We’d like to think that our bodies work like cars—press the accelerator to go faster, tap the brakes to slow down. But our body’s metabolic switches don’t quite work that way: We may not gain or lose weight at the rate in which we expect to. When we have inflammation, our bodies are less efficient, meaning that we burn more calories—as a way to protect you, even as you gain weight. As we lose weight and decrease inflammation, our bodies go back to being efficient, and we may not burn calories at the proportional rate in which we gained them. So when we eat the right foods and more efficiently metabolize them, weight also may stall temporarily—meaning you still may be heavy, but might not have as many health risks associated with the weight.
While we’re all familiar with those overt, emergency intestinal crises, our intestinal emotions also influence us in ways we don’t normally associate with food. The reason we may feel groggy or have less energy than a drained nine-volt could be because our intestines are trying to tell us we’re choosing the wrong foods. If you pulled out the small intestines of your entire family and laid them on the back deck to compare them (latex gloves, please), you’d see that they all look alike; they’re the classic, wormy tubes that wind throughout your gut. In terms of basic physiology, we all have the same intestines, just as we all have the same basic brain structure. But just as all of our brains don’t function the same way even though we have the same parts, our intestines don’t function the same way either.
2009-7
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Why Some People Stall
2009-7
10
Abdominal Pain Is a Pain in the Neck
Your abdominal discomfort may be caused not by what’s happening inside your belly but by what’s happening outside. According to one researcher, there’s such a thing as Tight Pants Syndrome, which is abdominal pain lasting two to three hours after a meal. Its cause? Yup: pants that are too tight. (The researcher says there’s as much as a three-inch difference between waist size and waistband.) Funny, but the same thing happens with men and shirt size. Two-thirds of men purchase shirts with a neck size that’s too small, so they get headaches, changes in vision, and even changes in blood flow to and from the brain.
2009-7
5
Your Parking Lot of Fat: Your Omentum.
The omentum, which is located next to your stomach, serves as your primary storage facility of fat, where you park some or (in really bad cases) all the excess foods you eat. Ideally, the garage is empty. But as we gain weight, some of our bellies are housing four stories of Winnebago-worthy fat. Most important, the omentum serves as our body’s ultimate stress gauge: YOU-reka! As we’ll explain in a moment, bigger bellies indicate higher levels of inadequately managed chronic stress—which causes chronic levels of inflammation.
2009-6
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Psychological responses
Food aversions can develop if, say, a person had a bad vomit- inducing shrimp dinner one night. The response would be to associate the shrimp dinner with the painful aftereffects and avoid it.
2009-6
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General GI disorders
Problems like irritable bowel syndrome, which causes gut-related symptoms like diarrhea and abdominal pain, are caused by sensitive nerves and result in inflammation in the intestinal walls. For example, we usually all pass the same amount of gas a day (about fourteen times, or 1 liter total), but some of us sense discomfort from that gas more than others do.
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Enzyme deficiencies
When your intestines lack enzymes to metabolize specific foods like milk or grains or beans, the food remains undigested, so you start feeding your intestines’ ravenous bacteria. The result: lots of intestinal dilation and more gas than a Hummer fuel tank. The most common of these is lactose intolerance (the lack of GI agreement with dairy products), and a close second is an allergy to the protein gluten from wheat (and rye and barley; nutritional good guys). As an example, when you lack the enzyme lactase, the sugar lactose in the milk reaching your intestine is not metabolized, so it’s presented to your intestinal bacteria, which metabolize the lactose in your intestines, producing a lot of gas.
2009-6
15
Slow the Process
Especially before your meal. If you have a little of the right kinds of fat just before you eat, you can trick your hormonal system by sending the signal to your brain that you’re full. If you eat a little fat twenty minutes before your meal (70 calories or so of fat in the form of six walnuts, twelve almonds, or twenty peanuts), you’ll stimulate production of CCK, which will both communicate with your brain and slow your stomach from emptying to keep you feeling full. (CCK release and ghrelin reduction take about twenty minutes to kick in and take about 65 calories of fat to stimulate.) That way, you’ll be able to sit down for a meal and eat for pleasure, not for hunger—which is one way to ensure you’ll eat less. The average person is finished eating well before his satiety signals kick in, thus counteracting any possibility that his hormones can help him. For the same reason, you should eat slowly. If you down your food faster than a MiniVac, you won’t allow your satiety hormones time to kick in.
2009-6
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Fasting Phase
When you’re sleeping or go long periods without eating, your body needs to have a supply of energy to keep your organs functioning. Once you use up all of your available glucose during the digestive phase of metabolism (your body stores only about 300 calories in the short-term glycogen reservoir), it taps a long-term reservoir: fatty tissue in the form of triglycerides (molecules that include a carbohydrate-containing glycerol). This keeps you going until you break the fast with breakfast.
2009-6
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Digestive Phase
Your hypothalamus orchestrates this phase of metabolism by receiving signals from throughout your body about whether you’re hungry or not, so that your body can use energy to power itself. Here’s how: Your body has a short-term reservoir for energy in the form of glycogen, a carbohydrate primarily stored in your liver and muscles. After eating, when you have glucose (sugar) and insulin (the hormone produced in the pancreas to transport glucose), your body uses all of the glucose it needs for immediate fuel but takes the rest and stores it as glycogen. If your blood glucose level falls, your pancreas stops releasing insulin—and then releases another G substance, glucagon, which converts the stored energy (glycogen) to sugar (glucose). So the effect is that when your intestinal gas tank empties of sugar (in other words, when our ancestors were fasting between bison hunts), your body is still able to supply crucial energy to your central nervous system by converting glycogen to glucose.
2009-5
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The System of Satisfaction
Though it may seem that we have endless reasons to eat—to celebrate holidays, to beat stress, to pass time between Super Bowl commercials—there’s only one real reason why we need food: for energy. That energy allows our organs to function, our muscles to move, and our bodies to keep warm. And to a large extent, our brains help control how we convert food to energy. To help understand the process that your body goes through to use energy, we’ll break down the metabolic path into two phases.