The Easiest Way to Burn Fat: Understanding Your Body's Natural Processes

Understanding Fat Storage and Burning

To comprehend how to burn fat effectively, we must first understand how the body stores fat in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, fat storage isn't simply a result of eating too much fat. Fat is a natural fuel source for the body. The real culprit behind fat storage is excess energy from any type of food.

When your body needs resources, you experience hunger. After eating, any excess energy gets stored. For example, if you consume a 1000-calorie milkshake, it will be absorbed and stored within 2-3 hours. If during that time you only use 200-300 calories, your body will store the remaining 700-800 calories.

This storage system is practical because it allows you to use that extra energy later when you don't have food available, a process called fasting. It's a continuous back-and-forth movement: you feel hungry, eat something, store the excess, and then burn it off when you go without food.

The Role of Insulin in Fat Storage

Insulin plays a crucial role in fat storage. You cannot store fat without insulin, which is known as the fat storage hormone. This is evident in Type 1 diabetics who cannot produce insulin. Despite having high blood sugar levels, they don't gain weight and can even starve in some cases.

After eating, food is absorbed and glucose enters the bloodstream. However, this glucose needs to enter the cells where most metabolic activity occurs. Insulin acts as the key that opens the gate for glucose to enter the cells.

It's important to note that insulin isn't inherently bad or evil. It's essential for life. The key is to maintain the right balance of insulin.

Natural vs. Unnatural Regulation

As long as we eat food from the planet in its original form and move to obtain it, there's a natural regulation - a balance between eating and fasting, hunger and satiety. Our body has a beautiful, highly sensitive system that tells us exactly how much food we need and when we're done.

However, when we start breaking these rules by adopting an unnatural lifestyle and consuming unnatural foods, we bypass this beautiful system. We override this regulation, change those set points, and get what's called dysregulation. This is where we can't tell when we're hungry, we eat for the wrong reasons, we overeat, and we don't have those natural boundaries.

Comparing Our Diet to Our Ancestors

Our DNA is over 99.9% identical to our ancestors who evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago. This DNA codes for all the enzymes that help break down food. If we have the same DNA, it means we have the same enzymes and are supposed to eat the same type of food they ate.

Any food introduced in the last 300,000 years that our ancestors didn't have is essentially an experiment. It's possible we might be able to tolerate it, and it might be beneficial for us, but it's not very likely because these changes happen very slowly.

The Best Diet for Fat Burning

The best diet for fat burning isn't a single diet, label, or program. It's any type of whole food that provides nutrients, gives us the resources we need (building blocks and energy, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals), but at the same time doesn't cause big fluctuations in blood sugar to disrupt our metabolic balance.

It should be satisfying, make you full with less food if you're trying to lose weight, and make the regulation we talked about natural, thus preventing overeating. We're talking about real food - whole food - the way it came out of the planet, with minimal processing.

Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet

A less strict version of the ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet. This is where you probably eat less than 50, maybe less than 30 grams of net carbs per day. You eat a moderate amount of protein, and the rest is fat. This works for most people because it creates a lot of satiety, especially for people who have become insulin resistant and have already gotten out of this balance.

However, it's not one-size-fits-all because we respond differently to different things. We get satiated and satisfied by different things. So don't feel like you have to try just one thing, because some people respond better to a moderate amount of carbs.

Movement and Exercise

Our ancestors moved a lot. They moved constantly throughout the day, taking many steps, which was aerobic activity, meaning very low intensity. You're not huffing and puffing; you're primarily burning fat through this aerobic activity.

Many people ask how many steps you should take. There are a lot of step counters that people have on their phones and on their watches, and some people aim for 10,000 - a number we hear a lot. I think that's a big number if you can get to it. It's much better than 500 steps. But our ancestors and most animals that move to get their food probably take about 30,000 steps a day.

They also performed what we now call very short bursts of high-intensity interval training. Of course, they didn't call it that; that's a modern concept. But if you were a hunter, there would be short periods where you would do intense movement, like sprinting after something, or maybe running away from something.

Stress Management

Unlike our ancestors, we often experience chronic stress. We don't have these high ups and downs. We have a little bit of stress all the time. This does several things to the body. For one, it tends to break us down in many ways. It raises blood sugar, breaks down immunity, breaks down tissues. But the other thing it does is it decreases the amount of hydrochloric acid, so our digestive systems don't work well when we're under chronic stress.

One thing you can try to compensate for this is apple cider vinegar. It's a very, very beautiful tool; it's incredibly inexpensive. You take a tablespoon or two every day. You can take it in the morning, you can take it before a meal, and this will help replace that acidity in your stomach that's decreased because of this chronic stress.

Another thing you might want to try is some kind of stress management, like breathing exercises or meditation - whatever you want to call it. It's just a way to get away from this chronic stress, break this pattern where your thoughts never stop, and you always feel under pressure.

Electrolytes and Insulin Resistance

If you're insulin resistant and you start correcting it, your insulin levels will drop. When insulin is very high, you tend to reabsorb a lot of sodium and electrolytes, and this is where we get high blood pressure with insulin resistance. But once you start correcting it and insulin goes down, you will now lose some of the electrolytes that were artificially held in the body.

So for a period of time, you're going to lose electrolytes. In the long run, this is good because blood pressure is going to come down. But before the body has a chance to reestablish this balance again, you may be missing some electrolytes, and you may have some symptoms like dizziness or nausea or fatigue or brain fog.

So during the time that you're fixing this problem, you probably want to supplement some electrolytes. Especially if you're fasting for longer, like more than 24 hours, you now want to double up on those electrolytes because you're not getting any from food, and insulin is dropping faster because you're fasting.

Conclusion

The easiest way to burn fat is simply to work with your body - to allow the body to do what it's supposed to do and provide the resources it's supposed to have. This means simply getting healthy, and that's the beauty of this. It's not a short-term fix, it's not a magic pill, it's not something that's going to fizzle out after three weeks when you get tired of it. This means you get healthy by providing the natural conditions and circumstances and resources that your body was designed to have under natural law.

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