Being in shape for summer is great, but being in great shape for life is a lot better!

Why do you brush your teeth everyday or check your mirrors before you indicate while driving? Because like many things you do everyday without thinking about it, you’ve created an ingrained subconscious habit, meaning overtime it has become so autonomic or natural you don’t even think about it anymore, you just do it, whether its a good thing such as brushing your teeth or a bad thing like always being 5 minutes late for work.

The truth is, all the habits we have are learned, although they are totally natural and done without thought now, at one point in time, took effort and practise, like when learning to drive a car, clutch control was hard, but after a few months of driving its effortless.

These daily habits are a great example of the power of our unconscious mind to learn and ingrain things so we don’t have to think about everything we do, every minute of everyday, we just do it. Creating these habits is also the key to long-term weight-loss and weight management.

Because if you can create healthy habits around the way you live just like brushing your teeth, and make them easily enough to sustain, then eventually these habits will become just like brushing your teeth and so natural you do them everyday without thinking about them.

For long-term fat-loss this is the only solution as if you need to think about and force yourself to take certain supplements, force yourself to follow a diet and exercise plan every week it will never last, where as if these are unconscious habits you just do, it will of course last indefinitely.

The problem however for most of us when it comes to losing weight and living a healthy lifestyle, is we try and do to much, to fast. This is a huge problem, because I explained in my last article, we only have a limited amount of willpower, and eventually we will burn out, quite a few studies have shown self control is an exhaustible resource and trying to force yourself to do things will only work for so long. This is why when we try either a new diet or exercise routine, we often fail, its not because we don’t want to succeed, its because our willpower gets exhausted from a constant battle with our mind.(2)

A great book, The Power of Less is based on the philosophy of accomplishing more by doing less(3). The, author Leo Babauta shares with us interesting data:

Adopting one new habit at a time = 85% chance of success

Adopting two new habits at once = 35% chance of success

Adopting three or more new habits at once = less than 10% chance of success

This along with the fact we only have a limited level of willpower explains why we often fail when trying to change our diet and lifestyle habits. It is also why during my new program, and any long-term fat-loss solution its best to only try and makeone change or new habitat a time. This might seem like a slow process, but it means eventually you will have new healthy habits which will stick with you for life, instead of fast weight-loss and a painful rebound where you gain all the weight you lost back like most diets.

So the key question is, how do you make a habit? Well one of the key strategies to making a new habit is consistency, this means doing it often and at the same time each day can make a real difference, but remember its still better to do it anytime than not at all.

One of the best solutions to developing a new habit beyond almost anything else is having a trigger associated with the new habit you want to create. A trigger is using something else as an association to help you follow through with your new habit. For example a habit where you are following the taking supplements, instead of hiding the supplements away in your cupboard, put them in plain site by your food, this will help you remember to take them, or even have an alarm on your phone as a daily reminder to take your supplements.

Another example of a trigger, is putting any exercise plans you have in your diary as an appointment like going to the dentist, which you can’t miss. Now when you look in the diary, you are reminded you need to exercise at said time.

Another very simple but effective way to make sure you follow through with your new habit is to get some accountability with friends, family, work colleges, with a coach, or even through social networks like facebook, you can do this by telling people what you are doing or making a bet with one of your friends that you will follow through with things, its like social blackmail to get the job done.

Also make your habits as easy as possible to follow, don’t create an elaborate system, the less time it takes to do and the more convenient, the better, as you will be likely to stick with it.

The idea with creating any of the habits is to not leave it to chance, learn to create a strong unconscious bond with your new habit, so eventually it happen without any thought at all.

In conclusion to increase the chances of making your habit permanent try and do at least one of the following:

• Create a trigger, link your habit to something, such as supplements with breakfast or a phone reminder
• Be consistent, try not to miss a day, but if you do, relax and just start again the next day
• Get accountability, tell a spouse, family member, work college, friend or social network it
• Make it easy for yourself and if you can, make it fun

If you are fed up with quick fix fad fat-loss programs and this resinates with you, then sign up for me FREE 5 day nutrition course to the right!

