The Winter Wellness Diet - 16

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF METABOLISM
I could just tell you that in order to get healthy and lose weight eat less fat and refined
foods. Yea, that makes sense, but I want to take a moment to explain how your
metabolism actually works. Once again, it’s more important you know why to make
changes over what changes to make. The motivation must come from an emotional
response within yourself. Being told what to do by others will not take you as far as
telling yourself with conviction.
(14)The Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations wrote a very nice and
descriptive article explaining the basics of how food is metabolized and in what order.
Here is how it works:
Alcohol is burned first because we don’t store it and it’s energy intensive to convert it to
fat. Amino acids are next because we don’t store those either. Next we utilize the
carbohydrates because we can only store a very small amount of those in our liver and
muscle. The conversion of carbohydrate into fat is energetically expensive (your body
doesn’t want to do this). Lastly, fat is burned, utilized or likely stored as it is very easily
stored at 96-98% efficiency. In other words, 96-98 calories of fat for every 100
consumed can be easily stored .
Reference that last paragraph as many times as you need to for continuous motivation.
For as many times throughout the day as we are subjected to eating fat, it’s no wonder
Americans and those eating the Western diet are overweight and unhealthy.
Let me break it down for you real quick. In an ideal world, our body would prefer that
we consume little alcohol, not too much protein, mostly carbs and a little fat. Carbs and
fat are what our body can store which is why alcohol and protein are burned first. Little
tip: don’t eat a lot if you’re drinking, especially high fat foods.
Carbohydrates (glucose) are what our body utilizes for energy. Excess carbs are
converted to fat and stored in fat tissue. The conversion takes a bit of energy, and only
around 2/3 of the original carbohydrate calories are stored as fat. Fat on the other hand
is so easy for our body to store that it utilizes fat last. If our body needs to access fat for
energy, remember that it converts it to glycogen in the liver to be released into the blood
as glucose.
One more thing which I will go over after the next section is the utilization of amino
acids. They were second in line for being utilized for digestion because our body can’t
store them. However, our body “utilizing” them implies that they’ve been digested. In
the case of meat and some dairy products that are body doesn’t digest efficiently, we
don’t utilize what we can’t digest. Therefore, our body will use what amino acids are
available to us and move on to carbohydrates next. This leaves partially digested meat
sitting in our systems, slowly making its way through. Maybe this is why colon cancers
are so common...