Este video tiene subtítulos en español.
Switching to fat for energy
Most people become obese with the standard American diet.
This is not so much because of what they eat but when they eat it. Three meals a day are bound to keep you in a metabolism that depends on food intake for energy. Let me show how to break away from this vicious cycle and begin to use your body fat for energy. Once you train your body, you will not feel hungry again. More importantly, you will have enough energy to get you through the day.
This is the link to my YouTube Channel.
One Meal a day (OMAD)
Hello Everyone, this is Juan Sarmiento. Ten years ago I started my One-Meal-A-Day or OMAD regimen and it transformed my life. Only recently it has become clear to me that I did all the right things without even knowing. It turns out that the science explains how I changed my life. The secret is not in changing your diet but changing the time when you eat it. In this video I’ll show you how I lost 28% of my body weight without changing my diet. Limiting my meals to one a day, I made a switch in my metabolism and became a new man. Here is a brief review of the science involved.
Stages of Fasting
With the passing hours of fasting, there are changes in our bodies. These changes occur in 4 stages:
– Stage 1 is the Fed state, within 3 hrs of any meal or snack. People eating 3 meals a day plus one or two snacks, do not move beyond the stage until night. Then they may fast for 12 hours, while asleep.
— Stage 2, is the early fasting, around 18 hrs of fasting. Only people doing at least the 18:6 Intermittent fasting regimen reach this stage. Those of us who prefer the OMAD regimen exceed this stage but do not get to stage 3.
— Stage 3 consist of 36 to 48 hours of fasting which include the alternative day fasting and the one-meal-every-other-day (OMEOD) regimen.
— Stage 4 consists of fasting for over 48 hours and some people do it only once, twice or three times a year. But this is not common.
Stages 3 and 4 are beyond the scope of this video, and we will discuss them in future videos.
The Fed State
— Let’s talk about the Fed State
When we eat a meal, be it breakfast, lunch, dinner or a snack, our glucose levels in blood rise. In responsse, Our pancreas secrets the energy-storage hormone named insulin. You probably have heard of this hormone in the context of Diabetes. Insulin is at the very center of the obesity epidemic. Diabetes is not caused by Obesity, but rather, both are diseases with a common cause: Out of control insulin. Being so important in our energy production and storage, we should know some basic facts about Insulin:
Insulin levels in blood are highest after a meal, specially if it is rich in carbohydrates. Proteins also stimulate Insulin and even fat, although at a very low level.
It helps to move glucose, one of the most important products of our digestion, from blood into the cells. The cells use glucose for energy production through a chemical process called glycolysis.
Storing Glucose
If we eat too much, our body stores excess glucose in the liver and muscle in the form of Glycogen. Think of this storage as putting food in the refrigerator for use in the short term. Glycogenesis is the name of this process.
When we exceed or Glycogen storage capacity, there is only one thing to do. Insulin transform glucose into fatty acids to be stored in our body fat. Think of this storage like putting food in the freezer, for long term use. Most people in modern society, do not get to go to the point of requiring this stored fat.
In fact, in this stage, when insulin is dominant, it supresses the use of fat for energy production (or lipolysis). Insulin wants to save us from starvation in the long run. The problem is that in our modern society, that last of our concerns is a lack of food, or the need to store it in our bodies as energy in fat.
Making the Metabolic Switch
With the OMAD regimen, we reach the stage of early fasting after 18 hours and the Insulin levels reach a minimum. But where does the energy come from to keep us going? Remember the glycogen storage? Since glucose forms the building blocks of glycogen, we extracted glucose from glycogen by glycogenolysis. However, the glycogen stores are limited and once consumed, the body must obtain energy from another resource. Once the insulin levels decrease during fasting, free fatty acids may be used for energy via a process called lipolysis. This means that we are beginning to make use of our fat storage for energy. The Metabolic Switch occurs when fatty acids are mobilized to produce energy (usually starts at 12 hrs after food intake).
Multiple feeding cycles
We hardly ever go much beyond the fed state. We hardly ever go far beyond 3 hours without food. After breakfast, we might make it to noon for our first eating cycle of the day. Unless, of course we have a snack in the middle to the morning.
Thus, we enter a second feeding cycle as we have our lunch at noon. Unless we have a snack in the middle of the afternoon, this feeding cycle may last 6 hours, as we can hardly wait to get home and eat our dinner.
Our third cycle, following our dinner, is the longest period without food. It usually takes 12 hours, unless we have another snack before bed. When we sleep we require no significant amount of energy. We usually have breakfast after a fast of 12 hours or less during our night sleep.
Snacks: Insulin and Ghrelin
Even without counting snacks, we remain in the fed state most of our day. In fact, most of our lives. Only at night do insulin levels come down, but not long enough for us to make the metabolic switch. The switch starts to occur precisely 12 hours after hour last meal. Insulin and the appetite hormone Ghrelin keep us hungry all day. This is why our source of energy is almost exclusively glucose. In fact, when we are hungry, we like to say that we are “hypoglycemic”. The truth is that we hardly ever give our pancreas a break, and insulin stays high all day long.
How is it possible that we are hungry so often?
The conventional wisdom is that only by staying in the fed state most of our day, we’ll have energy to keep going. Thus, we never make the switch. Our energy metabolism depends on food intake to give us the energy to take us through the day. The fear is that missing a snack will render us “hypoglycemic”. If insulin moves glucose out of the blood and into storage, we are in a temporary hypoglycemia. Then, we experience what we know as “hunger”.
My own Metabolic Switch
Link here to my story.
Following conventional medical advice to avoid fats, I cut some of my favorite foods between the 1980’s and 2009.
Doing so, made me obese. This is because my energy came, not from my body fat but from my food intake. Insulin made sure of that, by storing the excess glucose in my body fat.
Starting OMAD ensured that my energy came from my body fat, even though I did not change my diet at all. I kept eating a low fat, high carb diet. It took me 5 years, but I begun to look more like when I was 28, grey hair not withstanding.
When I took the fateful decision to eat only one meal a day, my wife thought I was crazy. We are so conditioned to our 3 meals a day (plus snacks) that we don’t think that there is a better alternative. By eating 3 meals a day with or without snacks, our blood insulin levels are kept high. Insulin stores our excess energy in our body fat but we never get to use it.
To break the cycle, we need to do the metabolic switch, and that could only be done with an 18 hour fasting every day.
It is really not that hard. 21 days of continuous OMAD will be enough to make the switch permanent.
With this new lifestyle you will be able to change you life by improving your health and your fitness with intermittent fasting in general and OMAD in particular.
This is Juan Sarmiento reminding you that Life is looking up.