As over the last 9 months i’ve been working on a long-term fat-loss program using exactly this philosophy, where i’ll take you step by step through highly effective habits to stay lean and fat free for life and its coming in the next 10 days, but if you are not on my email list, you’ll probably miss out!

Its not unusual to hear people who are lean and healthy say things like people are just fat because they don’t have any willpower. Its also not unusual for someone to go on a diet, lose a lot of weight, then rebound and put it all back on.

Even when people know they desperately need to lose weight and have all the motivation in the world, they still find it extremely hard sticking to a diet, are these people just doomed to fail?

If you’ve tried diets before and failed again and again, maybe just the other day you ate something ‘bad’ does it mean you should just give up as you always find avoiding bad food extremely hard, should you just except the inevitable?

NO you shouldn’t because you know what, contrary to what people tell you, its not your fault! Thats right, the reason you are struggling to lose weight is not because have poor willpower, its because you are exhausted and burned out!

You see popular belief is that the more you use willpower, the better you get at doing something, so if you go on a really hardcore diet and lose a lot of weight, you will then have more motivation to stay on it and you’ll find it easy because your willpower is even stronger.

Well thats an interesting theory, but does it actually work? Not really, i’ve never met anyone who is still lean and love handle free and healthy because of a crash diet! The truth is, you’ve been lied to, willpower does not get stronger, it gets debilitated and exhausted!

In an experiment put together to study if willpower gets stronger or exhausted the more we use it, participants were put into two groups and told they were given a cover story as to what the experiment was for, so they had no idea it was to test willpower.

In the first part of the experiment, participants were put in a room where chocolate chip cookies had been freshly baked and left out, so quite a temptation. Then they also put red and white radishes in the room. The participants were told to skip a meal and not eat for at least 3 hours and come to the experiment hungry then they were left in the room for 5 minutes unattended, but were being watched through a two way mirror.

One group was allowed to eat the cookies and the other had to leave them and instead use willpower to avoid them and eat the radishes instead.

Then all participants were asked to partake in a separate experiment, where they were given 30 minutes to solve a puzzle and if they could not do it within this time they could ring a bell upon giving up, however unbeknown to them, this puzzle was unsolvable.

Shockingly even though this had nothing to do with food, the group who had already used willpower to stop themselves eating the cookies all ended up giving up on solving the puzzles sooner, because they had already used willpower to avoid eating the cookies, they had less left to keep persisting with the puzzles. (1)

These results show then that, willpower is not endless, but exhaustible and when we try ‘harder’ and go on stricter diets, although we may lose more weight, we’ll just burn out faster as we are using more willpower.

This also explains why dieting is so hard and gets harder, the more you do it, the more exhausted and drained you are! At first when I learned this, I wasn’t sure what to do, but over the last 6 months i’ve been working on a program to help people lose weight without needing to restrict themselves and use willpower, so you never binge, burnout or fail, its not a rapid process, but it works as I can show from my own results.

In the next article I will explain how to lose weight and with at least 85% chance of success and long-term results and i’ll post my pictures of what happened after I lost the weight on my ‘quick fix plan’ and how I look far better now since i’ve taken it slowly.

If you want to learn more about this program, just sign up to the right of the this page for my free nutrition course as i’ll be emailing the information out in the next week.

It should be quiet apparent by now, that what makes you fat is excess calories as I stated in the previous blog posts, although I still have one more to write, however this painful myth about carbohydrates and insulin being fattening refuses to die, hopefully after this article, you will be fully aware of how wrong this myth is, and why carbohydrates and insulin do anything but make you fat.

So this myth seems to of come from low carbohydrate enthusiasts such as Gary Taubes and Dr.Atkins who believe insulin because it is a fat storage hormone and is raised by carbohydrate stores any carbohydrates you eat as fat, however this hypothesis has many, many fatal flaws, as you shall see.

“This alternative hypothesis of obesity constitutes three distinct propositions. First, as I’ve said, is the basic proposition that obesity is caused by a regulatory defect in fat metabolism, and so a defect in the distribution of energy rather than an imbalance of energy intake and expenditure. The second is that insulin plays a primary role in this fattening process, and the compensatory behaviours of hunger and lethargy.

