by Libby Weaver
We will explore emotions later in the book. In this chapter, I simply wanted to show you a number of different scenarios through which excess calorie intake, no matter what the cause, can be the piece of your weight-loss puzzle that needs the most attention. I also want you to open up to the idea that emotions may be at the heart of why you overeat, so the emotions piece of your puzzle may also be highlighted.
Taking in too many calories is not the only reason some people cannot lose weight. Indeed, some people eat beautifully from a calorie perspective and exercise regularly, yet their body doesn’t seem to change. On a physical level, this may be due to a variety of body systems, such as the production of stress hormones, the balance of sex hormones, liver function, gut bacteria profiles, thyroid function, insulin, leptin hormone levels, exercise methods, and the nervous system. Any or all of these systems can play a role when people do all they can for little or no reward.
The messages in this book do not deny that willpower has a place. Of course it does. My concern is that for people attempting to lose weight, it has been their backstop of blame. They can see no other reason other than a lack of willpower for what they classify as their failure to achieve a smaller body. But it’s important to remember that we are geared for survival, and the hormonal systems outlined above know that better than any ounce of so-called willpower you can muster. If your body believes that your life is in danger, it will act accordingly; and sometimes that means fat storage, despite your best efforts. This will all make sense as you see how the pieces of your puzzle fit together.
For some, eating less is as simple as making the decision. That’s it. No more overeating. They make the decision and follow through with great eating behaviors, and excess body fat is never an issue for them again. They may simply change their minds and begin to take good care of themselves, with outstanding nutrition and regular, functional movement. For others, however, it doesn’t feel as simple as making a decision. They know they “should” make a change, but it feels too hard or as if they’ve already “tried” everything. Some people feel that they make an effort every day and are never rewarded. So, are calories one of the pieces of your weight-loss puzzle that needs attention?
Signs the calorie piece of the puzzle needs addressing
You know you need to eat less but can’t seem to do it yourself
You have tried every diet!
You are either on a diet or off a diet; you find living in the gray difficult when it comes to food and exercise; it’s all or nothing
You count calories and in your heart you know that you obsess about this or your weight
You sometimes start eating and feel like you can’t stop
Please note, you will also likely need to explore thoroughly and apply the strategies in the Emotions chapter.
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CALORIE SOLUTIONS
If the calories piece of your weight-loss puzzle has been highlighted for you, whether you think it’s due to purely physical or emotional needs, or a combination of both, consider implementing the tips below.
Serve dinner on a smaller plate.
Eat two fist sizes of food (concentrated food such as protein and/or starch) as well as plenty of greens with a high water content for most of your main meals. Snacks can be up to the size of one fist.
Do not weigh food.
Do not ever weigh yourself; you simply weigh your self-esteem and set yourself up to feel stressed and/or miserable over the day if you start your day this way. You know by the way your clothes fit you if your size is decreasing. Start to focus on how you feel, and work on feeling better and healthier rather than weighing less. A feminine essence responds to praise while a masculine essence responds to challenge. For many women, scales don’t praise them and so don’t inspire them. For many men, if they don’t weigh what they want to weigh, their response is “I’ll just work harder.”
Get some discipline around your thoughts. You are more likely to make poor food choices when you are (silently) saying mean things to yourself.
Eat slowly.
Chew each mouthful a minimum of 20 times.
Chew each mouthful and swallow before you put the next mouthful in.
Eat regularly; don’t get ravenous so you feel like you want to eat your arm off.
When you are first making changes, set short-term targets for yourself. If you eat takeout most days, you could try starting with “I am not going to eat any takeout until Friday, and then I can have whatever I like.” Or if you don’t usually eat many vegetables, commit yourself to eating vegetables for six out of the next seven nights. Perhaps you drink too much sugar because of the wine or soda you consume? In that case, decide to drink these beverages only on Friday or Saturday, rather than every night. It is also important to reflect on how you feel when you follow through with what you say you will do. Commend yourself—but not with a food or drink reward. Look yourself in the eye and tell yourself you are proud of yourself. You may feel a trifle foolish at first, but persevere until you can hold your gaze as you say the kind words to yourself.
Allow some short-term targets to stretch beyond a week to two weeks.
Remind yourself that you keep your word in your commitments to other people, so it’s time to show yourself that you truly care about yourself and keep your word for these short bursts of time. As you explore in this book the other factors that influence body fat, you will begin to see there is much you can do to change your desire for food in the first place.
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Puzzle Piece 2 Stress Hormones
Your adrenal glands are two very precious walnut-sized glands that sit just on top of your kidneys. They may be small in stature, but the power they pack when they are working optimally is an energetic gift to us all. The adrenal glands produce many hormones, two of which are your stress hormones, namely adrenalin and cortisol.
