1 month ago
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THERE ARE many diets that people will attempt or complete in their quest to lose weight. Some persons might go for low-calorie or reduce the amount of food that they consume within a 24-hour period. Other people may choose low-carb diets, including reducing their intake of sugars or go for a low-fat diet. Many people today are also participating in Mediterranean or paleo diets.
According to Dr Orlando Thomas, medical doctor and functional medicine practitioner at Thomas Medical and Shockwave Centre in Old Harbour, St Catherine, the number of diets available to people are endless.
“People have lost weight on every single diet. All of these diets do work, but none of them are perfect for everybody. The perfect way to lose weight is not to pick a particular diet but elements of these diets that are common to all of them. This will lead to healthy and sustainable weight loss,” Dr Thomas said.
However, Dr Thomas said during a ‘Weight Loss’ series, the key to losing weight is balancing insulin in the body. Obesity, he said, is a hormonal disorder primarily of fat and glucose metabolism. People who are obese are primarily so because their bodies have difficulty with maintaining the right metabolic processes as it relates to fat and glucose.
“Whenever you eat, a lot of the food is broken down into sugar or eventually converted to sugar. When your body breaks down carbohydrates, they are converted to sugar or glucose. When you eat fats or protein, some of the nutrients are converted to glucose. So almost every food you consume will, in some part, end up as as glucose that will raise your blood sugar and try to get into your cells as sugar,” Dr Thomas said.
“Sugar just can’t walk into your cells. It has to go through a channel. This channel is opened by a special molecule called insulin. Insulin acts like a key to allow your cells to accept glucose,” he added.
In a normally functioning person, insulin will open the channels in your muscle cells, your heart, your liver, and kidney and allow the nutrients that you consume to enter the cells.
ENERGY
After eating, when blood sugar rises, the pancreas releases insulin. Insulin then binds to receptors on cells, particularly in muscle, the liver, and fat tissue, triggering a process that enables glucose to be transported to the cells. This glucose can be used immediately for energy or stored for later use, primarily as glycogen or triglycerides. In essence, insulin helps the body regulate blood glucose levels and manage energy storage.
However, Dr Thomas said there has been an alarming emerging trend in which there is an epidemic of insulin malfunction in our populations worldwide that has also resulted in an obesity epidemic. Research has shown that 60 per cent of people in the United States are overweight or obese. It is a similar trend in Jamaica, Mexico, and Canada.
“We have an epidemic of insulin resistance. When we analyse the physiology of most persons, we realise that their bodies are not responding to insulin. For some reason, the insulin that is supposed to open these channels in the cells does not work. The glucose remains in the blood and does not enter the cell,” he said.
The body he said, recognises that insulin is not being produced and it is not being accepted and then starts producing more insulin. The insulin level goes up, and as the insulin level rises, your body becomes more and more resistant to it, and this leads to you putting on more fat than using up your glucose for energy.
“As a result of rising insulin resistance, you have a rise in obesity, and concomitantly, other diseases such as diabetes, dementia, and cancers. The list of diseases is very long, very chronic, and are very difficult to treat,” Dr Thomas said.
Every food you eat, he said, stimulates insulin, but there are some foods that stimulate insulin more than others. There is evidence that carbohydrates and foods that are high in glucose, fructose, and corn syrup, especially those in fruit juices; there is also evidence that high consumption of sugar in refined forms is behind the insulin and obesity epidemic.
“If we understand how the concept of insulin and how it works in the body then we can address the high insulin levels and insulin resistance. Over 85 per cent of people are overweight or obese because they have developed insulin resistance,” Dr Thomas said.
English (US) ·