Weight Loss and Glandular Type

Editor’s Note:
When your body gets its required nutrients, it can clean, repair and maintain itself. Find your specific Metabolic Type to determine what foods contribute to your health. And which foods take away your well being.
Metabolic Typing is THE tool you need for optimal health. Feeding your unique body type is the single most important principle that affects your maximum performance in all aspects of life.

In modern society nearly everyone is obsessed with their weight. The media bombards us with pressure to look a certain way to be considered beautiful, desirable, and, successful. These pressures are especially dangerous and destructive for women and young girls, creating self image problems, leading girls to compare themselves to airbrushed and photoshopped celebrities and models in magazines, having unrealistic expectations, and many times even physically hurting themselves by starving, dieting, or over exercising. The Media puts great emphasis on looks and unscrupulous sellers offer you quick ways to get your dream body with their diet pills, weight loss shakes, machines that will help you lose weight while sitting on your sofa watching TV, and miracle elixirs that will make you skinny in no time no matter what you eat. The Western worlds obsession with lowering the number on the scale has turned into big business. We all should realize that money is all we can lose with these products, not weight. Certainly not in a healthy way. There IS a healthy way and it is not endless exercising or restricting food intake.

Eat less, move more is the message of some self promoting experts. People want to get rid of their body fat at all costs. They want to get skinny quickly, with minimal effort, and often they do it for the sake of their health. Eating less and moving more is not the correct answer. Eating RIGHT and moving BETTER is what gets the number on the scale down. Actually, eating more and moving less might be an answer too, especially for those who starve themselves while doing two hours of cardio training a day, putting their bodies under huge amounts of physical stress, elevating cortisol and making it impossible to lose weight. Everyone needs to find their own balance, because every persons body is different and has a set of different needs and conditions. It’s not just women who are manipulated by unrealistic airbrushed pictures of super skinny models, these things affect men as well. Magazines, billboards and tv ads show images of muscular male models with no body hair, a perfect tan, and ripped abs. Even though men may not necessarily talk about the effect of these marketing moves, they still has an impact on their body image and the way they treat their bodies. The amount of time men aged 15 through 50 spend in the gym, perfecting their protein shake, or participating in athletics further reinforces this point.

It is important to realize there is a difference between losing WEIGHT and losing FAT. Many people have a goal weight in mind and they don’t understand that number on the scale says nothing about the health or shape of their body. Losing weight might as well mean losing precious muscle mass, and that is something we do not want to get rid of. If you google 130 lbs images, you will get tons of pictures of different shaped bodies, some ripped, some with a fair amount of belly fat, some more athletic, but all 130 pounds. That is simple proof that number on the scale doesn’t really mean much without a context. If you want your body to be healthy, you have to focus on losing excess body fat while maintaining muscle mass. Our muscles help us move, walk, run, eat, make love, live, and perform all of our daily tasks. We are not just talking about becoming a serious bodybuilder to grow huge arms and a sixpack, we are talking about maintaining and preserving the muscle mass we already have and need for daily life and to prevent injuries.

If there were one universal diet that worked for everybody, the world would be much simpler place, don’t you think? You could grab the universal shopping list, load up your pantry, and be happy with your results. The food guide and the Standard American Diets attempted to establish this, but this isn’t how things work. Everyone of us is a metabolically unique entity that needs to be, approached in a specific way. Your neighbor lost 20 pounds in two months on a Vegan diet? Good for her! But that does not mean you should do the same and expect the same results. Of course, you can try, but you may experience a huge disappointment, or even do some serious damage. Not eating enough food can also lead to nutrient deficiency, causing all kinds of both minor and major health problems. Hair loss, poor sleep, dry skin these can all be a sign of your body missing important nutrients, mineral, and vitamins.

We are talking about weightloss and fat loss, but it is not always just overweight people who need help with their body weight. Some people don’t seem to gain weight, no matter what they do. Being chronically under weight is a problem too. Sometimes, helping underweight people to gain weight is actually more difficult than helping an obese individual to get rid of extra fat. Underweight people often lack muscle mass, so while focusing on fat loss for overweight people, gaining some quality muscle is what you should focus on if you are one of those people. You have probably heard things like I wish I was skinny as you or you are so lucky to have such fast metabolism, but you struggle with not being able to gain a pound and wish you could get some of their fat and muscle.

No two bodies are the same and if we want to understand weight management secrets, we have to take our bio-+individuality into consideration. What is your genetic make up? What did your ancestors eat? Where did they live? Do you have any food intolerances or allergies? Are you genetically predisposed to be overweight (store energy efficiently) or underweight? These are very important questions. They pre-determine what you need to eat in order to maintain health. Look around the Standard American Diet is definitely not right for everyone. Learn more about Metabolic Typing, a method that will determine the best way of eating for your individual body based on the results of a simple test.

Our bodies have an amazing ability to maintain a healthy weight when fed correctly. A healthy body knows its ideal weight. That means we have to keep our bodies healthy first, before doing anything else. Starvation and over-training does not support a healthy body. Discovering the right diet does. We need to eat foods that are compatible with our body chemistry, we need to find out how we handle different macronutrient ratios, we need to learn about what our bodies need. Your body most likely needs very different nutrition than your neighbors.

Hormones play a major role in body weight regulation too, and hormones are released by glands in our bodies. Certain food when eaten in excess can overstimulate and damage a gland, making it unable to make the right amounts of hormones. Those dangerous foods are usually the ones you crave. Your dominant gland is stimulated by these foods, it makes you want more and more, packing more pounds on, and making you unable to lose weight. To determine which foods you should stay away from, you need to identify your triggers and discover your glandular type.

Martin and Scott discuss glandular types in detail in this podcast episode. Enjoy it also as a video podcast so you don’t miss any graphic examples they share on screen. With the understanding of these concepts your weight management journey will get much easier.