end up packing if we are busy or working. Most people will also even throw in some chips or pretzels with their sandwich. In other words, you’re eating plenty of wheat for lunch. Thankfully there are a lot of other delicious and portable options. Instead, fix a big salad and add toppings like grilled chicken, last night’s leftover steak, or chopped egg and cheese are another great option. Grab some big lettuce leaves and make a sandwich without the bread.
Next, don’t snack. Stop snacking. Instead, get in the habit of only eating two meals a day. It is going to take you a little bit of time to untrain yourself from thinking that you need food every two to three hours. But, it will be well worth it when you remember that your insulin levels are going to be dropping and you’re going to be forcing your body to burn fat instead. The final thought I want you to have from this is I want you to remember that the key to true and lasting weight loss is to keep your insulin levels in check with intermittent fasting, along with cutting out sugar and wheat. In conclusion, we’re going to be live next Tuesday at 1:00 PM. Until then, I want you all to stay healthy and keep moving forward.
