Why Your Body Stores Fat By Al Beikoff At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

Studies around the world are clearly showing that obesity rates continue to climb despite the weight–loss industry being worth billions of dollars. With all the aids to weight loss why is it that people continue to get fatter?

The answer lies in how the body was designed to survive.

The body is all about survival. In a psychological sense the subconscious creates beliefs that are formed, initially at least, for safety and psychological survival.

Such a mechanism could be in place when an abused child grows up obese as a way of protecting herself from the advances of men, or as a way of proving that she has control, for instance. There could be many possible events and beliefs that provide the reasons behind the obesity. They may not even be significant. It could be started from a careless remark that was interpreted in a way that made the person feel threatened in some way.

In a physiological sense though the body maximizes its chances of survival by ensuring it has maximum energy reserves available to meet its needs. Those needs, of course vary according to the level of activity being engaged in.

Now most people tend to fall into habit patterns of eating on a regular schedule and generally eating until they are feeling full. They do this without thought to what activities they will be engaging in next. So any food intake (calories) in excess of what the body needs at that moment or the next couple of hours will be stored away for later.

And how will it be stored? As fat.

To the body, it's like hoarding up supplies for a rainy day.

Now fat cells are like little balloons the body fills up with fat and they expand accordingly (along with your waistline). Since the body is focussed primarily on survival and storing as much away as possible in case of famine later on, if it fills up all its fat cells it just creates a few more. (It's like it fills up the storeroom it's born with so then it creates new storerooms to store the extra food).

Interestingly, once created, these fat cells are never destroyed. You can empty them but they are still there, ever ready to be filled up again whenever you have excess blood sugar. This excess energy in the blood stream will be stored in the fat cells.

So these fat cells become the body's reserve of energy. A reserve is just that – held in reserve and used last after all other fuel sources have been used up.

In other words body fat is the last thing your body wants to use for energy, especially if your blood sugar levels fluctuate constantly because of poor eating habits.

This is an important point because it has a kind of intelligence whereby it registers long periods without food and irregular eating patterns as a potential threat to survival. It doesn't know when the next feed will be so the instability and uncertainty of the food supply is countered by it storing fat whenever it can.

So if you give it too much by overeating it stores it as fat.

Conversely, if you don't give it enough it goes into survival mode, slows your metabolism and stores fat as easily as possible.

If you create both those situations by infrequently eating and then having large meals sporadically the problem is compounded as the body interprets the situation as needing even greater fat storage.

With the body predisposed to storing fat and conserving it, it's no wonder obesity is on the increase. When we couple this body design feature with the facts that lifestyles are so sedentary and the food supply is diminished in quality as well as plentiful compared to only a few generations ago, it's not likely to change either.

Unless of course you are aware of how and why your body gets fat, which you do now. Knowing this puts you in a position of power so you can maximize your energy, minimize your fat storage and avoid the weight loss battle altogether.

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