professional
portfolios
 Chiropractic:
Tim Skraitz
Tim is a Peters
Township resident with over 23 years of clinical experience. He
is a Diplomate of the American Academy of Pain Management and
founder of Drive to Stay Alive. For more information, e-mail
skraitzchiropractic@yahoo.com or call 724-941-2100. Skraitz
Chiropractic is hosting free workshops on body type and body fat
reduction. To attend, call 724-941-2100.
Got
Belly Fat and Can’t Lose It?
It’s the same
every year at this time: we look at ourselves in the mirror,
gasp with horror and resolve to diet. You know the routine –
it’s always the same. Either we go on a starvation diet or a
calories-counting-and-exercising-until-it-hurts regime. You
count the calories, add up your point values or buy the
prepackaged foods to lost some of the weight. This works
temporarily, until you start to eat “normal” food again.
Unfortunately, it all comes back and then some.
What’s worse, have
you ever wondered if all the high protein drinks, thermogenic
pills, herbal formulations, appetite suppressants or prepackaged
foods with ingredients that you can’t even pronounce may be
doing you more harm than good? The answer may be yes! Why is it
that the harder you try to lose weight, the more stubbornly it
resists being lost? Could it be that all those chemicals and fad
diets have damaged your body’s physiology to the point where
it just can’t lose the weight?
It is beyond
frustrating that you still can’t attain the results you want!
It’s time to make a change. There is a better way.
In order to lose
stubborn weight, you must identify and correct the problem. In
many cases, people are attempting to fix the wrong problem.
Their weight is actually a symptom. The real problem is your
body’s control of its metabolism through hormones. The secret
is to use your body’s hormones to work for you instead of
against you. Hormones are chemical messages produced by glands.
In order to lose weight, you must: 1). Stimulate the fat-burning
hormones. 2). Inhibit the fat-making hormones.
There are three
fat-making hormones you need to keep at a low level in order to
allow fat burning to take place. It’s not enough to just
stimulate the fat-burning hormones.
The first hormone to
control is insulin. This hormone changes the sugar in your body
to fat and cholesterol. When insulin is present, your body can
not burn fat. In the absence of insulin, your body burns fat as
a fuel. It only takes a very small level of insulin to block fat
burning. What triggers insulin? Alcohol, juice, bread, pasta,
candy and cereal. Excessive amounts of proteins in the diet will
also trigger insulin.
The next hormone you
need to contain is cortisol. This is the main stress hormone
that will keep your body burning sugar as a fuel and block fat
burning. It is triggered by stress. This can include
poor-quality sleep, pain, emotional stress, medications,
exercise intensity or over exercising (Yes, the people who are
in a gym 2-3 hours a day and still overweight!) If exercise was
the only thing necessary to lose weight then these people should
be anorexic.
The third hormone to
monitor is estrogen. Estrogen makes fat and can be acquired
through eating animal products that have been injected with
hormones. When you eat animal products injected with hormones
and antibiotics, you actually consume a concentrated amount of
the hormone which can behave like estrogen compounds in the
body, thus blocking fat metabolism.
Environmental
disruptors, such as pesticides and emissions can also act like
estrogen. Soy products can have estrogenic effects. So if you
consume too much soy, this can also block fat metabolism.
Over the years,
research has postulated that there are four different body
shapes, each influenced by hormones. You have heard of the
saying, “She is shaped like a pear or apple or skinny as a
rail.” Certain hormones direct where the fat is stored in the
body, and it is a distortion of this function that causes
different body shapes. The outside shape of the body gives us
clues as to what’s going on inside and, in the case of body
fat, which specific nutritional meals are necessary not only to
get healthy but to lose stubborn excessive fat and lose the
weight once and for all.
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