Understanding Fat & What You Can Do About It

We’ve all struggled with losing that fat that just seems so stubborn. We go on the right path, get results than drop off the wagon and here it all comes back again. Couple that with a slowing metabolism, loss of muscle mass as we reach the age of 40, and you’ve got a recipe for lack of fat loss.

Nothing to rave home about but there are some good people out there that have dedicated their life’s work to find an answer this old age question.

Understanding Fat

Dr. Sylvia Tara, PhD, the author of The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You, a biochemist, discusses in her book the science behind the body’s least understood organ – fat.

Despite spending $60 billion annually fighting it, the ways in which our battle with the bulge has been misinformed and misdirected. Fat is an essential and critically misunderstood body part.

In it, she addresses issues such as:

• The genes that some of us have and others do not that help determine our weight
• Fat growth even without excess calories
• Its effect on the body’s metabolic rate
• The unexpected importance it has on to our health
• Fat’s fight back to preserve itself while we are battling its removal

Fat is Smart

Fat is much smarter than we think. According to Dr. Tara, fat is not only an obsession, it’s also the least-understood part of our body. You may not love your fat, but your body certainly does. In fact, your body is actually endowed with many self-defence measures to hold on to fat. Tara talks about the complex role that genetics, hormones, diet, exercise, and history play in our weight.

Fat can:

• Use stem cells to regenerate
• Increase our appetite if it feels threatened
• Expand itself through bacteria, genetics, and viruses

The secret to losing 20 pounds? You have to work with your fat, not against it.

Work With Your Fat

Tara explains how your fat influences your appetite and willpower, how it defends itself when attacked, and why it grows back so quickly. The book describes cutting-edge research together with historical perspectives to reveal fat’s true identity – an endocrine organ that, in the right amount, is critical to our health as our heart, lungs, or stomach. It triggers puberty, enables our reproductive and immune systems, and even affects brain size.

Seems like a pretty important piece of ourselves that we should treat more than just excess meat on our bodies. In her book, she sets you on the path to beat the bulge once and for all…

The Importance of Willpower

Part of getting a handle on fat, is ensuring you have the willpower for it. Dr. Sylvia Tara believes that your willpower can be trained like a muscle. We have all sorts of medical interventions for weight loss, but there is always a risk to each one of them. The brain does what it can to fight off your fat loss efforts, by triggering your body to feel hungrier, more lethargic, even making you want foods you otherwise didn’t enjoy.

As much as you’d hate to hear it, diet and exercise are the best remedy.

The only hurdle is changing our behaviour towards it. Psychological studies show that there are different things we can do to reach fitness and health goals:

• Temptation bundling
• Reward schemes
• Building good habit
• Pre-preparing meals
• Paying your gym membership on a monthly basis to ensure you get yourself to the gym