Lets make it easy and consider emotion, hormones and sugar - then you can lose weight!

Eating can fill a starving appetite or a mood or even help you relate to a friend over conversation. But hey, if you eat too much or the wrong thing, you end up wearing it.
So, it’s time to hit the gym, the pool, the bike path or some form of physical involvement. But really, it barely works. Study after study shows marginal weight loss at the rate of about a pound a month at best. That is a buzz kill. Let me break it down for you.
 
Simply, the thinking has been to go with calories as a measure of success and failure. On an average workout, an individual can burn 200-400 calories. At that rate, you are looking at a pound lost every 10-15 days or so. It’s not awesome but at least it’s movement you may think but the research doesn’t support this. In fact, Weight Watchers abandoned calorie counting because they have finally reached the conclusion that it doesn’t work. So much for neat and tidy and that form of math.
 
It’s time you were introduced to hormones. Your body was built to retain weight to weather starvation in primitive times. If you lost a pound every time you went walking for an hour, your chances of survival would severely decrease. Hormones like insulin and estrogen help you store fat while hormones like testosterone, thyroid, progesterone and growth hormone help you burn it. Cortisol can burn and store but in general it stores that fun fat around your waist.
 
So, time for a diet? Here is the shaken up, boiled down truth that has to be part of any diet to work:
 
You must lower blood sugar or you will never burn fat!
 
Your body will preferentially burn sugar when it is there. So, things like low fat or no fat popsicles will sabotage your efforts at fat/weight loss. (So will pretzels, and chips-even the organic kind) Sugars are sweet and can hardly ever be mistaken as something to cut out of your diet. Things like fruit and diet sodas can go by unnoticed and pack pounds. Foods like yogurt and granola are also culprits that raise your sugar levels. Starches/grains become sugars when they hit your body. The chemical name for a starch is polysaccharide which is literally translated to mean “many sugars”. I am not sure why anyone is telling you to eat these…
 
Your metabolism is going to be the key to making weight loss successful. Every day, you are burning anywhere from 1500-3000 calories. Tweaking this is going to trump efforts in the gym under most circumstances. In general, you reduce starches, sugars and dairy and increase meats and vegetables.
 
Protein/meat increases your metabolism while vegetables do not really raise your blood sugar. By the way, gram for gram, vegetables pack more nutrients than grains (starches) and yes, most vegetables adequate fiber too.
 
Whatever diet, way of eating or lifestyle you choose has to be something that you will do the rest of your life. This decision will reflect a way of eating that includes health to your final days.