This is how you become fat

Facts about Fat

• The fatty layer beneath our skin helps conserve body heat and regulate body temperature. It also provides insulation against cold.
• Fat placed around our joints helps as a lubricant in allowing smooth movement.
• Our vital organs like liver, heart and brain are all cushioned by fat to prevent injury.
• Cholesterol is an important type of fat which is a part of each cell and is important for its functioning. It is a precursor of vitamins, hormones and bile acids. Bile acids help in digestion of food in the body.

To control excessive fat in the body, nature has given us a hormone called leptin. This hormone plays an important role in obesity. Leptin helps in controlling hunger, burning of calories and aids in better metabolism.

When you eat a diet with a lot of refined sugar like sweets, chocolates, aerated drinks, and desserts, this can cause obesity even without overeating.

A high fat diet makes the body shift its metabolism towards storing fat, instead of burning fat for energy. Lipase, an enzyme which breaks down fat molecules, helps storage in your body's fat cells. The more fat eaten, the more its storage, particularly around the abdomen and hips. When you reduce fat from your diet, you first lose fat from the abdomen.

If you keep over eating, your fat cells grow larger. You also start forming new fat cells and gain weight. If you decrease your food intake, the size of the fat cells decreases but the number doesn't (so, it's better not to allow those new cells form in the first place!). So in addition to feeling hungry, your body thinks you are starving and tries to compensate by slowing down your metabolic rate. When your metabolic rate becomes slow, then your calorie burning also slows down.

Overweight and obese people have a higher rate of multiple medical problems like:

• Cardiac: High blood pressure, heart failure, heart disease
• Gastrointestinal: Gall stones, recurrent heart burn
• Endocrine: Diabetes, high lipids, menstrual irregularity, infertility
• Pulmonary: obstructive sleep apnea
• Musculoskeletal: Degeneration of knees, backache, disc herniation, osteoporosis, pathological fracture of bone
• Skin: various disorders (usually due to accumulated toxins in the fat cells)
• Cancer: various organs

Being overweight may be killing you slowly, but there is hope and help. If you are obese and need the services of a health coach to help you through this phase, send me a mail at essentialweightloss@gmail.com and if you are overweight and want to order Skinny Fiber to help you start your weight loss journey, click here