Many of us nowadays are a few (or many!) kilos above our ideal weight. As the years pass, we tend to progressively gain weight, up to the point that we can barely recognize ourselves in the mirror.
We hear that being overweight can cause so many health problems apart from making us tired, lethargic, and so on. Just the fact of having to carry all the extra weight is a big problem in itself. Imagine if you had to carry one of these big 20-liter water bottles all the time on your back or over your head, walking, running, going upstairs, etc. surely your daily activities would be a struggle. If one is 20 kilos overweight it means that he is basically living like that.
There is also evidence that being overweight is bad for our spiritual advancement. Srila Prabhupada comments how Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati would severely chastise his overweight disciples, equating weight gain with lack of advancement in spiritual life. At the very least, being overweight makes us lethargic, which means an increase in the influence of the mode of ignorance.
This was a challenge I personally faced during years when I was traveling extensively to distribute books about Krsna Consciousness. Being busy in my daily activities I started eating in a less than ideal way, and as a result, gained a lot of weight. At some point, I was weighing 95 kilos (I’m just 172 cm high!) and would become tired after walking just one or two kilometers. I was becoming like one of these Chinese statues of Buddha, which can be a little cute, depending on who you ask, but is not very healthy.
There are many unhealthy ways to lose weight, and of course, these are not recommended. There are many diets around and most of them have something in common: they don’t work. One doesn’t lose weight at all, or he loses weight at first, but later regains all the weight back with interest. However, losing weight can be surprisingly easy, as long as you know what you are doing. An essential aspect to understanding this connection is the mechanism our bodies use to store fat and burn it. It’s actually quite simple.
By following these tips, I was able to lose 15 kilos in three months, and 23 by the end of the first year, and could easily maintain it afterward. The improvement in my general disposition was immense, I could do much more, and my mind became clear. It was as if I was living under a constant mental fog and carrying a sandbag over my shoulders, and gradually it was removed. I became lighter and happier. At this point, I understood how this is a small detail that can make a great difference in one’s life and actually help him to improve his Krsna Consciousness.
In our culture, we believe that the body is a vehicle for the soul. When the body dies, the soul transmigrates to another body or achieves liberation, according to one’s consciousness. The problem is that our time in the body is fixed due to the laws of karma, therefore if one doesn’t take proper care of his health, he will be forced to remain in a diseased body in his final years, which regardless of one’s belief is not a very pleasant prospect.
The first point to understand is that every time we eat carbohydrates, the body produces insulin as part of the digestion process. The insulin signals to all cells in the body that it’s feast time: that they should absorb and store the glucose that is being put in the blood circulation as quickly as possible. Although glucose is the basic fuel of the body, it is also toxic in high concentrations, therefore it can’t stay in the blood for long.
In this way, all the cells in the muscles, brain, and other organs and tissues are flooded with glucose, and we have energy for our daily activities. We feel satisfied. However, there is a problem: the fat cells also absorb glucose and they store it in the form of more fat. It also happens that insulin will block the fat cells from releasing the stored energy for a period of six hours or more. Chances are that before this time expires, one is going to have another meal.
That’s why most diets don’t work: they focus on many small meals distributed during the day. This causes the insulin to remain active all the time, which in turn blocks the burning of fat in the body. One feels that he is starving, he suffers like hell, and still he doesn’t lose much weight. What is worse is that because the body is forced to work in a situation where it doesn’t get enough energy from the food and at the same time can’t tap on the fuel stored in the fat cells, it is forced to reduce the metabolism, starting to use less energy. Instead of burning, let’s say, 2400 calories per day, the body may start burning 2000, 1600, or even less. As a result, when a person gives up the diet and starts to eat normally, he becomes inclined to gain much more weight than was lost. In other words: the more one insists on the diet, the fattier he may become in the end. There are cases of persons that, after a succession of failed diets, have their metabolism falling to such low levels that they keep gaining weight even on a diet of 1200 calories per day. It can become that bad.
However, there is a surprisingly easy solution for this problem, a process called intermittent fasting.
The secret is to, instead of doing many small meals during the day, have just two, or even one average size meal during the day, leaving a longer interval between them. One can have, for example, some light breakfast at 9 a.m., lunch at noon, and a light dinner before 5 p.m. In this case, he would have an eating window of 8 hours and a total of 16 hours of fasting every day. This is a moderate style of intermittent fasting, called 16:8. We can see that this is not such a huge change from what we may be doing now, but the results can be really impressive.
The times of the meals can be adjusted according to your routine, the important part is the total interval between the first and last meal. If you wake up late, you can take launch at noon and a light dinner before 8 p.m, for example. It works the same.
The longer periods without food allow the insulin to run its course, enabling the fat cells to release their stored energy. The body will then get all the energy it needs from the fat cells, and it will start to lose weight without having to reduce the metabolism. Not only that but after passing a period of adaptation in the first weeks, one will not feel very hungry, because the body will adapt to the new eating schedule.