The third is that carbohydrates, and particularly refined carbohydrates– and perhaps the fructose content as well, and thus perhaps the amount of sugars consumed– are the prime suspects in the chronic elevation of insulin; hence, they are the ultimate cause of common obesity.” – Gary Taubes, good calories bad calories

One major problem with this myth, is the blatant disregard for the laws of thermodynamics and that calories do indeed count and excess calories are the cause of weight-gain.

However if we disregard that part of the hypothesis for a minute, because I know some people will still be worried that carbohydrates are in some way inherently more fattening that protein or fat and that elevated insulin is extremely bad for you, even though as I shall show you, this could not be further from the truth.

I feel since I have already covered in detail the fact calories do count, I won’t dive into why carbohydrates are not fattening, because as you have seen, no macronutrient is fattening unless eaten in excess and as I discuss in my blog posts on white rice and potatoes, these carbohydrate based foods are great for the amazing fat-loss properties they have. What I want to do in this blog post, is break the ridiculous idea that insulin is fattening and that we should all avoid foods that create an insulin spike.

During this article I will do my best to destroy this myth once and explain how unfair it is blame all the obesity epidemic on such a vital hormone and why if it were not for this hormone, it would be extremely hard to look good, burn fat and build muscle.

You see, insulin is indeed a storage hormone, this means one of its purposes is to help us store the food we eat in our cells, but this is by far from all it does.

The first major problem with avoiding foods that create a large insulin spike, is carbohydrates are not the only food which create a substantial insulin spike, many protein based foods also create a substantial insulin spike.

In a study comparing 240 calories worth of many different types of foods to see what level of insulin response they would give, fish actually gave a higher insulin response than white pasta and beef a higher insulin response than porridge. Also very interesting, the food which gave the highest insulin spike, in a similar styled experiment, but focusing on satiety of foods, the potato also has the highest in a satiety of any food. (1,2)

In another study comparing 4 different types of protein meals, all in liquid format from tuna, whey, egg and turkey  to assess the different insulin spikes because high insulin producing foods could help promote higher levels of fullness for longer.

Because although in the world of fitness guru’s insulin makes you fat and this study doesn’t make any sense, obesity researchers know otherwise and make no bones about it, this is the opening extract from the study itself:

“Insulin is thought to be a satiety hormone, with increased insulin levels in the brain eliciting a net catabolic response influencing food intake regulatory mechanisms. Dietary proteins have been shown to stimulate insulin release and influence glycaemia differentially”(3)

So what were the results, well for people who enjoy whey protein, you’ll be glad to know it gave a huge insulin spike and was by far the highest out of all four protein shakes. The glucose response was also much lower with the whey protein that the egg or turkey, but not significantly lower than the fish, this is very important and i’ll get onto it later.

The subjects were all significantly fuller on the whey and tuna shakes than the egg or turkey and four hours later after each different shake the participants were allowed to eat as much food as they wanted until comfortably full from a buffet, not surprisingly, the whey shake left people with the lowest appetite as they ate the least from the buffets, with tuna next, then turkey, then egg, perfectly correlating with insulin release.

As you can see, foods high in protein can give just as much of a insulin spike as foods high in carbohydrate, yet we all know a tuna steak doesn’t make you fat right!

The reason foods high in protein raise insulin is because the branched chain amino acids can directly stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin, with leucine having the strongest effect and if you haven’t guessed yet, whey protein is of course extremely high in leucine. This is one of the reasons essential amino acids can be so effective, they give a large insulin spike and all the amino acids are then pushed directly into the muscle for all that muscle building goodness. (4)

If you have a strong belief about insulin making you fat, I’m sure you are currently having a bit of a breakdown, I know I did when I first learnt this information, but stay with me. As you can see, if insulin makes you fat, then its not just carbohydrates that are a problem, but also most proteins and the ones high in brained chain amino acids that are great for building muscle raising insulin the most.

