Weight loss video
In this weight loss help video, Mark Tyrrell talks about how losing weight for many people can feel so frustrating. He discusses the traditional approaches to weight loss, such as restrictiing calories and over-exercising. Mark also talks about how important it is to use approaches that lose fat, rather than muscle, which can result from calorie restriction diets.
Why carbohydrates and sugar fuel weight gain, not fat
Mark then goes on to discuss how the usual approaches to weight loss actually make things worse. Carbohydrate-rich diets like those typically consumed in the West, enhance fat storage through stimulating insulin release and make it hard for the body to use fat as energy. The dieter’s metabolism then relies on regular intake of carbohydrate, or sugar, to keep blood sugar levels up as fat is ‘locked’ in cells due to high blood levels of insulin, making the fat unavailable for use as fuel. Mark talks about how fat has been demonized due to its high calorie content, and the mistaken idea that it causes heart disease.
Mark then discusses the emotional side of weight and comfort eating, and where this comes from. He talks about how the primal emotional needs can fuel emotional eating and how understanding them can free you from this viscious cycle.
Transcript of Weight Loss Help video
Losing weight, for many people, can feel extremely frustrating, because so many people ‘yo-yo diet’. You limit fats, you perhaps starve yourself, you over-exercise; you lose weight initially, but then it all comes piling back on again. The important thing when losing weight isn’t just losing weight - which could be losing water and muscle tone, rather than fat - it’s losing adipose tissue, losing the fat and keeping the muscle tone and the water levels, the moisture levels, in the body on an equal level so that we can remain healthy and slimmer; this is the important thing.
Now, there’s a sea change in thinking as regards weight loss, and this revolution in thought is that it’s not healthy to cut out too much fat from diet - or, in fact, any fat. Lots of fats are extremely healthy for organ function, for collagen production in the skin, for all kinds of healthy working in the body and mind. We need fat from butter, from eggs, from red meat. It’s a carbohydrate-rich diet that’s rife in the West which makes us fat by releasing insulin, raising blood sugar levels, and actually causing all kinds of problems for us.
People who go on a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet tend to become much healthier, much slimmer, more effortlessly. So it doesn’t feel like a diet - it’s a change in diet, but it doesn’t feel like a restrictive diet. Restrictive diets don’t work because we tend to eventually rebel against them.
There’s wonderful information about a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet and excellent exercise regimes on Mark Sisson’s site, MarksDailyApple.com. I really recommend that you have a look at his site, because it’s got extremely common sense advice to give about how exactly to lose weight without trying and getting into the yo-yo cycle of weight loss.
But of course, there’s an emotional side to losing weight, as well, and in Germany, they have a word for weight gain caused by emotional problems or sadness: Kummerspeck, a German word meaning ‘to comfort eat’. So often, if people aren’t meeting their needs for reassurance or for relaxation or for company (they might feel lonely) or even for success in life - they may know that they need something, but not really be clear about what it is, so they grab cakes or biscuits or ‘a whole loaf of bread in an evening’, as a client recently said to me. She had a whole loaf of bread in an evening just because she’d had an argument with her boyfriend; she wasn’t hungry, but this is what she did.
We can address the physical side of weight loss by looking at what current science has to tell us about what the body actually needs, but we can also look at the emotional aspect of weight loss: how can we stop someone Kummerspecking, eating through emotional causes? The tips and techniques and strategies contained within this part of the site - the articles in this site - address these two aspects: physically what you need to do in order to become slimmer, fitter, stronger; and also emotionally what we need to do in order to not use food as an emotional crutch anymore, but to get our emotional needs met in healthy ways that don’t involve us getting fat and unhealthy.
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