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Why is it so important to become a metabolic Fat-Burner? To answer this question, we will need to compare the two metabolic modes. Our body (our mitochondria) can burn two types of fuel for energy: fat and sugar (glucose). To clarify, the body doesn't completely shut off one fuel source when it turns on the other. What we are talking about here is which fuel source you use most of the time at a greater ratio over the other. You can test your “Respiratory Quotient” (RQ) to estimate how much of your energy came from carbs and how much from fat. RQ of 1 means pure sugar burning and RQ of about .07 means pure fat burning. You can read more about it here. But as you will see below, there are far easier ways to tell if you are predominantly a fat or sugar burner. Sugar burning mode - In this mode your body is mostly using glucose for its energy needs, but we can't store much of it because of the limits of glycogen storage. So, once the glucose is used up, we can't go long without food and get hungry easily. Basically, in this mode we require a constant intake of carbohydrates in food, at least 3 meals per day plus snacking. Not only do you have a poor ability to access energy from the fat you just ate, you also have little ability to burn the fat that is already on your body. This causes you to stay in a vicious cycle of eating fat, moving it to your body and never burning it for fuel. According to this study, a poor ability to oxidize fat for fuel is a good predictor of future weight gain. Sure, there are some people who can eat lots of carbs and not gain much weight. They are either genetically lucky or keep a very active life style. But they still experience other negative benefits of sugar-burning as you will see below. Fat burning mode - This mode allows you to easily burn the fat on your body for energy. Instead of your cells running on glucose, they run predominantly on fat and ketones, which are simply a byproduct of the fat metabolism. Actually, the brain and the heart, prefer running on ketones. Ketones are a more efficient source of energy for them, which means they age less. Fat burning mode has been used by humans for most of human evolution, well before the 24/7 supermarkets and fast-food joints could provide us the unlimited amount of tasty carbohydrates to drive our sugar-burning engine. Fat is the preferred fuel of the human metabolism. Our survival as a spices depended on it. Given the small amount of carbohydrates we could be eating before the invention of cooking, we had to rely on a fat-burning metabolism. In addition, without fat-burning abilities we couldn't survive the famine, because we can't store much sugar but have virtually an unlimited capacity to store fat. Our liver can store about 100 grams of glycogen and our muscles on average another 400 grams. Compare this to many pounds of fat even on a relatively lean person. This ability to burn fat is the reason we haven't developed bigger glycogen stores. In addition, we have the ability to make glucose via Gluconeogenesis. Fat has always been and always will be essential for life. On the other hand, may groups of people not just survived, but thrived on almost zero carbohydrates diets. Inuits (Eskimos), as one easy example, were doing great on their high-fat high-protein very low-carb diet. The advantages of being a fat-burner
It is important to avoid rancid fats. Most
vegetable oils, except palm oil, olive oil and coconut oil are high in
PUFA (polyunsaturated fats). See the "Food Chart" for the detailed
list.
One of the main
problems with PUFAs is that they are very unstable chemically and begin
to become rancid or oxidize very easily in the presence of light or
oxygen even under room temperature. In addition, if you use these oils
in cooking, you will greatly accelerate the rate of oxidation and free
radical formation. |
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