Would you have considered Michael Jordan “fat” during his basketball playing days?
He is 6 foot 6 and was a chiseled 220 pounds.
Obesity is medically defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as having a body mass index (BMI, a measure of height to weight) that’s 30 or higher. People are considered overweight when their BMI hits 25, and they are obese when it gets to 30.
Jordan’s BMI would have been 25.4. Overweight, according to mainstream medicine’s holy grail, the BMI!
This is one of the myriad problems with allopathic medicine. It doesn’t look at the body as a whole (holistic), so the BMI doesn’t take into account high muscle mass, or too little muscle mass.
People who are obese have higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. Obesity also increases the risks of high blood pressure, stroke, gallstones and gall bladder disease, gout, sleep apnea, and osteoarthritis of the knees, hips and lower back.
But please remember that when the medical profession recommends a high complex carbohydrate plus low saturated fat diet they are recommending a high glucose or high sugar diet. The result is high insulin and fat gain.
Then comes what the medical establishment tells you is “diabetes” – but is really a diet issue that results in all the other symptoms above.
A plan for your ‘health’ is a plan for their profits
“Obesity is common, serious and costly,” says the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). A study published in Health Affairs found that obesity rates increased by 37 percent between 1998 and 2006 in the U.S. A Harvard study showed that in 1990, only 15 percent of the population in most states was obese. But 20 years later, by 2010 36 states had obesity rates of 25 percent or higher, and in 12 of those, the obesity rate was 30 percent or more.
Over 22 percent of Americans are obese; data from the CDC tells us. Another one-third of Americans are considered overweight. A study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that “the amount by which obesity raised medical costs per obese adult” was $3508, an increase of 14.3 percent. And “the aggregate costs of obesity in the adult, noninstitutionalized population of the U.S.” was $315.8 billion.
I hope you are asking yourself just exactly what are these costs? And costs for whom?
My contention is that they are telling you you’re fat day and night so that you will spend more money on clinics, drugs, surgery, and medical “care” in order to “treat” your “obesity.”
The plain fact is that you can be “skinny fat” and have unhealthy and dangerous visceral fat around your abdomen just the same as if you have much more visible excess fat on your body. You don’t want to be visibly obese, but being a healthy weight doesn’t mean abiding by the BMI or those mainstream advisors who tell you to stop eating fat and eat “healthy” grains instead.
Losing weight is no easy task, as evidenced by the hundreds, maybe even thousands of weight-loss gimmicks, gadgets, diets, programs, and advice materials for sale in stores, on TV, in magazines, on the internet. They wouldn’t sell a thing if people weren’t desperate. But they are desperate because of the choices for food they are given by the food industry in this country, and they often choose the easiest, cheapest alternative, as intended.
How can you accomplish shedding the extra fat?
At its core, losing weight is a very simple matter. You take in the types of foods that enhance health and stay away from the foods that build body fat and excess blood sugar and deposit fat in the blood (triglycerides).
That means it’s not just “taking in more calories than you burn to gain weight and doing the opposite to lose it.”
Also, what you should not do is stop eating altogether. Crash diets may knock off the pounds quickly, but most people regain the weight almost as fast as it came off. When denied food, the body goes into survival mode and any food eventually taken in is mostly stored as fat the body is saving for the next dry spell.
Instead, try intermittent fasting. This gives the body a break from producing insulin and has many proven health benefits including longevity.
Based on findings I uncovered from researchers from dozens of articles, anecdotes and published studies, positive bodily events can occur during intermittent fasting:
- Limits inflammation, reduces oxidative stress and cellular damage
- Improves circulating blood sugar
- Enhances metabolic efficiency and body composition
- Improves insulin and leptin levels as well as insulin/leptin sensitivity
- Modulates levels of dangerous visceral fat
- Enhances energy production and mitochondrial energy efficiency
- Improves immune function
- Eliminates sugar cravings as your body adapts to burning fat instead of sugar
- Promotes human growth hormone production (HGH)
- Releases more cholesterol and lowers triglyceride levels
- Shifts cells from dormant to self-renewal state in immune system regeneration
Aside from not eating occasionally, what you’re eating is really more important than how much you’re eating. Eat a solid protein-rich breakfast each day… it helps you feel full and less hungry later in the day.
