Optimal Body Weight

Some people struggle to lose weight and the moment they have a lapse in their discipline, they just stack the weight back on to be where they were when they started or even heavier. Others are the exact opposite – they struggle to gain weight and the moment they are undisciplined with regular large feedings, they lose weight again. Why is this?

Fat Rats

The two rats in the photo were born at the same time and kept the same conditions. They were given as much food to eat as they wanted. One of them (can you guess which one?) ate a normal amount of food, was satisfied and stopped; growing to a normal size. The other was voracious and just kept eating and eating until it weighed three times as much as the normal rat next to it. What was the difference?

In this BluePrint, you will learn about the powerful ancient programs in your body that make you fat and make you skinny. You will know how to turn on your fat-loss program and turn off your fat-gain program effortlessly while all the time getting healthier.

My focus here will be on normalising body fat rather than gaining athletic muscle mass although the two are not at all opposite.

Health Gain is more important than Weight Loss

If you have been taking action steps from the Optimal Health Foundation Program I know your health and that of your family will have already improved enormously. If you were overweight when you started, you have most probably lost a lot of weight already. Maybe you have already realised your target weight.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of efforts people make to achieve weight loss are based on very wrong methods. This means that you can lose weight and actually be sicker and weaker than before. It is well established that overweight and obese people get more degenerative diseases as they age and die earlier than people with normal weight¹. Perhaps surprisingly, it has not been shown that losing weight results in life extension². Studies show that you still live the same shortened life even if you lose weight as an adult. In fact, if you lose weight after 60 years of age, you are likely to shorten your life further³.

This comes as no great surprise to me as the most common strategies for losing weight are to eat low-fat and to emphasise ‘complex carbohydrates’. This kind of diet is very nutrient-sparse and while it may make you lose weight, it will also make you lose health. In order to make low-fat diets taste acceptable, they also often contain trans-fats, sugar, artificial sweetener and msg, all of which are extremely toxic. This is an area of intense current research but to me, the scientists are all looking in the wrong places which is why they have come up with a blank so far.

So again, I cannot stress enough that your priority must be on gaining health and not on losing weight. Having said that, I strongly believe that a healthy body is not overly fat and that by understanding – and actioning – the principles of good health, your body will naturally assume a good balanced weight for your natural build.

Your Fat-O-Stat

The fat cells of your body produce a hormone called leptin. A hormone is a signalling molecule used by your body for communication. In this case, to communicate to your brain how much fat you are carrying. The more fat cells you have, the more of this leptin is in your bloodstream. There are receptors for leptin in your brain that measure how much leptin is in your body. In this way, your brain knows just how much fat is in your body⁴. Pretty clever.

Your brain maintains a leptin set-point to regulate how much fat you have in your body. As you accumulate more fat, the leptin level in your blood goes up. When it goes above your set-point, your brain will take steps to bring it down. When you lose fat, the leptin level in your blood goes down. When it goes below your set-point, your brain will take steps to bring it up.

It’s just like the thermostat in your reverse-cycle air conditioner at home. If you set the thermostat to 25 degrees and the air temperature goes to 28, the air conditioner turns on and brings it down. If the air temperature goes down to 20, the heater turns on to bring it up. It’s the thermostat in your air conditioner that controls the behaviour of the whole machine such that the temperature in your room stays at a nice comfy 25.

It’s exactly the same with your body weight but instead of a thermostat to maintain temperature, you have a fat-o-stat to regulate how fat you are (of course you do have a thermostat too, it’s just not the topic of this BluePrint). If you get more fat than your fat-o-stat is set to, your brain turns on your fat-loss programs. If you get less fat than your fat-o-stat is set to, your brain turns on your fat-gain programs. This is why forcing your body to change weight without changing the set point of your fat-o-stat is so hard. You can starve yourself into shrinking but as soon as you relax and let your body do what it wants to do, it will bounce right back to where your fat-o-stat is set. Does this sound familiar? In fact, as you will see, one of the things that will push your set-point up to ‘Even Fatter’, is starvation, so often you don’t just bounce back to where you were but to even fatter.

