Like many of you, I grew up in the “low fat” craze. Food manufacturers picked up on this trend and began to demonize fat in all forms – yogurt, margarine, snacks – you name it. Choosing fat free became trendy, and a very effective way to market. However, despite the low fat shift that has been going on since the 80’s, North Americans have become more and more obese, and heart disease has sky rocketed.
In part because food that has no fat needs to have loads of sugar added to it to be palatable.
This may sound crazy but the reason for this rise in obesity and heart disease is more related to the fact that we consume too few of our calories from good sources of fat and too many calories from carbohydrate.
Notice I said “good sources of fat”. This blog is not license to begin eating more french fries and ice cream!
Who doesn’t like the sound of that? Can you visualize your body chewing up those little love handles? Sounds good right? The reality is that consuming enough good fat, will reduce your cravings for carbohydrates, shift your metabolism to burning fat as a preferred fuel, and cause you to lose weight, feel more energized, think more clearly and simply function better.
Not to mention that fat burning shifts your body toward an anti-inflammatory state. Particularly important for those of you suffering from body pains or aches. This is one of the reasons we focus on your nutrition in the early phases of your care. Eating more in line with how you were designed to eat will help you heal that much faster.
Consider this analogy: Fat burning is like diesel fuel, carbohydrate burning is like rocket fuel. Rocket fuel burns fast and furious but doesn’t last. If you were to power yourself with rocket fuel you would need to constantly re-fuel – every few minutes.
Does this sound familiar? Toast or cereal for breakfast, muffin mid morning, sandwich for lunch, bagel in the afternoon, pasta for dinner, snacks in the evening? Being a carbohydrate/sugar burner requires constant refuelling and results in over consumption of calories which your body will store as fat because you have trained your metabolism to use carbohydrate as fuel.
Fat burns like diesel. Slow and efficient. Here is my typical morning: coffee with grass fed butter and/or coconut oil at 5am, 2 hard boiled eggs around 7:30, a green smoothie with a whole avocado at 8:15, workout at 12 and lunch at 2pm. That is almost 10 hours with virtually no carbohydrate and plenty of energy for a workout! Lots of good fat – diesel fuel!
If you want to find out more about shifting to becoming a fat burner, join us for EAT BY DESIGN Monday November 21st from 6:30-8:00pm. Register at the front desk or click here.
To find out more about Elevate Chiropractic and our dedicated team of professionals, click here.