Be aware that most of the foods we buy in packages at the store these days are chock full of obesogens in addition to calories, substances that degrade your health at best and can be life-threatening at worst.
The key is to replace all those tasty but potentially deadly temptations with raw foods. Raw food comes in the form nature created it to be, pure and clean, delivering necessary nutrients without the harmful baggage of man-made processing.
Start gradually adding more raw fruits and vegetables to your food intake until you are consuming one-half to two-thirds of your diet raw. Be sure the raw foods are thoroughly washed.
Not only are raw foods healthier for you, but they help you feel full quicker, are more digestible than processed foods and provide a potent source of protein, vitamins and minerals.
Raw apples, vegetables, fruits, raw meats, eggs and unpasteurized milk, cream and butter deliver most of the nutrients you will need for the day.
For a complete and healthy way of eating, I’ve found that the Nutritarian diet created by Dr. Joel Furhman, a board-certified family physician with over 30 years’ experience practicing nutritional medicine, works effectively. I am not paid nor do I make one cent by telling you this.
The Nutritarian diet involves no calorie counting, no feeling hungry between meals and uses the principle of “nutrient density” that allows eating tasty foods that ward off bad health effects like cancer, diabetes and dementia by keeping hormone levels balanced and normal. Furhman recommends our diet be 80 percent vegetables (organic) with only 20 percent meats (preferably free-range and not exposed to GMOs or antibiotics).
Besides packing on the pounds, most of the foods we buy in packages at the store these days are chock full of obesegens in addition to calories. Obesogens are substances that degrade your health at best and can be life-threatening at worst. Trans fat and high fructose corn syrup are just two.
Mind over ‘fatter’
Losing fat can be as much a matter of the mind as it is of the body. There are other things you can do to lose weight besides just watching what you eat. Here are just a few other tips that can help make getting to a healthy weight more productive:
- Eat protein with some fat in it. Your hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin, tell you to be hungry, and also tell you that you’re full, when you’ve eaten protein with some fat in it. That’s how your body knows it’s not starving.
- Drink lots of water… replaces sugary drinks, helps you feel full, flushes your system of pollutants, and keeps you hydrated.
- Eat slowly, chew food thoroughly… take a bite and put your fork down… this satisfies your cravings without loading up your belly. It takes about 20 minutes for a hunger signal to be sent to your brain that your belly is full, so if you shovel the food down fast, you can overeat without realizing it.
- Don’t avoid snacks entirely… but manage what you snack on. If you feel hungry, eat a raw food snack. I like dried apples, and sunflower seeds but any seeds with protein, like hemp seeds(30 percent protein) will do.
Also, science tells us that Golden oil, which comes from the black seeds of the Nigella sativa plant — also known as black caraway or black cumin seeds — may help you keep weight off.
Black seed oil has been found to aid in the partial regeneration of pancreatic beta-cells, which synthesize and secrete insulin. In fact, the same study also showed that the oil helps to lower serum insulin concentrations and even decreases your serum glucose, and better glucose control is synonymous with controlling sugary cravings.
As if that weren’t enough reason to want to give golden oil a try, a study published in Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine found that Golden oil has a great deal of the antioxidant known as thymoquinone, which lowers the inflammation that both causes weight gain and prevents weight loss.
Black seed oil is not magic, but it could help boost your fat-loss efforts when you also eat better, fast intermittently, and keep moving.
If you really want to make fat loss easy on yourself, Golden oil can be found in easy-to-swallow capsules, just like fish oil. You can find it in Peak Golden Oil™, which has been generating buzz in the weight-loss world since a small study in the International Journal of Preventive Medicine showed that people who took black seed oil and did aerobic exercise achieved better fat-burning results than people who did not take it.
Bob Livingston
