1. We skip meals/starve ourselves.
Skipping meals creates two REALLY big problems.
Problem #1 is that each and every time you skip a meal, you are murdering your metabolism. In the short term you’ll lose a few pounds by skipping meals and this might make you feel good for a few days. However, you’re killing your ability to be fit and lean and ultimately it will catch up to you.
Before I figured this concept out, I would skip meals all the time. For me, it was an addiction. I wanted to see lower numbers on the scale and skipping meals made it easy. The problem is that your metabolism gets lower and lower until it’s impossible to stay lean. I killed my metabolism this way. During one spell I figured out that I would gain fat (and weight) by eating only 2100 calories per day, even though I’m a muscular guy that weighs close to 200 pounds. Trust me, that’s REALLY messed up! A person of my size should be able to easily eat 3000 calories per day without putting on fat (I can now eat more than this without putting on fat).
Problem #2 with skipping meals is that your body will seriously fight against it by creating insane cravings. I would starve myself and overeat – often in the same day. This might not seem possible but trust me, it is and it’s one of the most damaging things you can do to yourself. People that do this usually start off by skipping breakfast. I did this often and it was usually because I was trying to eat extremely low calories. It would of course catch up to me later in the day and I would often eat an obscene amount of calories. I couldn’t control the cravings that my body would create. Now that I understand what happens physiologically when I don’t eat, it seems almost ridiculous that this was once my lifestyle. Some people of course create the same effect by skipping lunch or dinner.
The good news is that this pitfall is easy to reverse. You can make your metabolism CRANK by eating healthy meals that consist of lean proteins, whole grains, and fibrous vegetables. Testing on my own body indicates that my metabolism is now cranking out over 1,000 calories more than it used to and I owe this to a healthy diet and exercise. I don’t go more than a few hours without eating something, even if that something is a few slices of lean turkey and some vegetables. Eating the right foods regularly will also help you to control your appetite.
2. We eat low quality foods.
This one is especially dangerous for those of us that live in the United States. We want our food to be fast and cheap and manufacturers are getting better and better at giving us exactly what we want. The problem is that fast and cheap foods are REALLY easy for our bodies to break down and this can cause all kinds of problems.
At one time, I could gain fat more quickly than almost anyone I know and the type of food I would eat was a huge contributing factor. I would start most of my days by skipping breakfast (see #1), thinking that I was going to eat a lot less calories than usual that day. By the end of the day, I would almost always end up in a fast food drive-thru, ordering low calorie food and then binging. If you do this, you can put on fat every single day. It beats down your metabolism and then overwhelms your body with low quality calories.
Higher quality food is much harder for our bodies to break down and therefore leaves us more satisfied (and less likely to eat more later in the day).
A few months ago I visited the United Kingdom and Ireland. I was shocked at how thin almost everyone was there. After I had been there for a few days, however, it was easy to see why. Food in the UK and Ireland is extremely fresh. When you order a side of veggies in a UK restaurant, they look like they were just picked from the garden outside. Bread in the UK is the most mega-ultra-grain bread I’ve ever seen. There is no doubt that the difference in food is what keeps the people over there thin.
We can ALL improve the quality of food that we eat, and when we do, we raise our metabolisms and stay more satisfied throughout the day. We can eat whole wheat grains instead of white ones, ditch the white rice, and we can avoid many of the sugars and fats that we stuff into our diets. We can eat fresh vegetables and we can even eat organic foods if we want to take this concept to the next level.
When you raise the quality level of the food you eat, it will allow you to eat MORE food without gaining fat. High quality foods will raise your metabolism and again, are harder for our bodies to break down.
3. High fructose corn syrup.
HFCS is the favorite sweetener of U.S. based food manufacturers, in fact we as Americans consume more calories from HFCS than from any other food (if you want to really call it a food).
The problem with HFCS is that it’s extremely addictive and causes more weight gain than sugar (believe it, it’s true). Elite fitness professionals have of course known this for years and fortunately, studies have been happening that prove this to be true. Recently, a team at Princeton discovered that HFCS causes more weight gain than other sweeteners, especially around the mid-section.
