50 TOP TIPS FOR FAT LOSS – TIP 35

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Listen To Your Body

In evolutionary terms, the human species has gone through some magnificent changes.  From descending down from the trees, to standing upright on our hind quarters, to shedding our body hair, these changes in our physiology have certainly affected our place in the food chain.  However, it was with the shedding of our body hair that we gained the upper hand.  Until this time, we shared one common trait with all of our predatory enemies.  We couldn’t hunt during the heat of the day.  However, as we shed our hair, we gained the ability to perspire and this gave us a huge advantage over our prey.  We could continue moving, while they had to seek the shade and this led us to our next great evolution.  We began to eat more meat and it was the added protein to our diet that caused our brains to grow.

Now what has all of this got to do with fat loss tip 35, listen to your body?  It’s simple.  In order to stay one step ahead of our predators, we gained some automatic built in self protection mechanisms and these were designed to keep us safe.  You may know of a couple.  Picture this, you’re walking down a dark street and it’s late at night.  In the distance, you hear a bottle being kicked.  For some unknown reason you get a little edgy.  The hairs on the back of your neck stand up, goose bumps form on your arms.  This, believe it or not, is your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) protecting you from a sabre toothed tiger about to eat you.  You didn’t have to do anything, they just kicked in automatically.  Now, I know you’re probably thinking, this is the 21^st century, there are no sabre toothed tigers, but your body doesn’t know that.  As far is its concerned, you were in imminent danger and your body was getting you prepared to either fight the tiger or run off.

The other form of an automatic self protection mechanism  that hunter gather man needed was the ability to survive a famine.  Food wasn’t readily available from the fridge.  We had to hunt for it.  occasionally we failed and so we could quite often go for long periods of time without food.  Our SNS had 2 main roles, to protect us from imminent danger and to keep us alive during times of famine.  During these lean times, our body’s learned to store body fat and use it till the next meal came around.

So you can see that there’s a direct connection between listening to your body and body fat storage.

We have lots of these little signals our body automatically sends us, we’ve simply just learned to ignore them.  If we go back and re-learn them, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll start to shed some body fat.

Here’s a couple of you to tune back into.

As a diurnal species we are tuned into the cycles of the sun and moon.   When daylight hits our eyes in the morning, a hormone in the pituitary gland (located directly behind the eyes) releases melatonin and this wakes us up.  Around 6.00pm (as the sun starts to set, another hormone called melatonin sends us off to sleep.  Both rely on the sun and moon.  Shift workers get really screwed over because they move their bodies out of sync with the earth’s relation to the sun and moon, which is why shift workers have a higher rate of sick days than 9-5ers.  (As a former Police man, I was involved in a number of studies into this for the NZ Police Association)

That yawn that hits you during the day, it’s not a sign that you’re tired.  It means your energy levels are low.  As a result of low energy levels your breathing became shallow and that yawn was an automatic (SNS controlled) and urgent gasp of air to prevent you from dying.   It was probably caused because you’ve had an almighty sugar hit and now you’re plummeting to a sugar low.  What you ought to be doing is eating a meal with the correct ratio of proteins, carbohydrates and fats and not reaching for another sugar or caffeine hit.

Have you ever eaten a meal and then within 10-15 mins you find your eyes are so heavy that you can’t keep them open?  That’s your body telling you that that meal you’ve just had, had the wrong ratio mix of macronutrients and as a result, your body has stolen blood from every spare location (including the eyelid muscles and diverted it to your digestive system to process that meal you’ve just consumed.

Food is petrol for your body.  It shouldn’t send you to sleep.  It should provide you with energy to attack the next phase of your day with gutso.

So there’s just a couple of small signals your body sends you every day that you can re-tune into, to help you shift that body fat.

Tomorrow we talk about eating (my favorite subject) and the optimum frequency for body fat loss.  Till then, stay safe and happy.