50 TOP TIPS FOR FAT LOSS – TIP 37

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Balance Your Hormones

Hormones are chemical messengers.  They get released from cells and glands of your body and send messages to other cells and our body’s ability to function in an optimal way is dependent on the way in which our body’s messages are sent and received.

Imagine if you were sent an email from an unknown person telling you that you had miraculously inherited $1 billion dollars from a long lost uncle in Nigeria.  Now most of you with a little common sense would simply ignore that message and delete it from your inbox.  But for some people, the mere thought of inheriting $1 billion dollars is too much to cope with and so they do something that they know they shouldn’t, they respond to the email.  Some people have even been known to provide the sender with the bank details only to discover their life savings are stolen shortly afterwards.

Imagine for a moment you receive another email from your employer asking you for some important information, but for some unknown reason, your email filter accidentally sends that urgent request direct to your spam folder and you don’t get it.  The ramifications could result in you losing your job.

Hormones are the similar.  They send messages.  Sometimes, the messages are wrong, or blatant lies.  Sometimes our bodies don’t receive truthful messages and as a result all sorts of things can go wrong.

Let me give you some examples.

Behind the eyes lies the pituitary gland and 2 hormones that it controls are the ones that wake us up and send us off to sleep.  Melatonin and seratonin.  Makes perfect ense really, given the eyes are the senses that control light entering our body.  When light hits our eye lids in the morning, the pituitary gland tells us its time to wake up.  Then later on when iot gets dark, it sends another hormone off to tells us its time to go to sleep.

When we eat certain foods and the digestive process breaks them down into the macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates & fats, hormones get released to instruct various cells of the body to do stuff.  One such hormone is insulin.  As blood glucose levels rise due to food being digested, insulin is released from the pancreas and provides cells with a means of grabbing the glucose to use it for energy.  It also enables the liver to grab glucose molecules, join them together and store them for later use (liver glycogen) and thirdly it causes another hormone called Leptin to be released from the hypothalamus which tells the brain that we are full.

One perfect example of how hormonal messages get all confused and mixed up is the disease Type II diabetes.  This disease occurs when your body has a problem with either making insulin or it doesn’t recognise it.  The end result is the same, excessively high levels of glucose in your blood stream which can lead to all sorts of medical complications with obesity is one of them.

While the medical fraternity will say that they don’t know what causes your pancreas to stop producing insulin or your body becoming resistant to your own insulin, it doesn’t take much of an intelligent brain to work out that there is a direct correlation between the foods we eat and the confused hormonal messages that our bodies are sending.

So, how do we correct the confused messages and balance our hormones?

It’s simple, go back and start eating the foods that the body is designed to digest.  That way, when the food is broken down, the body can recognise them as proteins, carbohydrates and fats and send the necessary hormonal messages and act on them correctly.  You won’t recognise these foods straight away as you’ll have difficulty spotting them at first.  They are the ones that nature produced.  They grew in organic farms, they came from the animals that roamed free eating their natural food source and they thrived in the oceans.  You’ll struggle to find these in supermarkets, but if you look very carefully, you’ll find them around the edges and in the fresh fruit and vegetables section, the seafood section, maybe the deli and in a small section of the butchery.

The foods to avoid at all costs will be easily recognizable.  They are the ones chemically engineered in laboratories, sprayed with chemicals, toxins and poisons the agricultural industry calls pesticides, insecticides and herbicides.  They come in boxes, plastic bags and cartons and if you opened them, they would remain unaltered for weeks months even years, due to the preservatives that have been added to them.  You’ll find these foods in all of the aisles of your typical supermarket.  They are called breakfast cereals, loaves of bread, soft drinks, energy drinks, flavored milk drinks and fruit juices.  You’ll find that we humans have tried to improve them by adding large amounts of salt and sugar and we’ve tried to remove all levels of flavorings and fat content.

Tomorrow we look at some foods that use more calories to digest them than there is in them.  How cool is that?