Interestingly, in the 40 years that HFCS has been used to sweeten foods in the U.S., the obesity rate has risen from 15% to a shocking 33%. It’s difficult of course to blame anything on a single cause, however, people who stop eating foods with HFCS almost ALWAYS gain a lot more control of their diets, weight, and body fat.
You of course don’t have to believe research to understand the addictive nature of HFCS. Eat 100 grams each day for a week and then try to stop. Trust me, it won’t be easy.
Step one in the process of getting off of HCFS is to replace it with table sugar. Table sugar is significantly less addictive. This of course will generally mean that you will need to make your own treats, since HFCS is in almost everything nowadays. Ultimately, sugar isn’t a great food either but it’s much much better than HFCS.
4. We eat ultra refined carbs.
In reality, HFCS is but one of many refined carbs that we love to eat. We eat white bread, white rice, white tortillas, and sugars by the boat load and these foods are AWESOME at making us gain fat.
Refined carbs are extremely addictive for me and until I understood that fact my diet was always out of control. At one time, I thought that it was beyond impossible to stop eating sweets and many other foods. Switching to whole grains made eating right 100% easier, in fact most of my sugar cravings went away when I switched to whole grains.
These carbs cause our blood sugar levels to spike because they can be broken down easily by our digestive systems. Many of these foods can go from our mouths to our blood streams in 10 minutes. High blood sugar is of course toxic to our bodies so we release insulin to clear these carbs out. For the most part, our bodies turn those carbs directly into fat.
On top of all of that, many of our bodies are terrible at controlling the amount of insulin that is released during this process. Our bodies release too much and this causes our blood sugar levels to dip too low. Our bodies then think that we are starving (we need a certain level of blood sugar to function) so it creates insatiable cravings for more carbs (sugars and unrefined flours/rices). This is what we call carbohydrate addiction.
This of course can all be controlled if we stay away from refined carbs. Whole wheat breads and brown rice are much harder to shove into our blood streams. Small amounts of carbs trickle into our blood streams – it can take hours for this process to happen. This leaves us satisfied for longer periods of time and more importantly, our blood sugar levels don’t spike up.
5. We consume ridiculous amounts of fats.
Food manufacturers (restaurants especially) LOVE to load their foods with fats. They do this because fat tastes AWESOME. More fat will make almost any food taste better. Whether sweet or salty, foods will have more flavor with high amounts of fats. The problem with fat is its emptiness. Fat is extremely high in calories.
Many people eat thousands of calories of fat without knowing it. Many restaurant salads have more than 1500 calories because of high fat dressings, cheeses, sauces, and meats.
Fast food is especially dangerous when it comes to fat content. A Big Mac from Mcdonalds has 29 grams of fat and that’s a monstrous 260 calories from fat. Fat doesn’t take up much space in your stomach so you have to eat a lot of food to feel satisfied. The calories we can consume this way can be astronomical and when we consume more calories than our bodies need, we gain fat.
6. We are inactive
We gain fat when we consume more calories than our bodies need. Unfortunately, many of us are really inactive so our bodies don’t need many calories. Most people could make significant, positive changes to their bodies by walking for as little as 30 minutes per day. Walking of course uses calories in the short term and raises metabolism in the long term.
Weight training is of course a fantastic way to promote leanness for men and women. Lifting weights does a remarkable job at raising the amount of calories our bodies use during the day. A one hour lifting session each morning can raise your metabolic rate by as many as 1000 calories per day. Many women of course worry that lifting weights will make them appear bulky but in reality the effect is almost always the opposite. Women become leaner and therefore smaller when they train with weights.
Playing sports, hiking, and engaging in other activities will of course also help you to improve your fitness level by increasing your body’s calorie needs.
7. We get stressed
Food is comforting for many people and we’re often unaware that we turn to food when we get stressed. Usually this happens on the subconscious level. I personally turned to food for comfort for years without realizing it – this didn’t come to my attention until I started trying to keep track of how many calories I was eating on a daily basis.
