Healthy Lifestyle: Weight Loss Challenges

Published: Sep 11, 2023 4:31 AM

This delves into the multifaceted challenges faced by those struggling to lose weight. It emphasizes the pivotal role of adopting a healthy lifestyle. It explores how obesity can be linked to various factors.

One of the biggest mistakes that we make as a society, including many doctors, is that we blame the person for their obesity. I know that statement is going to ruffle some feathers, but the reality is the reason someone becomes obese in the first place really boils down to three things that occur from the moment that you’re a zygote and really up until the teenage years.

The time from zygote to teenage years is crucial to the formation of our brain. This is when our brain is the most malleable like a piece of clay. These three core factors are: genetics, epigenetics, and environment. By environment, I mean the hundreds of thousands of molecules, including food that the zygote, the fetus, the infant, the child is exposed to. All in all, these three factors shape our brain. They shape how our hormones work, including leptin and insulin, glucagon, estrogen, cortisol, and the thyroid hormones.

Some say, “Well, if they did just diet and exercise, that will fix everything.” Usually, if someone is eating the proper foods, exercising, especially if they’re doing intermittent fasting on top of that, that’s enough to cause someone not just to lose a lot of weight but to become metabolically healthy. How many people have been told, “Just eat less,” meaning calorie restriction? But calorie restriction diets typically fail after two months because they’re often not sustainable. They often end up causing more stress to that person, which makes them fall off the diet and lots of times binge on food.

healthy lifestyle

How many people know what truly healthy food is? How many people actually eat only unprocessed food? How hard is it for people to buy food that is unprocessed? When you consider that for most grocery stores, 75% of the food in that store is highly processed. How many people know how to cook healthy food or have the time to do it? Or, can they even afford it or have access to it? And how can people overcome their cravings, their addiction to that unhealthy food? Because I promise you that if I took someone who is obese, and I was attached at their hip 24/7, and I made sure that they only ate whole intact grains, fruits and vegetables, legumes, seeds and nuts, eggs if they’re available, and lean poultry and fish, and we limited their eating window to just eight hours a day and we did some kind of exercise on top of that, that person will lose weight and they’ll keep weight off because it’s not a diet. It’s a lifestyle.

And in many cases, this lifestyle reverses type 2 diabetes. It gets their blood pressure lower. It gets their cholesterol levels lower and dramatically improves their overall energy and mental health. In other words, they feel good about life. Living actually feels good at that point.

But for someone with obesity to overcome all these hurdles, to eat only unprocessed food, along with doing intermittent fasting, to exercise 150 minutes a week, and to do it day in and day out, month after month, that in itself is a monumental task for so many people, especially when you consider the fact that we live in a world we are surrounded by highly processed food.

But even if someone did this to a T, they still might have a harder time losing weight compared to other people. And it’s because that person has different genetics. And even more importantly, the biggest reason people can’t lose weight is because of epigenetics. You could think of your genes as a bunch of light switches. That light switch can be turned off or on, and epigenetics, it not only influences what those genes are turned on and off, but they’re the dimmer switch on that light switch. So they determine the extent of gene expression. We now know in 2023, that there are thousands of molecules in our environment, including in our food and in our water supply, that are called obesogen molecules and endocrine disrupting molecules. These molecules interact with the receptors in our body that change our epigenetics. And the younger we are, the more vulnerable we are to them, going back as far as when we’re a zygote.

And actually, it goes further than that, because our epigenetics can be influenced going back four generations. In other words, the health of your great, great grandparents, your great grandparents, your grandparents, and your parents, everything they did or didn’t do likely had some kind of impact on you, because we know that epigenetic programming affects the germ cells. This is known as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. And as you can imagine, if each person, let’s say has two children, these epigenetic changes can rapidly multiply across the population. So when you look at the rise of consumption of highly processed food, especially over the last 50 years, and you look at the rise of obesity rates, especially over the last 50 years, and you look at the rise of chronic metabolic disorders, like type-two diabetes, high blood pressure and all that, over the last 50 years, they seem to all correlate very closely.

By consistently embracing a healthy lifestyle, individuals can address weight loss hurdles more effectively. Through the transformative power of a healthy lifestyle, obese individuals can navigate their weight loss journey with improved health outcomes and increased chances of long-term success.

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