Fat cells – Your body’s fuel tank

Your fat cells are like little balloons. As they fill up with fat they expand accordingly (along with your waistline). Since the body is focused primarily on survival and storing as much away as possible in case of famine later on, if it fills up all its fat cells it just creates a few more. (It’s like it fills up the storeroom it’s born with so then it creates new storerooms to store the extra food).

Interestingly, once created, these fat cells are never destroyed. You can empty them but they are still there, ever ready to be filled up again whenever you have excess blood sugar. This excess energy in the blood stream will be stored in these fat cells.

So these fat cells become the body’s reserve of energy. A reserve is just that – held in reserve and used last after all other fuel sources have been used up.

In other words body fat is the last thing your body wants to use for energy, especially if your blood sugar levels fluctuate constantly because of poor eating habits.

And look at the foods we eat today... a lot of sugary, high fat, high GI refined carbohydrates. At least there’s a lot of foods like that clamoring for our attention in the advertising world and on the supermarket shelves.

This is an important point because your body has a kind of intelligence whereby it registers long periods without food and irregular eating patterns as a potential threat to survival. It doesn’t know when the next feed will be so the instability and uncertainty of the food supply is countered by it storing fat whenever it can.

So if you give it too much by overeating, it stores it as fat.

Conversely, if you don’t give it enough it goes into survival mode, slows your metabolism and stores fat as easily as possible.

If you create both those situations by infrequently eating and then having large meals sporadically the problem is compounded as the body interprets the situation as needing even greater fat storage. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place eh!

With the body predisposed to storing fat and conserving it, it’s no wonder obesity is on the increase. When we couple this body design feature with the facts that lifestyles are so sedentary and the food supply is diminished in quality as well as plentiful compared to only a few generations ago, it’s not likely to change either.

Unless of course you are aware of how and why your body gets fat, which you do now. Knowing this puts you in a position of power so you can maximize your energy, minimize your fat storage and avoid the weight loss battle altogether. Good luck with it.