by Libby Weaver
Eat whole-food fats with every meal. You may feel that eating protein with every meal serves your health.
Build muscle with resistance training to help your muscles to remain highly insulin-sensitive, therefore requiring less insulin across your lifetime.
Insulin is a growth factor and a fat storage hormone. Skin tags are a sign that your insulin was likely in excess at some (current or past) time.
Cow’s milk is made by cows to feed their young. It is created to grow an 90lb (40kg) calf into a 2,000lb (900kg) beast. Humans were never designed to grow at these rates. Limit or omit it, and, if you do consume it, only eat organic dairy.
Apply the liver and adrenal support strategies (see Puzzle Piece 2, Stress Hormones, and Puzzle Piece 4, The Liver).
Avoid artificial sweeteners, as we have no idea of their long-term effect on the human body. I pray they are safe as people consume masses of them these days. There is an enormous difference between exposing mice under test conditions to a substance for less than a year and humans consuming them for their entire lifetime. I am also suspicious that although they do not contain calories, they are confusing the insulin response. Some of the physically largest people I have ever met drank literally gallons of diet soft drinks every day, almost like an addiction. Leave it on the shelf. Use sparkling water with fresh fruit to sweeten the transition.
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Puzzle Piece 8 The Nervous System
The focus of this piece of your weight-loss puzzle is the nervous system itself, and the way it contributes to the type of fuel the body believes it needs to use in order to best serve your health. And what you will see is that, as with other systems in the body, you are wired for survival. In modern times, however, this can disrupt the efficient utilization of body fat as a fuel.
The autonomic nervous system
Everything in our internal and external environments, including the food we eat, the exercise we do (or don’t do), and the thoughts we think, influences our nervous system. Most people believe that in order to become healthy they must lose some weight. I believe the opposite is true; in order to lose weight, we must become healthy, and I approach weight loss for clients in this way.
As I’ve described, using science, emotion, and real-life stories throughout this book, I have known thousands of people who subsist on very little, and exercise frequently, but never get anywhere when it comes to fat loss. How else can we approach this? And how does this lifestyle create Rushing Woman’s Syndrome? For some, RWS is at the heart of them becoming Accidentally Overweight. Don’t get me wrong. I meet women living the RWS life and they are slim. But their nervous systems are usually a wreck.
To understand this, we need to explore how the autonomic nervous system (ANS) works. The autonomic nervous system “runs” our body behind the scenes and it is not under our conscious control. It regulates our heart rate, respiration rate, temperature control, and immune and hormonal systems while we carry on with life. Don’t you think it is truly miraculous that if you cut yourself the wound just heals? Don’t you think it is amazing that you swallow food and your digestive system extracts the nutrients to nourish you so you can stay alive? The human body is extraordinary and that’s an understatement.
There are three parts to the autonomic nervous system. They are the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), and the enteric nervous system (ENS). Here I will focus on the SNS, the “fight-or-flight” system, and the PNS, the “rest and repair” system, and their interaction.
In general, the SNS and the PNS have opposite functions. When we are under stress, the SNS (as discussed in Puzzle Piece 2, Stress Hormones), raises our heart rate, increases our respiratory rate, releases cortisol and shunts blood away from the digestive tract to the muscles so that we can run away or fight whatever is threatening us. If organ systems in the body are unhealthy, and therefore stressed themselves, or if we are mentally or emotionally stressed, that increases the sympathetic load as well. The SNS by its very nature is catabolic, meaning that it breaks down muscle tissue due to the increased amounts of secreted cortisol. High-intensity exercise is also sympathetic in nature; the heart rate goes up, as do respiration and body temperature, and cortisol is released into the blood. And we know what cortisol does to body fat and the hormonal changes it initiates. Once the “threat’ is dealt with (is it ever dealt with in the modern world?), the PNS slows our heart rate and respiration and it brings the blood back to the digestive tract so that we can digest our food. It also works on repairing any tissues that have been damaged in our “battle” and allows libido to be restored. Your survival instinct can’t have you thinking about reproduction when your body believes that your life is being threatened.
The PNS is able to do its wonderful work overnight, provided we go to bed early enough, because cortisol naturally starts to rise around 2 a.m. The SNS and the PNS are designed to balance each other. In those people who have a well-balanced nervous system, high-intensity exercise tends to lead to fat loss because the parasympathetic rest time between workouts is when muscle tissue is built. High-intensity exercise has other metabolic and biochemical consequences; however, the scope of this book does not explore them.
It is likely that people who are unable to lose fat by doing regular high-intensity exercise have a dominant SNS and, as a result, an inhibited PNS. In situations like this, there is too much systemic stress coming from somewhere, therefore adding high-intensity exercise is counterproductive. It adds to an individual’s sympathetic load, exacerbating the nervous system imbalance. This is one of the reasons we have to get our heads around “it’s not about the calories.” If “burning” more of them has not solved your body-fat challenge up until now, it is not suddenly going to start until some other work is done. And once the other work is done, you won’t need to go back to sustained, high-intensity exercise and caloric deprivation to maintain your new level of health and the size and shape of your body.
