Excerpt from my upcoming book on Flat Belly Diet… Full article here —>The role of stress in weight gain
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We all know that stress is an inevitable component of our modern lives. In the daily hustle and bustle we are always scrambling to compress more and more work/play in the 24 hours we have. The stress of a looming deadline, the stress of paying bills, the stress of taxes, the stress of daily traffic etc., all wreak havoc on our bodies, in ways we still don’t fully understand. In the process of coping with these stresses we disrupt our eating and sleeping cycles and cause additional stress to our bodies.
At a basic level what is stress? It is any external (or internal) state of disharmony that challenges either the physical or emotional integrity of an individual. The perception and response to stress happens via our autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS is responsible for controlling our involuntary or visceral functions like breathing, heart rate, blood vessel d…
Chapter 5 from my upcoming book on Flat Belly Diet…. (click to get pdf version of WHY WE GET FAT)
“Science is about recognizing patterns. Everything depends on the ground rules of the observer: if someone refuses to look at obvious patterns because they consider a pattern should not be there, then they will see nothing but the reflection of their own prejudices.” ― Christopher Knight
Most food we consume has three macro components; Fat, Protein and Carbohydrate. We saw from the last chapter that there are essential fats without which the body cannot survive. There are also essential amino acids, which are building blocks of proteins, which are used in daily repair and other metabolic functions in the body. These amino acids also cannot be synthesized in the body and have to be ingested from external sources. This leaves us with the third component: carbohydrate.
As you will see in this chapter there are no essential carbohydrates. Carbohydrate’s sole purpose is t…
An excerpt from my upcoming book on Flat Belly Diet…
We all know and believe that the body mainly uses carbohydrates for fuel but did you know that the body can also burn fat for energy? In fact, fat is 6.75 times more efficient as a source of energy than carb. Each gram of fat yields 9 calories while each gram of glycogen (stored form of carb) only yields 4 calories. Furthermore fat is a water repellent (hydrophobic) so it can store and transport by itself while 1g glycogen binds to 2g of water so in essence glycogen only yields (4/3) 1.33 calories/gram of stored glycogen. So you need 6.75 times the mass in glycogen (9/1.33) in order to store the same amount of energy as fat. So basically to store the energy of 10 lb of fat you will need 67.5 lb of glycogen. Hibernating animals are a good example of using stored fat as the only source of energy during hibernation. So don’t be surprised if I tell you that you can completely rely on fat as your source of energy instead of carbs….
“History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.” – John F. Kennedy
We have evolved from primates to modern humans in over 2 million years. Our subsistence patterns have evolved along with our intelligence. Our diets have also evolved in this period. Today we are in the grip of the obesity epidemic that is blamed for much of modern lifestyle ailments like CHD, diabetes, cancer and many others. Even though these ailments have multi-dimensional causes (like stress, pollution, environmental toxins etc.) the one powerful dimension in our immediate control is the food we eat. Our diets have changed drastically since the dawn of human civilization and understanding this evolution can lead to important clues about how we can change our diets to our advantage. In this article I want to briefly go over how our diets evolved from way back in the stone ages to the current era.
Back i…
