THE weight loss stumbling block

The pancreas measures the amount of sugar in your blood. When this increases, it releases insulin (sugar hormone). When the blood sugar level drops, it stops releasing insulin. Insulin ensures that sugar can get into your target cells (e.g. muscle and nerve cells) by means of the key-lock principle. Insulin uses a key to open the lock on the door of the target cell and in this way sugar enters the cell to be used as fuel or stored as a reserve. This reduces the amount of sugar in your blood.

Insulin:

When there is constantly too much sugar in your blood and too much insulin is produced in response, the number of ‘locks’ for insulin on the target cells decreases. This is a natural reaction of your body to the ever-increasing amount of sugar and insulin in your blood. It is a congenital protective mechanism to prevent too much sugar from getting into your cells and your blood sugar level from dropping too low.

By reducing the number of locks on the target cells, they have become ‘deaf’ to insulin, so to speak. In this way, less sugar can get into the cell. As a result, the amount of sugar in your blood remains high and your pancreas continues to release insulin in response. Subsequently, the amount of insulin in your blood remains high. We call this situation ‘insulin resistance’.

When you are overweight, insulin resistance almost always plays a role.

The consequences of insulin resistance include:

As with insulin resistance, target cells can also become ‘deaf’ to a number of other messenger substances, such as leptin, ghrelin and dopamine. It occurs in a similar way to insulin: a chronic excess of leptin, ghrelin or dopamine reduces the number of ‘locks’ on the target cells.

In the case of obesity, besides insulin resistance, leptin, ghrelin and dopamine resistance also play a role.

Leptin resistance has even more negative consequences. It also lowers your metabolism in order to save energy and fat tissue.

As a result of insulin, leptin, ghrelin and dopamine resistance, you end up in an unhealthy vicious circle. Insulin resistance maintains your feeling of hunger and makes you want to eat more. Leptin resistance results in you not getting that feeling of being full, so you keep eating and eat more than you need. In reaction to this, your blood sugar level, insulin release and leptin levels remain high. This results in even more fat cells, even more leptine release, even more “resistance” to leptine and ultimately more obesity.

Perhaps you believe that the solution to obesity is eating less (counting calories), dieting and exercising more. The traditional approach to losing weight is to burn more calories than you eat. This theory is outdated. Unfortunately many people, dietitians and weight loss programmes still focus solely on calorie counting.

A body that is out of balance does not recover by counting calories, eating less and exercising more. On the contrary, eating less for a longer period of time slows down your metabolism (less burning) and increases your feeling of hunger, especially the appetite for tasty treats. This is precisely why it is so difficult to maintain a strict diet.

In addition, dieting is not the solution to the various forms of ‘resistance’ either. The production of leptin decreases as a result of fasting and dieting. If you are overweight and lose fatty tissue, the amount of leptin in your blood decreases, which increases the urge to eat even more.

The combined effect of messenger substance ‘resistances’ in the case of obesity make it quite difficult to lose weight. When your brain encourages you to eat mostly sweet and unhealthy foods, it is difficult to resist. It takes a lot of willpower to ignore this. These are stumbling blocks that are not easy to overcome.

Now you might be thinking that the battle against those extra kilos and being overweight is lost once you have developed the various ‘resistances’ and have entered an unhealthy vicious circle. Fortunately that is not the case! You can reverse these resistances and bring your body back into balance.

What helps us to break the vicious circle is increasing the number of ‘locks’ on the target cells for (among other things) leptin and insulin, so that they can do their job properly again. In this way you can reverse the ‘resistance’ to various hormones and other messenger substances in your body.

How can you do this? With a healthy diet, sufficient nutrients, vitamins and minerals, enough exercise, stress reduction, relaxation, sufficient sunlight and doing things that make you happy. I know, it sounds like an open door, and yet it is. There is no better way to tackle the problem than at the cause itself.  The different resistances and the imbalances in all of your other body processes are caused by an unhealthy lifestyle.

Losing weight is therefore not as straight forward as it seems. Not being able to lose weight is not just a question of a lack of willpower. It is an imbalance in your hormones and many other body processes.

A body that is out of balance cannot lose weight. As long as this situation is maintained, losing weight is a battle you will not win.

If you want to lose weight sustainably, your body first has to get back into balance. And you do that with a healthy lifestyle.