Anxiety is so incredibly common today, often as a result of relationship challenges, financial stress, a poor diet and its consequences, worries about health or weight or if you’ve upset someone. Yet, a person may be in sympathetic overload and still not even mention feeling anxious.
Reducing the sympathetic load is essential to fat loss if the SNS is dominant. Movement is still important, but it is best approached from a different angle and with a different attitude. Far more effective exercise for SNS-dominant people is what I call the more “yin” (gentle, feminine, as opposed to “yang,” masculine, go go go) exercise types such as tai chi, qi gong, yoga, Stillness Through Movement, or any exercise that is done slowly while being conscious of the breath. These types of exercise significantly assist in increasing PNS activity, which helps balance the ANS. Building muscle is also critically important to—among other things—metabolic rate, and long-duration high-intensity workouts tend to break muscle down, not build it. Once the nervous system is better balanced, body fat is readily burned, a concept that is game-changing to the way you approach your body and your health.
The nervous system and body fat
In any given moment the human body is making a decision about which fuel to use based on the information it is receiving from the internal and external environments. The only two fuels for the human body are glucose (sugar) and fat. You don’t use protein for fuel. The body breaks proteins down into amino acids, which are then converted into glucose so the body can use that glucose as fuel (energy). The name of this biochemical pathway is “gluconeogenesis.” The body requires energy for everything it does, from walking to sleeping, laughing to blinking; it all requires fuel.
As you now know, adrenalin communicates to every cell of your body that your life is in danger and it prepares you to fight or flee. However, you may be making adrenalin simply because you have to make a phone call that you’d rather not make or perhaps because you’ve gulped down three coffees already today. Or maybe your dad yelled at you a lot when you were a child a
nd so even though you know now that your dad yelled a lot because that was how he communicated and coped with how stressed he felt (rather than it being about his lack of love for you), now when a male in your life raises his voice in your vicinity, you instinctively go into the “fight-or-flight” response. The majority of stress for most people in the Western world today is psychological rather than physical and it can be constant and relentless.
The branch of the nervous system that is activated with stress of any type is the SNS, which has an intimate relationship with adrenalin. If the body’s perception is that it needs to escape from impending danger, whether your thinking mind is telling you so or not, you need a fast-burning fuel available to you to do that. Your body thinks it has to get out of there and get out of there fast! So what fuel do you think your body will choose when it needs to flee, to get out of “danger” fast? Remember its only choice is to burn either sugar or fat… in this scenario, it will choose sugar every time. The body thinks it has to in order to save our life and we are all about survival. The body doesn’t feel “safe” enough to use fat as its fuel in this “fight-or-flight” state because fat offers us a steady, slow-release form of energy—not what we need in a time of danger. We can burn fat effectively in a PNS-dominant state because the body perceives it is safe when the PNS is activated. Yet, the PNS can never be the dominant arm of the ANS, it can never steer the ship, while the body perceives there may be a threat to your life. This alone can be a significant block to utilizing body fat as a fuel and therefore weight loss.
We have glucose stored in our muscles and liver in a form called glycogen, and these stores are mobilized whenever our body gets the message that it needs energy to fight or run, if there is not enough glucose to fuel our escape left in our blood from our last meal. This mobilization of glycogen out of the muscles due to stress can, over time, impact the function and appearance of our muscles, including allowing the onset of cellulite.
I believe that one of the most enormous health challenges of modern times is that the body can constantly be on the receiving end of the “fight-or-flight” messages. There are so many factors, internal and external to us, which drive this response within us that we have to begin to choose actively not to go there, not to get caught up in the rush. And to take steps in our daily lives to allow our nervous system to have some balance. Without this, using fat as a fuel can be an uphill battle.
Craving sugar
Many people today know they need to eat less sugar or cut it out completely. You would have to have had your head buried in the sand not to know that eating refined sugars does not serve your health in any way. Yet, even with great understanding of this topic and even with the desire to change dietary sugar habits, many people describe it being the major challenge for them on their road to outstanding health. So why is it that we crave sugar so much?
One reason is certainly habit. Another is its infiltration into the food supply, even into savory-tasting foods, and taste preference for sweeter and sweeter foods is also playing a role. It is a case of more begets more. Very few people go back after dinner for a second helping of broccoli. Yet what most people are not familiar with is the impact of the biochemistry, of stress hormone production on sugar cravings.
As you now understand, there are only two fuels for the human body: glucose and fat. And when you are living on stress hormones because of too much caffeine or due to your perception of pressure and urgency, your body predominantly uses glucose as its fuel, not body fat. A person weighing 155lb (70kg) has the capacity to store about 2,500 calories of glucose (as glycogen in their liver and muscles) while that same person will store about 130,000 calories of fat. So the more your body thinks it needs to use glucose as your fuel to help you escape from danger, the more it needs to keep your “get out of danger” fuel tank full. So you crave it to support yet another survival mechanism.