After I started counting calories, I decided to try to get control of my binging and overeating. This all helped me to realize that I sometimes craved foods like brownies, cakes, doughnuts, and ice cream when I was stressed. I never consciously thought that these foods would make me feel less stress, I simply craved them when I was stressed – it happened subconsciously.
Truth be told, this still happens to me. A few weeks ago I had to give a presentation to a few hundred people and got pretty stressed out. I ended up eating 1100 calories worth of brownies in less than 20 minutes. This of course did the trick and helped me to feel better in the short term but most definitely caused me to gain fat. While I do mess up from time to time, I have learned how to control these binges and for the most part, avoid them. Understanding what happens to our fat levels when we binge can help us to want to avoid binging.
8. Depression
Like stress, depression can cause us to turn to food for comfort. For many of us, dealing with our emotional difficulties can help us to improve our bodies.
Exercise of course has also been proven to help with depression.
9. We age
Our metabolism slows down with age. This means that as we get older, our bodies don’t need as many calories. Eating the same number of calories as we did when we were younger can cause us to gain fat. However, this effect can be greatly helped by increasing our levels of activity. Go for walks and hikes. Learn how to play tennis. Play sports with your kids or grand kids.
Age is of course something that we cannot control. However, we have complete control over what we eat and over our level of activity.
Fortunately, our metabolisms aren’t going to drastically change overnight – it’s a gradual process. For most people, they gain fat with age mostly because they become more inactive with age, not because of the small drop in their metabolic rates.
10. Hormonal imbalances
There are MANY hormonal imbalances that can affect our fat levels. Here are a few of them:
- Over-production of cortisol.
- Under-production of testosterone (in men and women).
- Under-production of thyroid hormone.
- Over production of estrogen (in men and women).
Research shows that the ridiculous levels of hormones in our food supplies can really mess with the natural hormone levels in our bodies. This of course affects some people a lot more than others. This may cause your thyroid to under-produce thyroid hormone which would drastically stunt your metabolic rate. If your body doesn’t produce enough testosterone it may be extremely difficult to get lean.
Some of you may find out that you need to have some testing done by an endocrinologist to determine whether your hormone levels are within the normal ranges. If they aren’t, this could be causing you to gain fat.
11. Lack of understanding
Ultimately, we are responsible for gaining fat. Many people would argue that they simply don’t know how to stop gaining fat. I would argue that we can each learn how to control our bodies.
If we don’t understand how many calories we can eat without gaining weight, it’s going to be hard to not gain weight. If we don’t understand the triggers that cause us to overeat, it’s going to be hard to not overeat. If we don’t know which foods are extremely high in calories, it’s going to be really difficult to not eat too many calories. If we don’t understand how to raise our metabolisms, we will probably have low metabolisms.
In order to stop gaining fat and get lean, we first need to learn what it will require. We need to learn about our bodies, about food, and about activities that will promote leanness.
12. Genetics
Many people are of course genetically disadvantaged. For these people, gaining fat can happen quickly. There are a few different ways that people can be genetically disadvantaged:
- They can have naturally slow metabolisms.
- They can have overactive cravings for foods, causing them to overeat.
- They can have a genetic disposition toward inactivity.
We have no control over the genetic makeup of our bodies. However, we can make changes that can help us to stay lean despite them. I for one gain fat very easily in fact there have been multiple occasions in my life where I have gained more than 10 pounds of pure fat in less than one month. If I kept that up it would be an amazing 120 pounds per year. I am not naturally lean – my genetic code tries to make me fat every day of my life. I have learned how to combat my genetics by learning about food and exercise and during that process, I have learned how to take advantage of the genetic advantages that I have.
I believe that almost every person can be lean. If you learn about how food and exercise affect your body, you can stop it from gaining fat and you can then help it to drop fat. It can be much easier than you think!
Tags: Diet, fat, fat gain, fat loss, food quality, nutrition