Weight loss

Having your body be able to adapt to the negative forces in our environments is ideal for a full enjoyable life. I have recently felt the weight come off (pun intended) as I have succeeded over the past year to increase that ability adapt by getting to a healthier weight and fitness level. Now I do not proclaim to be a dietitian or a personal trainer. I am a chiropractic student with a degree in chemistry. I hope to use my personal experience with weight loss as well as my background in chemistry to share how you can improve your health and ability to adapt through losing weight.

As with other posts I will start with my science background. In physics we have the Law of Conservation of Energy that simply put states, "Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can change form". In our bodies we consume chemicals (food) and those chemicals have chemical energy (calories) that can be released if broken down into smaller chemicals. These chemicals have basically two fates: they can be stored in the body as either energy reserves or building blocks for our body, or they can be converted into kinetic energy by contracting muscles. The calories have to go somewhere and they do not just appear in the body. We had to put them there by consuming them. If we convert more of those calories to kinetic energy rather than stored energy we will lose weight.

Now on to my experience. On January 1st, 2013 I decided it was time for me to live what I preached. As a future healthcare provider, I knew that I could not help others improve their health with out me improving mine first. One of my biggest pet peeves are hypocrites. So being that I was only 5'6" and 174 pounds, I decided that the first way I could improve my health was by shedding some of that extra storage I had been carrying around. Knowing the facts that I stated earlier in this post, the best way for me to lose this extra weight was to eat less then I burned. It is a simple enough concept in theory, but harder in practice. So I started by keeping track of the calories I consumed and made sure that I was consistently lower than what I had calculated was my baseline calorie burn (if you are interested in how to calculate this just ask) for example, my base was around 1850 cal/day so I ate 1600 cal/day. It was hard to eat less because up to this point in my life I had eaten whatever and how much I wanted. With some good old fashion discipline and the occasional "unknown day" I was able to see marked results. I lost over 20 pounds in the first 3 months. Also, as I lost more weight, my desire to exercise increased, which led to more marked weight loss results. It was like my body was saying "thank you for freeing me up now let me show you what you really can do." As my exercising increased I then upped my calorie intake and when I exercised less I ate less. The longer I kept this cycle the easier it got. Now after over 13 months I am down to 134 pounds and feeling amazing. I sleep better and I have much more energy.

You see your body only has so many fat storage cells (adipocytes) and when those are full, your body starts putting fat where ever there is extra space in you body. As more of this fat is placed outside your fat cells the more cramped your other tissues become. Your heart and lungs normally have plenty of room to expand and contract, but when you start filling that expanding space with fat it becomes too crowded and then your heart and lungs have to work much harder to perform their functions. Also your blood vessels become clogged with the extra fat so your heart has to work even harder to get blood throughout your body. Also your glucose receptors become desensitized to all the extra glucose you are consuming which causes diabetes. I could go on and on and on about how too much fat is bad for you and makes it hard for your body to function at its full potential.

I understand that people on certain medications gain weight and that there are more genetic issues coming out about the difficulty of weight loss. Popular culture plays a big roll in the obesity epidemic as well. But simply put, if you eat less than you burn you will lose weight. I tested it and it worked magnificently. Your body wants to be healthier and it wants to show you what it is capable of. We can all make better choices about what we put into our bodies. I just hope that this helps inspire some and help us all continue to strive for better health so that we can adapt to our ever changing world. As always leave me questions or feedback in the comments.

-Mike E