In another study looking at the best macronutrient ratio to increase leptin levels, which is you don’t know much about leptin, is a anti-obesity hormone strongly linked to body-fat and hunger levels, with higher levels decreasing hunger and making it easier to lose weight, especially if the person has good  brain leptin sensitivity, only the meal that raised insulin levels high also raised leptin levels, meaning keeping insulin low, is likely to decrease leptin levels and increase long-term hunger a long with body-fat levels. (8)

Okay, so now that your belief about insulin being fattening being on shaky ground and not the root of all evil, let me explain why insulin is actually keeping you thin, but first i’m going to explain to you how diabetes type 1 actually works and what insulin does.

So most people think diabetes type 1 is really bad because the lack of insulin production stops glucose getting into muscle and fat cells and is instead left floating around in the blood stream causing havoc, but thats far from the truth and unfortunately based mainly on current dogma, instead of fact.

You see we don’t need insulin to store the carbohydrates we eat, when type one diabetics are measured for glucose uptake during severe hyperglycaemia, glucose uptake is increased above normal in the absence of insulin. This is because we have glucose transport proteins of which as least 6 isomers are known, these are glut 1-6. These transports can move glucose directly into fat and muscle cells in the absence of glucose and this is exactly what happens with type one diabetics. (5)

This is where all your bad words about insulin need to be rapidly retracted, because you are about to find out that without regular releases of this amazing hormone, you would be very hungry, fat and ageing very quickly.

Because the major role of insulin is not to store carbohydrates as fat, but actually to turn off excess liver production of glucose and ketones. You see, when type one diabetics don’t have high blood sugar because they can’t store the glucose eaten, they have high blood sugar because the liver over produces glucose and ketones until it is told to stop and insulin is what tells it to stop.

If it wasn’t for a big insulin spike when you eat, you would continuously get high blood sugar problems, not because you were not storing the carbohydrates you eat, but because insulin stops the liver over producing more glucose to be used, insulin tells the liver to stop this.

Remember earlier when I mentioned that whey protein had lower glucose response than all the other proteins, which would mean more stable blood sugar, this is because the high insulin spike from whey decreases the amount of glucose production from the liver, where as the proteins that spike insulin less didn’t do this as effectively, this means more glucose is produced by the liver creating less stable blood sugar.

So contrary to popular belief, a large insulin spike helps keep blood sugar levels low and stops wild blood sugar fluctuations which are created by the livers over production of glucose because when insulin is not around, the liver over produces glucose as is seen in type one diabetics.

So far we’ve seen that protein rapidly increases insulin production, especially if the protein is high in branched chain amino acids, the higher the insulin release the fuller we feel after that meal, without insulin the liver over produces ketones and glucose causing blood sugar problems and if untreated would eventually lead to death, but thats not all, insulin also has some other tricks up its sleeve and these are that when insulin is released, it stimulates the release of another appetite suppressing hormone, which slows gastric empting and digestion.

And that hormone is Amylin, very simpley, amylin works by increasing the time it takes for food to empty from the stomach, this increases satiety, improves digestion, it also increases the release of a glucagon-like peptite-1, which itself helps decrease appetite and food intake. (6,7)

Conclusion

By now I think it should be clear that the idea insulin causes weight-gain is not only completely insane, but also totally unsupported by science, insulin is a vital hormone in the body, which does a lot more than push carbohydrates into fat cells and if it did do that, then the only way to lose weight would be by eating a diet low in carbohydrate, low in protein and extremely high in fat, but I can’t see that happening. Without adequate insulin it would be a real struggle to build muscle, and feel full, since insulin is strongly correlated with feelings of fullness and satiety.

If you are wondering what this means, its simple, stop worry about insulin making you fat and trying to control it, focus on eating foods that create long-term feelings of fullness and not overconsuming calories, eating carbohydrates such as potatos, white rice, sweet-potato’s and fruit can and should be part of this, forget about insulin and carbohydrates making you fat!

If you found this article helpful, please feel free to share it on facebook and twitter, it would be much appreciated, as a lot of people need to know the truth.

P.S This is just a review, if you want more information on why insulin is not the fat-loss villain you think it is, keep your eyes pealed as the full chapter on this will be out in my book soon.