Before we can dive into weight loss, we need to understand what habits are causing us to gain weight in the first place. Snacking, poor dietary choices, and lack of exercise are all contributors. However, the way they impact each of us is different.
Selling Car Parts
A Little Analogy
Imagine a company that sells a variety of car parts. The company buys and sells new auto parts, but it also buys non-functional vehicles and sells their components. It has staff members who disassemble the cars, a garage where the cars are stored, and a store that holds all the components for sale.
Management realised they were continuously expanding the garage to store more cars. However, the store was usually virtually empty. Customers had no issue in buying disassembled or new parts, but there was an internal problem. It seemed that the workers did not like or had issues disassembling the cars. This production bottleneck placed a burden on car storage. The garage was constantly expanding, and the company was buying new parts to sell, even though the parts were available in the cars.
A Connection to the Human Body
We may compare the human body to this company. The car parts are starch and sugar (carbohydrates). The non-functional cars are fats, and the management and staff are the various systems of the body. Just like the workers do not like disassembling cars, the body hates breaking down fats. Instead, the body uses sugary and starchy foods to provide energy quickly, just like the company bought new car parts to supplement the lack of used parts from the cars.
The issues with this analogy.
This analogy between business and body is excellent but not complete. The body also converts starch and sugar into fats if these components remain unused for an extended time. However, our analogy does not transform car parts back into the cars.
Sugar and starch are stored as glycogen in our muscles and liver to provide ready energy for our body. If glycogen remains unused within a given time, the body converts it into fats for long-term storage. Therefore, feeding our bodies with excess, and therefore unusable, sugar and starch results in fat storage. Also, as we eat fatty foods, fat reserves keep building instead of being broken down into sugar to provide energy. We end up with a net flow of fats into our bodies, causing us to gain weight. To complicate things even more, virtually everything we eat breaks down into sugars, including vegetables and protein.
The Dessert Dilemma
For many of us, it is customary to have something sweet after the main meal. In doing this, we prevent our body from breaking down the meal we just ate into sugar to provide the energy needed to sustain us. Instead, the body uses the ready-to-go sweet treat to produce energy, storing the sugars from our meal as fats. It’s like buying new, ready-to-sell car parts instead of allowing the staff to disassemble the broken-down cars to provide the parts for sale. This unbeneficial practice becomes so “normal” that we do not realise that the garage is overflowing with cars. Similarly, when we continuously indulge in sweet things, we do not notice that we gain weight, packing on more and more body fat.
Universal facts with unique consequences.
The facts expressed above are universal. Everyone’s body will store sugars as fats if necessary. However, our uniqueness determines the extent to which it occurs. One person may be able to eat sweets more often than another. Someone else may be unable to eat sweets at all. As a result, losing weight will lead us along different paths depending on the health of our body, what we eat and how we exercise.
I wish I had this information earlier in my adult life when I was overweight. I moved from 181 to 158 pounds in 6 weeks by adjusting my diet and exercising consistently, doing a combination of walking and running. Some people were adamant that I must eat carbohydrates, but I proved them wrong with the results of my experiment. However, I acknowledge that my solutions may not work for everyone because our situations are unique. We have to find out what works for us while getting the necessary guidance from our doctor and monitoring our vitals. However, it was interesting that one of my main “opponents” who said I must eat carbohydrates came around and significantly reduced their carbohydrate intake. In the end, this individual experienced an even better result than mine.
To continue reading, learn how we begin to lose weight.
