The Easiest Path to Reduce Body Fat and Improve Your Heart Health

February is National Heart Awareness month, and one of the best things you can do for your heart is to shed those extra pounds of fat.

Sometimes we get caught up “isolating” our health goals and treat everything as a separate process. I can tell you it’s a whole lot easier to focus on the root cause, as multiple health issues can fall like dominos.

For instance, extra body fat and heart disease often have a major factor in common, excessive insulin production. Insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia, the state of elevated insulin levels, train your body to store fat, and not burn it.

Insulin resistance is the root of what’s known as metabolic syndrome; dramatically increasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, resistant weight loss, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and many other “modern day diseases” that can be prevented and managed through lifestyle strategies such as diet, exercise and natural supplements.

Insulin resistance starts with the chronic ingesting of too many carbohydrates- and that’s ALL carbohydrates. Whether it’s whole grain bread, or a box of skittles, they all pour into sugar, which leads to your bodies excessive insulin production to remove the sugar for the blood, since the body recognizes sugar as toxic.  The chronic insulin stimulation leads to a continued process of fat being stored in fat cells, and not getting burned.

So how do we fix this? First, let’s look at symptoms of being a sugar burner and not a fat burner.

If you miss a meal, do you feel irritable, tired or week? Maybe you feel shaky or jittery if you go too long without eating? You could feel tired one to three hours after eating, calmer after a meal, and of course the weight loss roadblock of excessively craving carbohydrates or sweets.

As far as testing, three tests on the top of my list are blood sugar, insulin, and HbA1C. At home blood sugar testing is a great idea, as you can track your numbers to see the progress or lack of progress you are making through your lifestyle changes.

When you go to your doctor, they can test both your blood sugar and insulin, in either a fasting or a post-prandial challenge; which is essentially testing 2 hours after consuming a high carbohydrate meal to see how the body responds.

Lastly there is HbA1C which can give a general idea of how your blood sugar has been over the past two to three months, and more importantly the level of glycation, or damage to cells and proteins, due to excessive blood sugar levels.

As I mentioned, diet plays a big role, and a formula for healthy blood sugar consists of low, but healthy carbohydrates, moderate protein, and adequate healthy fats.

If you are looking for more information on how to adapt an healthy, primal lifestyle- of diet, exercise, and relaxation strategies, check out our courses, as well as our consult and coaching section of the website.