Clearly the solution here is to adjust the set point of your fat-o-stat. Then your brain will engage your fat-loss programs and fat will fall off effortlessly. Yes, you do still have to eat healthy food and do exercise, but you will want to instead of kicking and screaming all the way.

The rat in the photo on the left has a genetic defect that makes it unable to produce leptin. It has faulty fat cells that work fine in every way except they don’t produce any leptin⁵. As a result, the rat’s brain always believes it’s too skinny. The rat’s fat-gain programs are turned on; it eats voraciously and gets aggressive if you deny it food. It keeps eating and eating until it is over three times the weight of the normal rat on the right which just stops when it has had enough.

But here is an even more amazing part. Scientists have calculated how much extra fat the rat should gain from the extra food it eats compared to the normal rat. The rat gains even more fat than the normal rat would from the same amount of food. The fat-gain programs actually alter the rat’s physiology so that it more efficiently gains fat from the food supply available.

The Myth of ‘A Calorie is a Calorie’

This is profound. You see, you will commonly read or hear on TV that a calorie is a calorie. It doesn’t matter where the calorie comes from – fat, sugar, starch or protein – it will make you fat just the same depending on how many calories you eat. But this is not true. The fat-making power of a calorie is determined by whether your fat-gain or fat-loss program is turned on (and also on how easily your body can convert the different kinds of calorie into fat). And it turns out that one of the things that changes the set point of your fat-o-stat is the kind of foods you eat.

If you eat foods that turn your fat-o-stat down, the calories in the food are less important. If you eat foods that turn your fat-o-stat up, every single calorie goes to your hips, or worse, to your tummy, or worst of all, around your abdominal organs. So which foods are they? Alright… we’ll get to that…

Ah hah! I know, I’ll just inject leptin!

So, do people have this genetic abnormality too? Yes, but it is extremely rare – like about 3 cases in the world. You see, your brain knows that you need body fat to be ready to have babies. When your body fat levels are too low, a woman stops ovulating. In fact, if the body fat levels are too low in children, they won’t even go through puberty until there is enough body fat. The intelligence of your body clearly knows that if you are too skinny, you are not strong enough to have babies – man or woman. In the case of these poor people, taking leptin saves lives. One girl was 86 kg at 8 years of age (normal is 28 kg) and her 2 year old cousin 28 kg (normal is 14 kg). And your body knows how fat you are from your leptin levels. Because their leptin levels stay at zero, their brains think they are skinny no matter how much they eat. If they cannot get to puberty, they can never have babies so this genetic defect is extremely rare since (until now) it couldn’t get passed on.

Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Hey, if leptin signals how much fat I’ve got, maybe I can just trick my brain into thinking I’m fat enough already by taking leptin. If I take enough, my brain will conclude I have too much fat and turn on the fat-loss programs.” Um. No. That is what scientists had hoped when they discovered leptin in 1994. But your brain is just not that easily tricked. In the obese mouse or person that has a genetic inability to make leptin, it works just like that. They stops eating and shrink down back to normal. But in experiments with obese people with no genetic defect it does not work very well at all. This is because obese people already have very high levels of leptin. It’s not a leptin deficiency that is the problem. It is the high setting of the fat-o-stat.

Fat-loss and Fat-gain Programs

So what exactly are these fat-loss and fat-gain programs? They are set of actions – behaviours or physiological changes – directed by your brain to increase or decrease the amount of fat in your body. When your brain needs to gain fat (or thinks it needs to), it turns on the fat-gain program.

The fat-gain program drives you to increase your energy intake and reduce your energy expenditure. To increase energy intake, you get hungry, you get aggressive if denied food, you find food that makes you fat especially attractive (sugar and starch), your stomach needs to stretch a lot before you feel full. To reduce energy expenditure, your thyroid hormones drop, you get lethargic (even lazy), your body temperature drops and you feel the cold, exercise seems like way to much effort.  Your cells also change their metabolic pathways to focus on converting as much of the available nutrients as possible into fat instead of heat or other expendable energy⁴.