Adrenalin and the big sugar rush
Adrenalin is your short-term stress hormone. It is your acute stress hormone, the one that’s produced when you get a fright. If someone suddenly runs into the room and startles you and you jump, that feeling that most of us know very well is caused by adrenalin. Adrenalin is designed to get you out of danger—and fast. Historically, we made adrenalin when our life was being threatened, and our response, fueled by adrenalin, was typically physical. A tiger might have suddenly jumped out of the jungle at us or perhaps a member of another tribe came running towards us with a spear. In that moment, you made adrenalin to get out of danger. Adrenalin promotes what is known as the “fight-or-flight” response. When activated, the typically excellent blood supply to your digestive system is diverted away to your periphery, to your arms and your legs. This is necessary because you need a powerful blood supply to these muscles to get you out of danger.
You also need fuel to give you the necessary energy, and the most readily available fuel is glucose—often referred to as sugar (a carbohydrate). Your liver and muscles store glucose in the form of glycogen, and adrenalin communicates to your liver and your muscles that energy is required. They then convert glycogen back into glucose and dump this glucose into your blood. Your blood sugar subsequently shoots up, ready to fuel your self-defense or your escape.
This cascade of events—and the biochemical changes that result—allows you to escape from danger in a very active way. Regardless of the outcome, regardless of whether you win that challenge or not (you escape, die, or win the fight), this stress, the threat to your life, and the need for adrenalin, is over very quickly. The trouble is that for many of us in the modern world, it is more often psychological stress that drives us to make adrenalin. And so although our life may not literally be threatened, this hormone still communicates to every cell of our body that our life is indeed at risk.
Psychological stress can come in many forms. It may be that you return from a two-week break at the beach to find 800 new emails in your inbox, and you wonder when on earth you’re going to find the time to deal with those. It may be that your la
ndline rings and, while you take that call, your mobile rings, and you feel that you can barely finish one conversation before having to start another. It could be that you set your alarm for the morning, you press snooze… you keep pressing snooze and suddenly you sit bolt upright in bed and realize you’re running late. You may still have to iron clothes, prepare lunches, and deliver little people to school and, because you’re leaving later than usual, you get stuck in traffic. Meanwhile, your mobile phone starts ringing with people at the office wondering where you are as you are supposed to be in a meeting, but you are stuck in the middle of rush-hour traffic, and your brain has gone into overdrive with the enormity of your morning. And you’ve only been up for an hour!
When you finally burst through the doors at work, all you can think about is how much you want a coffee. So all morning you’ve been making adrenalin, and now you are going to make even more adrenalin, as caffeine promotes its production. All you actually want from the “coffee” at this point in your day is a little breathing space. The reasons we crave a hot drink may vary, but often it’s just to catch our breath. In those coffee-break moments, there is a bubble around us, and we are silently communicating, “Don’t you dare come near me for the next three minutes!”
One important difference between the past and modern day is that the biochemical changes generated by adrenalin, such as sugar being dumped into your blood to get you out of danger, serve a useful purpose while you are physically fighting or fleeing. However, if you’re sitting on your bottom at your desk in front of a computer and sugar is being dumped into your blood, you make insulin to deal with that elevation in blood sugar. And insulin is one of our primary fat storage hormones, as you will see in later chapters.
How coffee can make you fat
I know. Some of you will want to block your ears at this information. Sorry, it’s just part of our biochemistry. Caffeine acts on the adrenal glands by stimulating the production of adrenalin. When adrenalin is released, your blood sugar elevates to provide more energy, and your blood pressure and pulse rate rise to provide more oxygen to the muscles, which tense in preparation for action. Your pupils also dilate to see more in less light, and your immune function stops firing as, from the body’s perspective, fighting infection is not essential at this unsafe point in time. Blood is diverted away from digestion, and reproductive functions are down regulated since they use a lot of energy and are not necessary for our immediate survival, given the impending threat. Plus, your body does not believe it is “safe” to bring a baby into what your body perceives is an unsafe world. Not when your stress hormones are telling your body that your life is in danger (adrenalin) or that there is no more food left in the world (cortisol)!
Whether your adrenalin production is the result of real or perceived stress, or simply the result of your caffeine intake, caffeine, via stress hormones and coupled with the response of your nervous system (explored later in detail), can either lead you to slenderness or fat storage, because insulin—the fat-storage hormone—will firstly convert unused glucose from your blood into glycogen and store it in your muscles and what is left over will be converted into body fat. Let me explain this with the story of a client I’ll call Anne.
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Case Study
Anne, a strikingly slim and physically beautiful woman, had an appointment to see me. I did what I do with every client, and asked how I could help her and what she would like to get out of our session. Anne apologized for what she thought would sound vain and said that she had gained 7lb recently and was seeing me because nothing in her diet or activity level had changed to which the weight gain could be attributed. She was concerned that she might be perimenopausal even though her periods had not changed. She said some of her friends had gained weight during perimenopause, and she was here because she was concerned that it would become 20lb before she knew it, if she didn’t get to the bottom of why her body had changed. I admired Anne’s attitude and her desire to understand her body better. We discussed the many facets of her life, emotional and physical, and when it came time to talk about her food, her diet was truly amazing with regards to all of my benchmarks of eating a diet based on real foods.
