Is being overweight a matter of lack of willpower?
To lose weight you need calorie restriction, but it is not as simple as not eating, there are many more factors, from psychological to environmental.
Environmental?
In the last 50 years, obesity has multiplied by three because we have much more unhealthy foods available and because we don’t move.
There are many people who claim that they eat little and gain weight.
Take paper and pencil and record everything you eat to really see how much and what you eat, we are kind to ourselves.
What is emotional hunger?
When we turn to food to deal with emotions, when for example we lack dopamine and we look for it in chocolate, or when we are stressed and cortisol causes hormones to be generated that make us hungry.
That is surprising.
I’m bored and I look for positive emotion in food instead of other sources of dopamine such as social relationships, walking in the sun, listening to music, singing, dancing…
Do we have love handles as standard?
Genes load the gun, they determine between 40% and 70% of the predisposition to being overweight, but habits trigger the trigger; We have room for action.
It’s not just a question of diet.
Now it is fashionable to talk about the gut-brain axis, but muscle should be added to the equation.
What do intestine and muscle have to do with each other?
We consider physical exercise as a punishment to pay the penalty for excesses, when in reality the muscle generates compounds, myokines and exerkines, that have anti-inflammatory capacity.
Saying that we are all inflamed is also fashionable.
Physical exercise generates those molecules that scientists describe as the natural polypill. Exercising muscles has great benefits in terms of cognitive protection, it generates more neurons, more plasticity and more memory, and prevents cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.
What type of exercises?
Of strength. Working hard causes the adipocyte, that fat cell that we don’t even want to see, to transform into Zumosol’s cousin, white fat becomes brown.
It’s the one for babies.
Brown fat reduces the risk of inflammatory diseases and controls obesity. Strength exercises activate it, and also being a little cold, which causes brown fat to burn energy and generate heat.
Come on, everyone, do squats!
It doesn’t all boil down to eating little, there are many strategies, we need to activate all those muscle metabolic processes.
He says there are different types of hunger.
The physiological. Emotional hunger, which always asks for sugar. Environmental hunger, which I call ass I see ass I want.
Tell me.
If you were drinking a Bollycao instead of water, I would like it because dopamine, the neurotransmitter of desire, of the anticipation of pleasure, would appear.
Sin must be kept away.
And then there’s the hungry Dragon Khan. When you eat sugar, insulin shoots up, you have a spike, and when insulin falls your body seeks to return to balance and asks for more sugar, and you go on a roller coaster. If you eat a very sugary breakfast you can go into that loop all day.
Some other kind of torturous hunger?
Hormonal hunger, that of the adipocyte, when these cells are large because they have eaten a lot, and tight because they do not fit, they do not breathe well.
Are they not healthy?
No, and since the adipocyte is the one that sends the signal that we are satiated, if they do not work well they do not send the signal, you continue eating and the adipocytes continue to grow.
The love handles grip tightly.
Yes, that infinite beauty. They gain weight and multiply, some die from asphyxiation, generating free radicals; The others, since they no longer fit in the Michelin, travel to the pancreas, the heart, the liver, generating problems.
There are drugs to eliminate hunger.
They are called the Hollywood drug because the Kardashians or Elon Musk have made them fashionable, and they are effective against obesity, but if you don’t want to recover what you lost you must work on your strength. The problem is taking them to lose three or four kilos.
Does feeling fat lead us to gain weight?
There is evidence that frustration and stigma, feeling judged for being fat, lead us to fail in our plans to lose weight. People who feel judged live with a level of stress and anxiety that leads them to emotional hunger.