As a consequence of these actions of your fat-gain program, there are other changes or side effects that occur. Depression, loss of concentration and impaired memory due to reduced energy available for your brain, sensitivity to feeling the cold due to lower body temperature and efforts to conserve heat loss, water retention and constipation due to lower thyroid hormones and decreased libido simply because energy is being conserved to make fat. It’s miserable.

Remember, anytime your body fat levels drop below the set point, these fat-gain programs will kick in. If you attempt to lose weight by reducing your calorie intake – i.e. by eating less – your fat-gain programs will kick in causing you to have all the miserable changes it entails. If your fat-gain program is turned on, how can a calorie-restricted diet ever possibly work in the long term? The answer is: it can’t. This is the reason for yo-yo dieting. The entire premise of losing weight by starving or partly starving yourself is doomed to fail as soon as you stop dieting. It doesn’t make you live longer, and you don’t have more fun on the way.

On the other hand, if your fat-loss program is engaged, you get all the opposite effects. You actually don’t want to eat and when you do you get full really easily. You have lots of energy and a high body temperature making you resistant feeling the cold. Your concentration is good and your mindset is positive. Anytime your body fat levels are above your set-point, this is how you feel. And it feels good so we like to be there. And yet ‘there’ for most of us is fat.

What happens if you change the set-point?

I think you can now easily see that if you want to lose body fat, the key is to lower your set point, turn off your fat-gain program and turn on your fat-loss program. So long as you eat healthy food following the three Food Principles I have already taught you, fat will just fall off. You won’t lose muscle because leptin is not made by muscle, only by fat.

These are the things that will cause your set-point to move to ‘Super Fat’

1. Eating sugar and carbohydrates – these turn up your fat-o-stat. That’s why it’s so hard to lose weight by eating low-fat. Our physiology is wired up for the hunter and gatherer lifestyle, not the agrarian. When the hunt is bad, people eat grains. It’s time to store up fat for the hard times. When the hunt is good, people eat meat. It’s time to lose fat so you can run faster to catch more meat.
2. Starvation – again, food shortage is read by your brain as hard times. You fat-gain programs turn on strongly.
3. Stress – some stress turns on fat-gain, some turns on fat-loss. If stress is perceived by your brain as like the threat of starvation or cold weather, your fat-gain programs kick in.
4. Pregnancy and pre-pregnancy – it is natural for your body to gain extra fat in readiness for pregnancy and to keep that throughout pregnancy. In fact without enough fat, you won’t even ovulate let alone get pregnant.
5. Cold – if you can’t get warm, your fat-gain programs turn on.
6. Toxins – your brain is made of about 2/3 fat. Fat-soluble toxins tend to accumulate in your body in your fat stores which includes your brain. The biggest problem is with POPs – Persistent Organic Pollutants – which include DDT, dioxins, PCBs, Chlordane and the infamous Agent Orange. Studies have shown that elevated levels of POPs are associated with up to 38 times increased chance obesity and diabetes⁶. 38 times! This is huge. In order to keep these toxins out of your brain, your body turns on your fat-gain program. The more body fat you have the more the toxins are kept out of your brain by simple dilution. It is very important that you eat organic meat to minimise your accumulation of these POPs. Eat nutrient-dense to enable your body to remove these toxins.
7. Nutrient-sparse diet – if you eat nutrient-sparse food like bread and pasta your body gets depleted of essential micronutrients. While you might be eating a lot of food, your brain interprets the micronutrient deficiency as hard times. Fat-gain programs turn on.
8. Fat peer group – if you hang out with overweight people, your brain moves your set point to match those around you. It’s just a matter of fitting in with the rest of the tribe.