People like me have numerous strategies (as you will see) that we can apply to assist someone in their quest for fat loss; from a food perspective this lady was already living by all the tricks of my trade. When it came time to talk about her liquid intake, she politely informed me that she had one glass of red wine four times per week and that she had done this with her husband for years. And then I asked if she drank coffee. Anne’s eyes lit up. She replied that, yes, she loved it, but acknowledged, on reflection, that her caffeine intake was something that had changed. She had always had a coffee before breakfast every day for most of her adult life, and that was the only caffeine she consumed all day. But for the past three to four months, she had begun to have up to four coffees per day, but she didn’t know why. She just had. When my eyes lit up back at her, she quickly justified her intake by saying, “But they are all black coffees, so there are no calories in them.” She drank them all at her desk. She had never exercised, and I could see she had very little muscle mass. Her body fat, she said, had gone on around her tummy.
Anne could see from the look on my face where I was about to go and, before I’d even spoken, said “Please don’t take them from me.” I wanted her to see how emotionally attached she was so I didn’t interrupt her. Eventually, I said that I believed it was the coffee that had led her to gain her 7lb, and she cried. She told me it was impossible, and she kept coming back to the calorie reasoning. She virtually had a tantrum in my office. I gently tried to lead her to the truth that actually it’s only a drink, yet she behaved as if her four daily coffees held the meaning of life for her. I then went on to explain the mechanism I outlined above involving caffeine, adrenalin, elevated blood sugar, and subsequent insulin production. I told her that I wasn’t even asking her to give up caffeine entirely. My clients will tell you that, when it is warranted, I often ask them to give up caffeine completely for four weeks. They are often shocked by how much more energy they have without caffeine in their lives. I simply wanted this client to go back to her one cup a day before breakfast, a coffee prepared with love by her husband for her. Anne agreed to make this change for four weeks, even though she couldn’t imagine anything being more powerful than calories in fat creation and couldn’t see how this plan could possibly work. I did nothing else for this woman.
Not one other change to her dietary intake and, four weeks later, she burst through my door telling me she had lost 9lb in four weeks, more than she had gained in the first place. I have never weighed a client nor will I ever weigh a client. My theory was that Anne’s weight gain was the result of the perception of her nervous system, rather than the result of too many calories. Her subsequent weight loss was, in my opinion, extremely fast, but my point in sharing this story with you is to demonstrate caffeine’s power to signal what is, for some, fat storage. Granted, this will not happen for everyone. It is significantly dependent on, as I mentioned earlier, the balance of your nervous system (discussed in detail in later chapters).
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So consider your caffeine habits and get honest with yourself about how it affects you. Does it dull your appetite and so unconsciously you grab a coffee instead of eating? This is especially true for many women at lunchtime. Does it make your heart race, give you the shakes, or loosen your bowels? Does it elevate your blood pressure? Or does it nourish your soul with no ill effect whatsoever? You know yourself better than anyone. Act on what you know is true for you.
Think about all of these mechanisms. So many of us run on adrenalin. Moment to moment, day to day, it’s like a light switch has gone on, and it hasn’t entirely switched off for a really long time. And it doesn’t have to be traumatic stress and shocking situations that drive this process in us. It can simply be the pace at which we live our lives; the juggling act that leads so many people I meet to
say that they want more “balance” in their lives. Some people even seek the feeling adrenalin gives them, and they only feel like they are living when adrenalin is pumping through their veins.
The human body is incredibly resilient, and although we were not designed to withstand long-term stress (due to the way we’re designed, we are healthier when it is short-lived), many bodies appear to tolerate, as opposed to thrive on, years and years of living on adrenalin. Part of the challenge, however, is that once your body perceives that the stress has become long-term, your stress hormone output patterns can begin to change, presenting new—and often undesirable—changes to the body.
Cortisol—friend or worst nightmare?
Cortisol is your long-term stress hormone. Historically, our only long-term stress revolved around food being scarce. Long-term stress came in the form of floods, famines, and wars. During such times, we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. Today, in the Western world, our long-term stresses are more likely to be financial stress, relationship concerns, and uncertainty, or even worries, about our health, or the health of a loved one, but also body weight. For so many people, their first waking thoughts involve, “What will I or won’t I eat today?” or “How much exercise can I get done today?”
Or, for some, the thoughts might flow like this: “Oh, my goodness, it’s Wednesday, and I still haven’t been to the gym, and, my gosh, it’s 7 p.m. and there’s no food at home, which means I still have to go grocery shopping, and that means I won’t get home until 8:30 p.m. and then I have to cook and clean up and then it will be midnight before I get to bed and I have to get up at a good time to get to work early in the morning, but I’m going to a party in three weeks and I really wanted to fit into my favorite red dress and that’s not going to happen because I haven’t been to the gym all week and I am still not going to go tonight because otherwise I won’t get any sleep and get to work on time to do everything I have to do…” And on and on and on it goes. Phew! So many people live like this most days of their life, whether they reveal it in how they live or simply think it. When it happens day after day it can easily lead to a chronic pattern of stress response, hence increased cortisol output, which in turn can lead to a change in your metabolism.
