Your Red and Green Weight Loss Switches!……Part 1

This is a simplified but accurate picture of the process of weight loss that hopefully will inspire you to see where you are going wrong and motivate you to make better lifestyle changes.

Your fat cells have receptors. Some receptors help store fat (call them red switches to help you remember) and some receptors help burn fat (call them green switches). Most people have a lot of the red switches turned on and the green switches turned off! This can be particularly true in some areas of your body with stubborn fat e.g. stomach, especially lower stomach or hips and thigh or back of arms.

The environment we create inside our bodies because of lifestyle habits determines which switches are on and it can vary even throughout one day! If you begin a diet and/or exercise and you have a lot of red switches on, your results will be very limited, despite your best efforts. This is why I always stress to people there are 3 ingredients to real weight loss – diet, exercise and fixing your metabolism i.e. turning off the red switches and turning on the green switches.

In this Issue I want to look at things that turn on the red switches. That way you will think more about them when you do them and better understand why you might not be making weight loss progress or at the very least sabotaging your weight loss efforts.

Habits that turn on the red switches:

1. Skipping breakfast – remember you probably haven’t eaten much since 6 or 7 the night before!
2. High sugar or sweetener products e.g. lucozade, cakes, buns, biscuits and sweets etc – just deadly!
3. Alcohol – a heavy nights drinking can turn on the red switches for 2 or 3 days!
4. Long gaps between meals – the longer over 4 hours the worse the damage!
5. 100% carbohydrate meals e.g. juice, toast and cereal for breakfast – try to replace some of the carbohydrates with some good protein e.g. low-fat cheese or a boiled or poached organic egg.
6. Over-exercising – your diet must support the amount of exercise you do. If it doesn’t then ‘on’ go the red switches.
7. Medicines – short term use of medicines turns on the red switches but long term use of medicines can set them on permanently and it takes time to reverse this.
8. In some people salt can turn on the red switches especially in the stomach area where they build up a solid pad of stubborn fat.

I hope that this has started you thinking more about what you do and where you are going wrong. In the next article we will look at a few more things that turn on the red switches but focus more on the good news about things that turn on the green switches.