These are the things that will move your set-point to ‘Lean’

1. Abundance – when the hunt is good, we eat lots of meat. This turns on your fat-loss program. It’s better to be lean when hunting as you can run faster and catch animals better.
2. Eat Nutrient Dense (Food Principle #2) – times are good. Fat loss programs turn on.
3. Eat Organic (Food Principle #3) – less fat soluble toxins means less need for body fat.
4. Fight-or-flight stress – you can run away better if you are lean. Chronic fear of something you need to run away from turns on your Fat-loss program.
5. Running – any bodyweight exercise turns on your fat loss program as you can do it better with less body fat.
6. Breast feeding – if you can’t breast feed, your brain reasons either you haven’t got enough nutrients to make milk or you didn’t have enough nutrients to keep your baby. Either way, it says times are hard. Breast feeding means times are good. Breast feeding has been repeatedly shown to result in long-term reduced weight in mothers and to decrease the chance of obesity in babies when they become adults⁷.
7. Associate with lean people – reset your perception of normal body size^{8, 9}.

Action steps to change your set point

So, writing all this into simple action steps:

1. Eat Foods by God – Food Principle #1
2. Eat Nutrient Dense – Food Principle #2
3. Eat Organic – Food Principle #3
4. Do exercise that moves your bodyweight
5. Don’t starve yourself
6. Eat plenty of protein and fat (and vegetables and fruit)
7. Adopt an abundance mindset

Does this all sound familiar? It’s just everything I have been teaching you already in the Optimal Health Foundation Program.

The best reference if you need help with the last one has to be the excellent book by Jon Gabriel called, “The Gabriel Method”. Jon has some powerful abundance meditations you can use to permanently change your mindset.

Here are a few other things that can help with getting a better body shape while you get a healthier, stronger body:

Artificial Sweetener

Artificial sweeteners have been shown in research to make you fatter. The more ‘diet’ drinks a person consumes, the fatter they get¹⁰. In fact, if something has the word ‘diet’ in its name, you’d probably be best to steer clear of it.

Coconut Oil

Studies have shown that the pear shape is healthier than the apple shape. The pear shape means your waist is smaller than your hips and the apple shape means your waist is bigger than your hips. People with the apple shape are much more likely to get heart disease and diabetes.

Scientists in Brazil took 40 women with apple obesity and divided them into two groups. They gave both of them exactly the same diet with one exception.  Half they gave soybean oil as the primary fat source, the other half they gave coconut oil as the primary fat source. After just 20 weeks, the group using the coconut oil had started to lose their apple shape and were turning into pears. The soybean oil eaters had no change in body proportions. The coconut oil eaters also had improved blood cholesterols (lower LDL, higher HDL, lower LDL:HDL ratio) and the soybean oil eaters had worsened blood cholesterol (higher total cholesterol, higher LDL and lower HDL)¹¹.

Coconut oil is an exceptionally healthy oil and an essential nutrient in healthy fat loss. You can buy delicious, certified organic, fair trade Coconut Oil in our store.

Nuts

Tree nuts, in particular walnuts and pecans, are rich in essential oils, antioxidants and other nutrients that are very good for healthy fat loss. They have been shown in studies to be good for a woman’s figure and reduce heart disease in men¹².

The best nuts of all are walnuts and you can buy fresh, organic walnuts right in our store.

Eating Fat makes you Fat is a myth

Just in case you didn’t get this yet… eating fat is not the primary cause of getting fat. When it comes to food, it has much more to do with eating sugar and starch. It’s just easier for marketers to say ‘Low Fat’. “Low-fat food makes for a low-fat body” – it sounds reasonable. Only problem is it’s wrong. Delete this myth from your mind right now!

Probiotics

Studies have shown that fat people have different families of bacteria living in their digestive system compared to lean people¹³. Funnily enough, the ones that predominate in obese people are coincidentally called ‘Firmicutes’. You’d think they’d be the bugs in the lean people but they are called ‘Bacteroidetes’¹⁴. Follow the recommendations in the BluePrint on Good bugs, Bad bugs and Leaky Gut to make sure you have the good bugs working on your team.

The best probiotics are made with real food (duh!). You can buy excellent real-food probiotics in our store.

Trans Fats

Trans Fats, Public Enemy #2, are the closest you can get to a guarantee of abdominal obesity, heart disease, cancer and cellulite. Strictly avoid these common toxins by following the BluePrint Fats, Oils and Public Enemy #2.

