Regulating Metabolism for Weight Loss

It's maths. Consume more calories than you burn, and you end up stocking the excess as unsightly, unhealthy pounds of fat on your body. Yet, it's not that simple a maths, as many battling with their weight would tell you. All the steep weight loss that the exercise regimens bring about initially isn't sustainable, and you hear many jargons, such as 'metabolic setpoints' and 'muscle memory'. So, let's understand the metabolic processes.

Metabolism varies between individuals and is the rate at which the body uses energy or burns calories in everyday activities such as breathing and maintaining the heartbeat and the core brain functions. If you have to lose weight, your metabolic rates should be raised through physical activities and exercises. And again, you cannot afford to let your best efforts develop a leak in the form of calorie-rich food. The successful strategy in the battle of the bulge is to make a winning combination of dieting and exercise.

Doing regular exercise — aerobic and weight training — raises your metabolic rate and creates a caloric deficit without triggering the starvation response. Strength training exercises increase muscle mass. Muscle burns calories more efficiently than fat; the more muscle you have in relation to your body fat, the higher your metabolism.

Instead of adopting fancy diets, keep a few commonsense rules in mind. Extreme dieting can only bring short-term results, as they cause muscle loss and slow down the metabolism. The dieter cannot remain in this 'starvation mode' for long, and when she gives in, the body rebounds vengefully with an immediate fat gain.

Choose the right fat for cooking, for example, sesame or coconut oil, olive oil, etc. Choose raw and whole-grain foods over processed food, because the body uses calories just to process them. A salad, which contains a high percentage of cellulose, requires a lot of calories for the body to digest it, whereas cooked foods are rapidly assimilated, so you wind up with more net calories.

Sometimes despite best efforts, weight just doesn't seem to drop. Remember that the body's hormones also have a direct impact on the appetite, metabolism, and fat storage. High levels of cortisol triggered by stress and lack of sleep can make you obese by producing excessive glucose.

Stress causes you to crave carbohydrate-rich, and often sugary, 'comfort' foods. The high-carb diet increases levels of fatty acids in the blood and decreases the ability of the liver to store sugars. The liver ignores insulin and releases more sugar into the blood — hence the name, insulin resistance, for the type 2 diabetes. The rising levels of glucose triggers the pancreas to produce more insulin, temporarily overriding the resistance, but eventually, it gets exhausted and cannot make enough insulin and clear glucose from the blood. The excessive calories are stored as fat in the abdomen.

Another important part of the complex metabolic machinery is leptin — a protein hormone made by the ob (obese) gene inside fat cells. Leptin governs when you are hungry and when you are satisfied. The body tissues receive the leptin’s message that you have stored away enough fat, and it’s now time to burn off some excess fat. Leptin acts directly and indirectly on the fat cells to induce thermogenesis; that is, it increases the oxidation of fatty acids in muscle tissue so that fat doesn’t get stored in cells. Leptin also lowers pancreatic insulin secretion and liver glucose production, and increases glucose metabolism. This boosts insulin sensitivity and decreases fat storage.

In order for leptin to be heard clearly, however, leptin levels must not spike too high, which happens when there are excessive fatty acids in the blood. More fat cells means more leptin, and the excessive leptin causes the cells to become "resistant" to leptin and it takes more and more leptin (and hence more fat cells) to communicate satiety.

Thus, excess lipid is to blame for both insulin and leptin resistance — factors that contribute to impaired metabolism and fat gain. The message is clear: for effective weight loss, be cautious with high-carb, high glycemic food that lead to excessive fatty acids in the body.