Weight-Loss And Water-Intake: Three Ancient "Fat Switches"- HealthTrekker

Photo: Vince Fleming, Unsplash

Researchers Discover 3 Switches For Weight-Loss, Starting With Water:

So with the problem of weight-loss, there are all kinds of approaches.

Crazy celebrity fad-diets, calorie-restriction, Weight Watchers, special magic foods, etc.

Some people even try to out-exercise bad nutrition; which is of course, impossible unless you’re Lokelani McMichael.

Because the problem is so thorny, medical & nutrition researchers are going to all kinds of lengths to find some kind of key that might make things easier through diet magic.

And Dr. Richard Johnson’s team might just have found another one…

The Short Answer:

Weight-loss seems to be very difficult for everyone.
Because of this, everyone seems to be looking for hacks.
Anything that differs from the standard: count & reduce calories and sugar appeals to people, because it’s less work.
There are even behavioral & psychological components as evidenced by companies like Noom.
The big problem is our bodies are still optimized to store calories as if a famine could happen tomorrow.
But Dr. Richard Johnson along with various teams has found an ancient system of switches that can be manipulated.
They are triggered by and operate involving Water, Salt, and Fructose.
Both standard dehydration and high salt-consumption dehydration can turn on fat-storage.
Getting too much fructose, especially in the form of sweet drinks turns it on also.
According to Dr. Richard & his colleagues, one of the simplest things you can do to help is to drink the right amount of water.
It shuts down the system by ending dehydration and minimizing the presence of a special fat-storing hormone.
You can also lower your salt and sugar intake to do even better.
This is especially true for reducing sweetened drinks.
Fructose is a weird sugar that tends to wreak all kinds of havoc in your body like fat-storage, munchies, and inflammation.
We all should try to recognize that evolution tries to get us to binge because it doesn’t “know” we live in a time of plenty.
Previous, but unrelated research supports the idea of drinking water to help weight-loss also.

Read on to find out the details…

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The Standard Weight-Loss Recommendations:

In order to lose weight, we all get the same recommendations really.

Eat less, stay away from sweets as much as you can,

And if you’re really fancy, guide your food-choices with numbers you’d get from a calculator like the one at TDEECalculator.

Those are just the basics, and if you need to lose weight, that’s really where you should start.

Unfortunately, most people absolutely hate math and so the idea of counting calories and measuring food sounds like freebasing lab-grade insanity.

Weight-Loss Always Seems So Complicated:

Furthermore, as companies like Noom have figured out, there are psychological approaches and problems like family habits, stress-snacking, speed-eating, and “The Clean Plate Club”.

So in addition to America’s general approach to any problem of, “Can’t I just take a pill for that?”,

The many complications around food tend to make everyone look for shortcuts & hacks, because it seems so difficult.

Nutrition Nerds To The Rescue!:

And that’s where the work of Dr. Richard Johnson and his team comes in.

Spoiler Alert! The titles of Dr. Johnson’s books are The Fat Switch, and Nature Wants Us To Be Fat.

If it weren’t already apparent, our bodies have evolved in many specific ways.

One of them is to make sure we don’t die in a famine.

It may sound like an odd concept for the first world to run out of food, but it happens.

Famine has happened in the first world as recently as World War II Europe, and given the war in Ukraine, some African nations might be getting closer to real trouble in the near future.

The Key To Our Wacky Metabolism, In Chubby International Squirrels:

To find out where that “Famine Switch” is, Dr. Johnson started by looking at different kinds of animals.

And after a little investigation, he found the switch!

By checking in with weird critters like desert rats that also have weird diets and store lots of fat,

He found three factors that really make the difference:
1) Water
2) Salt
and
3) Fructose

When you have too little of the first, and too much of the last two, it turns on an ancient switch in your mammalian body that makes you store fat.

-Which is weird, because the standard orthodoxy about body-fat storage had been:
1) Person eats high-glycemic food (like a sweet, bread, pastry, etc.)
2) Blood-sugar spikes
3) Insulin rushes in and overcompensates for high blood-sugar
4) Body stores excess blood-sugar as fat.

The Weird World Of Dr. Richard’s Ancient “Famine Switch”:

But what Dr. Richard found out is that when you get too much salt, you get dehydrated.

