Fat Loss Effects of Physiological Changes

Fat Loss Effects of Physiological Changes

Everybody knows what results they want from a diet when it comes to the mirror, but there’s a lot going on under the hood that make changes in appearance possible. Your body is capable of impressive feats, but it won’t only actually do them until you alter your lifestyle to one where the aesthetic qualities you want line up with the physiological changes that provide your body the path of least resistance. Even though a lot of the things your body does may seem inconvenient, bodily processes are generally the most efficient way for you to deal with the environment (both inside and outside the body) in the moment.
To put things in a general sense, metabolism is the process of turning caloric nutrients into energy. When the nutrients come from a recent meal, it is referred to as anabolism. When they come from storage within the body (fat cells, muscle glycogen, liver glycogen) it is called catabolism. Which state you are in depends on when your last meal was, what the last meal consisted of, and how your metabolism is conditioned (how you eat most days). Your body will be prone to store nutrients away and grow when anabolic, and it will use up stores of nutrients when catabolic. So if your goal is to burn off body fat, your body has to be in a catabolic state. This is not to say you need to be in the state 24/7, just more often than not. The following sections describe how to promote processes in the body that facilitate catabolism.

Low insulin
Insulin is an anabolic hormone that plays huge role in fat storage. It signals to cells to take in nutrients. Only when insulin is low, are cells able to release excess nutrients (such as stored fat, or salts).
Insulin’s main function is to clear nutrients out of the bloodstream. Glucose is the most potent stimulators of insulin because one's blood glucose can quickly become dangerous if out of range. Protein can also stimulate insulin but not as bad as glucose. Fat by itself is pretty negligible when it comes to insulin. Another important factor is how quickly the glucose or protein is digested. So if you’re trying to achieve a low level of insulin a meal needs minimal glucose and slow digesting protein (avoid protein powders). Fasting is also a great way to lower, but it is challenging to do so for long if you're insulin resistant. This is because even without eating a meal, the amount of insulin required to transport enough glucose to keep you alive is still too high let your fat cells release fat.

Insulin sensitivity
When you take a drug frequently, your body builds up a tolerance. The same thing happens with hormones that are frequently elevated. The more sensitive to insulin your body becomes, the less insulin has to be produced to shuttle away nutrients. This results in a lower fasting insulin level which means you’re fat cells will release more fat between meals. This makes refraining from snacking and skipping meals easier because your body has more energy (from the fat cells) available in the bloodstream.
Though there are supplements that can help with insulin sensitivity (link insulin sensitizers), it can also be done through reducing insulin exposure. Just like quitting a drug, the lower your meals elevate insulin and the less frequently your insulin is raised, the more insulin sensitive your cells will become.

De Novo Lipogenesis
Everybody knows the liver processes toxins in the blood; however, it has many other jobs, one of which is being a fuel tank. The liver can store carbohydrates, but once it’s become full it starts converting them into triglycerides which then get stored as belly fat. This process of converting carbohydrates to fat is known as lipogenesis and it can occur in the liver and in fat cells. This process is thought to be a large contributor to metabolic disease and leads to fatty liver disease.
To avoid this process, the liver has to have room to store energy so it doesn’t resort to converting carbohydrates to fat to be stored elsewhere. It’s also nice to have a low level of energy (glycogen) in the liver because it promotes the burning of fat. To keep your liver from filling up, it's helpful to learn about how two substances (glucose and fructose) are processed by the body.
Carbohydrates are either in the form of sugar or starch. Starch is made entirely of glucose, while sugar is typically half glucose and half fructose. Glucose is the preferred source of carbohydrates. It can easily be taken up and stored by muscle cells as well as any other cells. Fructose on the other hand almost exclusively ends up in the liver. So glucose and fructose can both end up in the liver, but glucose at least has a chance to get stored in your muscles or burned up by other cells.

tGlut Expression
Under normal circumstances insulin is required to transport glucose from the bloodstream to cells. Being insulin sensitive means less insulin is required to do this; however, fat, liver, and muscle cells experience this insulin sensitivity equally so if glucose is easily driven to fat as well as muscle. This why people often say you can't gain muscle while burning fat.
The term tGlut refers to glucose receptors in muscle cells that only get expressed for about 4 hours after intense exertion. These receptors let your muscles take in glucose without the use of insulin. This results in a lower insulin level after a high carb meal.
This all means that if one eats carbs after heavy weightlifting, more glucose will be driven selectively to the muscle that was worked as opposed to it going to your fat, liver, and muscle evenly.

Circadian Rhythm
You may have heard that your body has an internal clock. That’s true but it doesn’t mean you have some organ that keeps track of time. Instead it’s a series of phenomena where certain processes in your body have adapted to anticipate the repetitive changes in a daily cycle. This internal clock is more accurately described as the circadian rhythm.
Learning how our bodies evolved to perform certain tasks at certain times in the day allows us to take advantage of certain physiological changes that happen over the course of the day.
The change most relevant to fat loss has to do with insulin sensitivity. Your entire body is more sensitive to insulin in the morning. This sounds like it might be the best time to eat carbs, but when all of your cells are more sensitive glucose will more likely end up in fat and liver cells where it is converted to fat.
In the evening your whole body is less sensitive to insulin. If this effect if combined with the expression of tGlut from heavy weightlifting, then your fat and liver cells become far less likely to take in the glucose from a high carb meal.

Ketones
You may have heard about ketones before. I saved it for last not because it’s the best, but because it's perhaps the most overrated of the physiological phenomena related to fat loss. Ketones are a way for your body to spare glucose by converting fat to a water soluble molecule that can pass the blood brain barrier to fuel the brain which under a high carb setting only uses glucose; however, there are still some systematic effects relevant to fat loss.
When ketones are elevated to a certain degree, the “hunger” hormone, ghrelin gets reset to low levels. This and steady glucose levels are how fasting and ketogenic diets reduce cravings for food.