Cellulite

Cellulite is an irregular surface contour of the skin overlying fatty areas of the body especially the thighs, pelvic and abdominal regions. It affects mostly women and results from irregular fatty deposits under the skin and disruption of the normal connective tissue. The causes have not been determined in research but in my personal opinion, I suspect it results primarily from trans-fat consumption compounded by nutrient-sparse diets.

So there you have it. Everything you really need to know to get a healthy, lean body. If you want to a great book to read to really spell things out for you I cannot recommend highly enough “The Gabriel Method” by Jon Gabriel. In fact, it’s so good, we stock it for you.

Commmet at the bottom of this BluePrint to let me know how you go!

Yours in Optimal Health,

Richard Sawyer.

Key Message

• Your body has a Fat-O-Stat that sets the level of fatness that your body moves to.
• Trying to lose weight by restricting your calories has repeatedly proven to fail.
• Weight loss is easy if you just change the set point of your Fat-O-Stat.

Making It Real

1. Eat Foods by God – Food Principle #1
2. Eat Nutrient Dense – Food Principle #2
3. Eat Organic – Food Principle #3
4. Do exercise that moves your bodyweight
5. Don’t starve yourself
6. Eat plenty of protein and fat (and vegetables and fruit)
7. Adopt an abundance mindset

References

1. Srikanthan P, Seeman TE, Karlamangla AS. Waist-hip-ratio as a predictor of all-cause mortality in high-functioning older adults. Annals of epidemiology. 2009;19(10):724-31. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19596204.

2. Harrington M, Gibson S, Cottrell RC. A review and meta-analysis of the effect of weight loss on all-cause mortality risk. Nutrition research reviews. 2009;22(1):93-108. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19555520.

3. Maru S, van der Schouw YT, Gimbrère CH, Grobbee DE, Peeters PH. Body mass index and short-term weight change in relation to mortality in Dutch women after age 50 y. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 2004;80(1):231-6. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15213053.

4. Jéquier E. Leptin signaling, adiposity, and energy balance. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2002;967:379-88. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12079865.

5. Friedman JM, Halaas JL. Leptin and the regulation of body weight in mammals. Nature. 1998;395(6704):763-70. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9796811.

6. Lee D, Lee I, Song K, et al. A strong dose-response relation between serum concentrations of persistent organic pollutants and diabetes: results from the National Health and Examination Survey 1999-2002. Diabetes care. 2006;29(7):1638-44. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16801591.

7. Palou A, Picó C. Leptin intake during lactation prevents obesity and affects food intake and food preferences in later life. Appetite. 2009;52(1):249-52. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18926866.

8. Christakis Na, Fowler JH. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years. The New England journal of medicine. 2007;357(4):370-9. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17652652.

9. Trogdon JG, Nonnemaker J, Pais J. Peer effects in adolescent overweight. Journal of health economics. 2008;27(5):1388-99. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18565605.

10. Fowler SP, Williams K, Resendez RG, et al. Fueling the obesity epidemic? Artificially sweetened beverage use and long-term weight gain. Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.). 2008;16(8):1894-900. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18535548.

11. Assunção ML, Ferreira HS, dos Santos AF, Cabral CR, Florêncio TM. Effects of dietary coconut oil on the biochemical and anthropometric profiles of women presenting abdominal obesity. Lipids. 2009;44(7):593-601. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19437058.

12. Bes-Rastrollo M, Wedick NM, Martinez-Gonzalez MA, et al. Prospective study of nut consumption, long-term weight change, and obesity risk in women. The American journal of clinical nutrition. 2009;89(6):1913-9. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19403639.

13. Ley RE. Obesity and the human microbiome. Current opinion in gastroenterology. 2010;26(1):5-11. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19901833.

14. Turnbaugh PJ, Hamady M, Yatsunenko T, et al. A core gut microbiome in obese and lean twins. Nature. 2009;457(7228):480-4. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19043404.