Too many people in the Western world today regularly over consume caffeine, feel pressured about their work, money, relationships or their body, feel like all of their tasks are urgent, like there aren’t enough hours in the day and they scratch the itch of their “not enoughness” (explored further in Puzzle Piece 9, Emotions) on and off all day. Then they crave wine in the evenings for the sugar and to help them relax, even though underneath they are utterly exhausted. And many people have become so accustomed to living this way, they don’t even notice how stressed they are anymore. Anxiety is rife, yet most people who experience it have not been informed that caffeine leads them to make the very hormone that drives anxious feelings. If you experience such feelings, caffeine needs to be the first thing that goes.
When you live like this, your body will predominantly use glucose as a fuel in preference to body fat and it will only switch back to being an efficient fat burner if you make some changes. You can start with the food—some people do—yet for others starting here is precisely why they’ve made no progress in decreasing or cutting refined sugars and refined starches out (remember both sugars and starches are all broken down to glucose in the digestive system).
So if you know starting with food is not your way, then park it. You can start by focusing on activating your PNS, which means embracing diaphragmatic breathing. This may take the form of a restorative, breath-focused practice such as restorative yoga, tai chi, meditation, or simply regular intervals across the day where you commit to 20 long, slow breaths that move your belly as you breathe. It is a matter of retraining yourself to breathe this way, instead of the short, sharp, shallow breaths in your upper chest that adrenalin drives. The calmer you feel, the more your PNS is activated, the less sugar your body will need to keep the glucose fuel tank full.
Increasing your intake of green vegetables and/or dietary fats from whole-food sources can also make a big difference in reducing your desire for sugar. A high intake of green leafy vegetables for a minimum of 21 days starts to change your taste preferences, as greens have a bitter taste base. When it comes to fat, if you’ve lived through the “low fat, high carb” era and you became conscious of your dietary fat intake, you may not be eating enough of it. Notice when you crave sugar and significantly increase your intake of fats at the meal prior to the typical craving time. For example, if the middle of the afternoon is your tough time, then eat more whole-food fat at lunchtime.
Fat is incredibly satiating and you’ll notice it will fuel you for longer through your afternoon. Yet if you still have the mindset that counting calories is your only road to weight loss, you’ll never let yourself eat the fat, given it has the highest number of calories per gram. However, when you eat carbohydrates it leads the body to make insulin, which you now understand signals to the body to store fat, whereas when you eat dietary fat, no fat-storage signaling hormones are released. Not all calories behave equally inside the body, a concept I explore in detail in my book The Calorie Fallacy.
Signs your nervous system needs support
You feel stressed regularly and like you are on red alert
No matter how well you count calories and exercise, you struggle to lose weight (I’m not suggesting you count calories, but rather that you use this as a sign that this puzzle piece may need to be addressed)
You crave sugars and/or starches (carbohydrates)
You love coffee, energy drinks, and anything that contains caffeine, although sometimes you notice that they make your heart race
You startle (jump) easily
You regularly don’t sleep well
You don’t wake up restored or with good energy
If you don’t go to sleep by 10 p.m., you get a second wind and end up staying awake until at least 1 a.m.
You regularly feel tired but wired
You are a worrier or a drama queen (or king)
You feel anxious easily
Your breathing tends to be shallow and quite fast
You experience “air hunger” (and other causes have been ruled out)
You struggle to say “No”
You laugh l
ess than you used to
You feel like everything is urgent
You feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day.
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NERVOUS SYSTEM SOLUTIONS
When you understand how your nervous system works then you start to see what it needs, and I hope the following solutions will help you put that information to good use.
Embrace a restorative practice.
Commit to a regular practice of diaphragmatic breathing.
Instead of focusing on eating less sugar, focus on eating more dietary fats from whole foods and/or green vegetables.
Decrease or omit caffeine for four weeks (and keep it going if it feels much calmer), or switch from coffee to green tea so that you consume smaller amounts of caffeine buffered by the effects of theanine in the green tea.
Explore your perception of pressure and urgency. Have you made what you have to do each day full of pressure and urgency? Or is it a busy life, full of opportunity that is so ridiculously privileged because all of your basic needs are met? Of course there is real pressure and real urgency in this world. But save that perception for when you really need it, not your everyday existence (explored in detail in my book Rushing Woman’s Syndrome).
Explore your emotional landscape using the strategies in the next chapter, Emotions, if feeling like you are not good enough resonates for you.
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Puzzle Piece 9 Emotions
Most of us know what to eat; we just don’t do it. Even with all the confusing nutrition information out there—such as “eat carbs as they are essential for energy” versus “don’t eat carbs because they will make you fat and tired”—and these statements can be made in books sitting right beside one another on the same bookshelf—most of us still have a general idea about the food that nourishes us. And we still don’t do it. And this is not just about food and body size. I have met plenty of slim people who are incredibly unhealthy. Just because it might not show on the outside doesn’t mean you’ve got this piece of the puzzle licked. Most of us know it is not great to drink bucketloads of alcohol or caffeine, for example, either, yet at times we still do.