Want to lose weight? help your body access stored fat

To summarise this post, the concept is that exercise gets your body in order so it can use fuel properly and access deeply stored fuel like fat.

Many years ago, I was thinking about how to express obesity and other diseases in relation to the effect of exercise on helping them.

Then I realised it’s just like keeping order when there is too much going on because exercise requires your body to access nutrients quickly and efficiently.

To sustain high-intensity exercise, everything needs to run like clockwork, so it forces the body to be able to find and use resources at a moment’s notice.

As a result, it is easy to access the fat that is stored deep within the body because the necessary tools are in place.

Without exercise, there is no need to be so organised with energy, and the ability to find and use fat declines. At the same time fat and other fuels start to collect and provide clutter. If there is enough clutter, the fuels get in the way and even cause damage.

The usefulness is in the analogy to housework or anything like a project or finances. Tidying up and keeping things ordered, ready to use, and fit for purpose is a constant task. When you neglect it, then over time, you get clutter and damage, and things stop working properly.

For example, when you overfill a fridge, it becomes hard to access everything. If you don’t keep on top of the out-of-date items, they will go off and cause real problems. The presence of out-of-date foods can make other foods go off sooner or infect them, and they can also harm you.

Matching supply with demand is a common problem everywhere in life, where there is a regular turnover of resources. So, the body is always facing this challenge. If your body gets slack in managing its resources, this will lead to predictable problems, and you will suffer as a result. It is also critical to be able to recover quickly when you get behind.

In normal life an example is eating too much food or buying too much and having to eat it up quickly. If you move regularly, your body will be used to managing energy so your body can deal with it; you just need to have a few fewer calories the next day to balance things out. In a well-organized fridge, things are stored within easy reach.

If you’re not good at recovering, then the excess resource becomes clutter. It gets stored somewhere, and you can’t get to it when you need it. It’s like being stuck behind the sofa or stuck under and behind things, so it’s very awkward to get what you need and very easy to miss something. You often end up buying more of the same because you didn’t realise you already had it.

You also find it hard to use things up. Things go out of date because you can’t access them or forget about them. This is what fat is like in an overweight body. The body literally doesn’t know how to access the fat. There is so much piled up together, and more is coming in than is going out. So, of course, the body has forgotten how to use up the fat and instead remembered how to store it.

A critical first step in losing weight is reminding your body how to access the fat that it has stored. So how do you do that? Move. Moving simply makes your

The general crux is that I am looking for simple analogies for weight loss and exercise that make the concepts easier to understand, implement, and stick to.

Obesity and all other illnesses reflect a body that is not in order, even cancer. By moving, you get your body back in order. The analogy is good because the movement comes from getting your house and life in order. Your body often only needs normal daily activities that we used to do, because that is what we have lost most: daily movement, daily distractions that made moving fun.

Most people understand what would happen to their house if they kept piling items into it all year without tidying it. It wouldn’t just be tidy, but it would get dirty and dangerous. Mould and other things would get in. This would happen in a bath of water left there or in a fridge because each needs regular upkeep. Your car and house are the same.

Exercise just keeps your body in order. So it’s important to be ready to get it in order and regularly keep reminding your body how to keep your body in order. research shows that regular exercise also improves sleep so the brain and body can get back in order along with your emotions

Exercise also prepares and enables your body to access stored fuels. Without it, your body will get the energy from elsewhere. Which is often structures you actually need to work against long-term weight loss and health, like your muscles and particularly your heart. The simple reason is that the less muscle you have, the lower your metabolism (fat-free body mass) once you lose weight.

At the same time, exercise increases the number of calories that you can eat while still losing weight—50-200 kcals in most cases, but it can be the difference between a treat or not. Exercise also makes it easier to get enough nutrients like calcium than on a restricted calorie and food diet, or a weight loss plan. Exercise, therefore, helps ensure that you lose only stored energy and not necessary bodily infrastructure. It is important to understand that exercise has the most benefit as therapy when it gets to work on your body over a long time, several times a day all year.

That means it must be a utility, something that you do without thinking. Not something you specifically set aside time for but the most normal part of your daily life. The current population piling on the pounds exactly matches the same trend to avoid movement. The opportunity and need has simply been taken away.

The fun we now have is to choose how and when to be active and to do it because we want to instead of because we have to. What this means is very personal: You get to decide for yourself how you will be active throughout your life.

I say this because there are so many myths about weight loss. One I saw recently was Bad Weight-Loss Technique: Exercising on an Empty Stomach. Some people use studies to show that you burn more muscle if you exercise on an empty stomach.

I couldn’t access the actual article Does Cardio After an Overnight Fast Maximize Fat Loss? which is a common problem in science but one that may be this paper’s loss.

There is plenty of research already out there to refute this, and since I can’t see their study, I can’t balance it against what I already know: that if your body has access to fat, it will get the calories during the day from there and even things out.

Using muscle for energy reflects deeper mechanics than just whether you are fasting. It comes down to how easily your body can access fat and how much need it has for muscle, among other things. The article is simply spreading a myth and the research doesn’t fit the wider research. It is never safe to use one study to prove a point.