Dr. Vincent Bellonzi: Hi! This is Dr. Vincent Bellonzi. I want to consider describing your day. Is your day pretty level? Do you wake up easily? Do you wake up ready to go? Can you just kind of roll out of bed and start it out your day? Do you have a nice easy day with not many highs or lows and then fall asleep fairly easily within about 10, 15 minutes? That's what I want you to be. The problem is, maybe the people who are coming to our clinic anyway, their days are nothing but highs and lows, and the lows are real low. Now, what do you think I find the reason is for most of those conditions, which usually has to do with blood sugar?
So, if you can describe your day's as being high at some point, and then a lot of crabby time, maybe moody, just no energy and maybe you go have some sugar and that's how you get back up high, if you depend on coke or some other soft drink, if you're depending on coffee to stimulate your energy, then you need to consider the fact that you are on your way to diabetes most likely. The most common reason for those highs and lows is that you've gone hypoglycemic.
Now that's not a disease. What it means is that your body doesn't really have the ability or the inclination to burn fat in between meals, that it's so used to having high loads of sugar, that it overreacts or it's forced to overreact because you put too much sugar into the system and the body has to overcompensate, and as you puts away more sugar than you should, basically the insulin response is too high, now you've got hypoglycemia, which just means your body overreacted. It means that you don't maintain a blood sugar level that's high enough. Usually, it's been too high, and then you took it too low, its extremes.
On much rather your day was level throughout. You should get a slow, easing the cortisol, meaning that you'll be less stimulated throughout the day and then you can fall asleep and have a nice, nice sleep. That's not you, that's the first place you got to look is the sugar. We have a weight loss program and that's what happens to some of our people in the program. Now, we use things to help them, metabolize fat better. In some cases or perhaps many cases where there is a weight loss problem, we find those people are sugar burners. Their body prefers and in a sense, can only use sugar because it's so used to getting that sugar. So, we have to work with these people. We actually do some testing on them and we measure what they're burning at rest, whether it's sugar or fat.
Now, when I take an athlete and test him on this equipment, I can measure fat burning primarily if not the only thing being burned. I always burning every fuel, but predominantly I get somebody who has been taking care of themselves, conditioning for a sport, eating low, and I find them to be a fat burner. I take somebody who's been eating a lot of sugar, not taking care of themselves, pretty much in poor health; I find them to be a sugar burner. The neat part is that, you can become either one. You can go from being a sugar burner to being a fat burner, it's a physiological shift. What you have to do is, in a sense force your body to burn fat. You have to let the sugar levels be lower, you have take in less sugar and get your body used to metabolizing fat again.
We do it in the clinic everyday. It's a matter of talking to people about how they exercise, what they do for their diet, and we can measure that shift. We can take one person and look to see what fuel they're burning. If it's primarily sugar, we have them do certain activities. It has to do with working on endurance, working on perhaps longer activities, doesn't have to be real intense and we train their body to burn fat. Then we retest them, we see them to be a fat burner. Also by the way they'll lose some weight by then. Obviously, if you start burning fat better, you'll loose more weight. Now, I have to consider other things that can get in the way of that, it means is to being triggered, medications, other things do get involved with interference to fat burning.
But for most people it's just that they haven't had their body do fat burning for a while. If you're not exercising, especially longer activities where you're getting your glycogen stores used up, say you're doing a longer activity over 40 minutes, you're well into fat burning and your body is learning to metabolize that fat. But let's say you're sitting in a chair and you drink sodas and you eat sugar, you're training your body to metabolize sugar and it's not going to be very good at metabolizing fat. Again, you can make a shift in either direction. If you're athletic and you decide or maybe your life changes and you're suddenly sedentary, you're behind a desk working whatever, you'll become a sugar burner and you'll start gaining weight.
So in that case, you need to make the shift to the fat burner. What I want you to do; I want you to cut down on the sugar. Now, you're going to go through a little bit of withdrawal quite possible because you've got addiction to the sugar. It is a true addiction, it's real and it's going to take time to get away from it, just like any other drug addiction. But also, you've got to train your body to burn the fat. So I want you to start doing a little bit longer workouts, if you're not already. A lot of people think, I can do five minutes here, ten minutes there, I am busy during the day, whatever, it doesn't put you into fat burning. Usually you have to do a workout for about 40 minutes.
So I do have people do a longer workout and I see the effect in that they become better fat burners. The warning now is that you may not feel so good when you do that. You drop the sugar and your body is going to rebel. You're going to be real fatigued because you don't have that ready energy; you don't have that high sugar rush. You're going to be moody, you're going to be cranky, you just not going to feel great, but bear with it because there reaches a point where your body begins to use that fat better and you come back and you come back strong. You want to be a fat burner in between your meals. You don't want to shock your body with the sugar and you want to teach it how to metabolize the fat. You want to be able to use all the fuels. You've got three major food fuel sources. You do use your protein for fuel as well, but I want you to minimize that and there are ways to do that.
You can protect the protein with taking sufficient protein, you can't protect it with taking just enough carbs, but the main thing is that you put your body into that fat burning mode. You do things that require to depend on fat, you cut down on the sugar intake, then you won't get that hypoglycemic response. Teach your body to burn fat and you'll loose weight. So, for all of you out there that think it's all about just not eating, that's a big mistake because when you fast, you're going to probably burn up the protein. Believe it or not, you're going to be fatter at the end of it when you skip those meals, because you burn the wrong fuel. So, learn how your body works, learn how to work with it and you'll get better results. Eat the right fats, eat the right carbohydrates, get enough protein. This is Dr. Vincent Bellonzi, learn how to be healthy and be there, be well.
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