That already turns on one type of ancient fat-storing switch.

When you get too little water, you are definitely dehydrated in the classic sense, also turning on the same switch.

When you get any fructose in your diet, it activates a special hormone and also turns on a fat-storing switch, too.

(note that fructose makes up 50% of table sugar)

So when you look at how people eat today, especially with Ultra-Processed Foods full of what? -Salt and Sugar!,

You can see how people would get fat pretty easily.

-And not guess that there was a very specific, very old mechanism that is optimized for those circumstances.

Maybe There Was Something Wrong With HFCS After-All:

And though Dr. Richard does not appear to be part of the International Cane Sugar Cabal that tried to slander High-Fructose Corn Syrup years ago,

It does seem that shadowy group actually did us at least a small amount of good.

Because sugary drinks, specifically those sweetened with HFCS, are ones he cautions most against.

This is also due to the fact the liquid-carbs get into your bloodstream even faster than non-dissolved sugars.

He even cites that a huge increase in the obesity epidemic that started after farming got really efficient about 100 years ago, also accelerated back in the 1980s when HFCS was introduced on a much larger scale.

And Now The Really Good News. There Is Hope!:

But before we get into the truly nerdbot details, there is a fix.

And the good news is that it’s a pretty simple one.

1) Just get more water across the day! -Yes, at least 8 glasses.

If you really want to go Pro, then also:

2) Try to get less salt in your diet

3) (the one we all know) Try to get less sugar, specifically sugary drinks and fructose in your diet.

3a) Note: This does not mean stopping all consumption of fruit. (Dr. Johnson actually advises only eating 1 type of fruit at a time.)

The Nerdy, Interconnecting Details On The Ancient Fat Trinity:

Now for the really nerdy details.

In researching the Desert Rat (or fancy International Gerbil of Mystery), Dr. Richard’s team discovered that both dehydration and salt-intake increase fructose production in the body.

This also drives fat-production through the survival-switch.

Because, strangely-enough you are not only like a Desert Rat in some ways but also just like a Camel, your body actually uses fat to store water for times of shortage, too.

When fat breaks down, it actually generates a pretty large amount of water in the process.

This of course is one of the reasons why camels store fat in their humps, instead of water.

The Suspicious Spectre Of The Hormone Vasopressin:

In a very interesting side-chain, there is a hormone called vasopressin that also helps you retain water.

And people who are obese conspicuously tend to have very high levels of this hormone.

But that hormone also has another role.

It stimulates fat-production! –BOOM!

So if you’re getting toward starvation & dehydration, having high vasopressin in your body is great; it helps you survive.

But if you’re fat, trying to lose weight, &/or eating the wrong things, it could be a huge problem.

And in other experiments, researchers have demonstrated that fructose intake also increases vasopressin production.

Fructose Is The Fat-Storing Energy-Vampire Of Sugars:

It also causes your body to be in a lower-energy state because less of it is turned into the body’s standard fuel than it is turned into fat.

This happens to such a large extent, it actually reduces the energy state in your body’s cells and trips the fat-storage switch, appetite-dysregulation, hunger, and thirst; all while even increasing inflammation, too.

What a bargain! Many problems all for one. low. price! -If you act now!

It’s almost as if nature had figured out 8 million years ago,
“Hey, any time we can get these guys to flip-out and gorge on fruit, we can keep ’em alive for another few months! Let’s set up some biochemicals for that and make it happen!”

-So it’s almost like a vicious-cycle.

But again in the same experiments, they still found that simply drinking water was an effective solution to lower the production of fat-loss-Voldemort, vasopressin!

Nature REALLY Wants Us To Get Weird & Binge Fruit Like A Daft Monkey:

The other really nasty thing implied by Richard’s research is that both salt and fructose intake can stimulate a type of forage-and-binge/munchies type of hunger instinct,

Not too dissimilar from people who have problems from eating too fast.

Another interesting side note, is that fatter people seem to have the same problem as the soon-to-be-fat speed-eaters.

They are less sensitive to the hormone that makes you feel full (Leptin).

So it is particularly important for overweight people to 1) be more disciplined than lean people, 2) choose both the right foods, and 3) also to be really methodical and slow at meals, like The French.