Health Fitness

We are prepared to maintain a healthy weight

Suppose you have a “fat meter” that would send out a loud “STOP!” message to your brain once you have accumulated enough fat. Suddenly, you wouldn’t feel like pizza, ice cream, or French fries. You would look at these favorite foods, even smell their tempting scents, and you wouldn’t even be tempted. Or maybe you decide to eat anyway, and your metabolism would just kick into overdrive to burn off the extra calories.

Nice fantasy, huh? Well, it’s not that far-fetched. Believe it or not, you have that built-in mechanism. So why do you wonder if you always feel compelled to eat, even when you consider yourself overweight or having a hard time keeping it off? And why do you gain weight when you don’t control yourself?

Well, maybe your meter is broken. Or maybe your alarm isn’t loud enough to trigger a reaction in your brain. And that is very bad. Because this mechanism is so powerful that the people it works for never have to fight the temptation to eat when they’re not hungry. Staying at a healthy weight comes naturally to them; It’s not something you have to work at with deprivation diets and long hours in the gym.

Unfortunately, for many of us, this powerful system of weight regulation has gone awry. Food still tempts us long after our caloric need is satisfied. And the extra calories result in packing on extra pounds. Our body no longer knows how to regulate its “set point”, the level that is biologically ideal for us.

But do not worry. I offer information to help you learn how to reset this powerful mechanism so that your body can naturally reach its healthiest weight. You will be able to eat normally without thinking about calories, allowing your hunger/satiety/appetite levels to regulate what and when you eat in a remarkably efficient mechanism. Eating will be simple and pleasant.

Reference point: your ideal weight

When working properly, this weight regulation mechanism is as accurate as the most sophisticated scientific instrument. You do not believe me? Think of a fifty-year-old woman who weighs five pounds more than she did when she was twenty. If she eats about 2,000 calories a day, over the course of thirty years she eats about 22 million calories. Since five pounds of body fat stores about 17,500 calories, that means her body was only 0.08 percent less in energy balance compared to 10%. power output. This equates to a difference of about 50 calories per month, less than the calories in one egg!

In other words, his energy balance was regulated with greater than 99.9 percent accuracy! How many things in life can you say that about? There’s certainly no way you can be that precise trying to exert your own willpower over what you eat and how much exercise you get.

Until recent decades, weight stability for adults over long periods of time was the norm and an effortless process. A research study from the 1970s showed that the average weight of a sixty-year-old man was only four to five pounds more than the average weight of a thirty-year-old man. That kind of weight maintenance is not an accident.

So why fight? Stop counting calories and try to control your eating through diet. Instead, let your body regulate for you. I promise you will get much better results.

The healthy weight your body is aiming for is called your baseline weight. Think of it like the preferred temperature on a fat thermostat. Like any thermostat, this one can be set to whatever point is most comfortable. The system then works tirelessly to do everything it can to align your body with that point. It acts like a biological force: the further you go from the center, the stronger the pull will be to get you back into comfortable range.

However, this system only works if we let it. If you keep “moving” with the thermostat through the diets, the mechanism breaks down. This jolt is like a power struggle to wrest control of your body’s innate weight-regulating mechanism, and in the end, it only makes your body fight harder to maintain control. The result: Your body forces you to not only regain the weight you’ve lost, but you may even pay a penalty with additional weight gain, and a set point now set higher to guard against future dieting.

Instead of continuing to engage in this weight battle with your body, you could declare a truce and join forces with it to help achieve a healthy, natural weight. You will find that you will lose interest in eating when you are full. And your own body will compensate for those occasional excesses at parties without you having to deliberately deny yourself.

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