Intermittent fasting offers a wide range of benefits. It reduces inflammation (helping with all kinds of painful conditions), increases the release of growth hormone (that promotes fat loss, the building of muscle, repair of tissues), improves testosterone levels in men (which results in important health benefits), promotes fat burning and weight loss, rebuilds the immune system, protects against most types of cancer, and so on. If someone would create a medicine that would offer all these benefits simultaneously, he could charge a lot of money for it, but intermittent fasting is free.
A common argument against staying such long periods without eating is that it could lead to muscle loss. However, actually, the opposite happens. One can lose muscle when he eats too frequently, because the insulin blocks the burning of fat, forcing the body to burn muscle to produce energy. In natural conditions, the body will always first burn the glucose of the food and then start burning fat. It will start to burn muscle only after weeks of fasting when the reserves of fat in the body start to run out. It’s a concept similar to someone living in a forest house during a harsh winter: he will not start burning his furniture until he exhausts his supply of firewood.
Intermittent fasting consists of having relatively large meals, combined with relatively long fasting periods. This makes the body work in a completely different way, using glucose from the food in the first few hours after the meals (when the insulin is high), and then switching to fat-burning as the insulin runs out. This results in loss of fat and preservation of muscle.
Naturally, if one starts to skip breakfast but compensates by eating a lot of junk food in his “lunch” the effect will be limited and he will still suffer a great deal to be able to go without eating until the next day. For best results, the change in the timing should be accompanied by a change in the diet. One should eat more leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) and roots (like beets, carrots, etc) and much less grains. Healthy fats (in moderation) are much better than grains from a weight-loss perspective.
The general advice given by many health agencies, that one should eat more carbohydrates and less fats is largely based on flawed research from the 1950’s and 1960’s. The situation was that since the 1920’s the rates of heart disease were increasing in the US, and nobody knew exactly why. When president Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955 the trend became a motive for public histeria. A nutritionist called Ancel Keys published a study that pointed to saturated fat and cholesterol as the culprits. Now we know that actually the problem was the rise in smoking and in the consumption of hydrogenated fats (like margarine), but at the time the debate was not so clear and the party led by Ancel Keys won the debate.
Despite the inconsistency of his evidence, he was able to convince many in the high circles, which lead to the establishment of public guidelines about what one should eat. As a result, most of the medical guidelines from there on advised people to go on a high-carb, low-fat diet, eating more grains, sugar, refined carbohydrates, margarine and refined vegetable oils, and less butter and saturated fats in general.
This campaign was largely successful. The message was passed on and people started to follow the advice. Butter was outlawed, avocados and nuts were frowned upon, cheap refined vegetable oils were promoted as “good for the heart”, sugar was not seen as an enemy and the idea that a calorie is a calorie (and therefore from a weight gain perspective, doesn’t matter what one eats) prevailed. This led to the explosion of cases of obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other modern diseases. Only recently the damage started to be undone, with new studies proving that these previous theories were flawed, and that actually the greatest villains are sugar, refined carbohydrates, and refined vegetable oils.
Examining the situation from a weight gain perspective, foods that are rich in starch, like many types of grains, potatoes, and practically all industrialized products, result in a huge spike of insulin. They make the body store fat and make one hungry, and therefore should be avoided as far as possible if one wants to lose weight. Wheat flour especially should be carefully avoided, because it’s one of the ingredients that have the highest glycemic index of all. White bread, for example, has a GI of 75, higher than even pure sugar, which has a GI of “just” 65. For comparison, cooked chickpeas have a GI of just 28, and peanuts are even lower, at just 14.
Foods that are rich in protein (like legumes, lentils, or even cheese) result in a moderate release of insulin, while foods that are rich in fats (like nuts, avocados, ghee and butter, etc.) result in the release of very little insulin. Therefore, a rule of the thumb for weight loss is to eat a lot of vegetables, a moderate amount of fat and protein and very little carbohydrates. This will keep the insulin low and force the body to burn fat. Doing like this, everything works: you will feel hungry during the first two weeks, when the body is transitioning from burning glucose to burning fat, but after that there will be very little hunger, and the weight loss will be quick and maintainable. I lost a total of 23 kilos during my first year following this system and was able to maintain the weight afterward without much trouble. Not only that, but my health also improved tremendously.
The main point is to maintain good habits after the weight loss, continuing to avoid junk foods and high glycemic foods and continue to eat lots of vegetables during the maintenance phase, after the diet. The change should be permanent. If you start to fall back into your previous habits, eating in an uncontrolled way, going back to junk food, etc. the easiest fix is to fast for a couple of days. This helps to “reset” our eating habits and gives us the chance of starting again with better choices.
This is actually a new approach to nutrition that started to become well known only in the last ten years or so, but this is in line with what people were following for most of human history. We tend to think that people from past centuries were uncultured idiots, but actually many times the idiots are us. Because in most cultures people discarded the traditional wisdom that was accumulated for thousands of years, we commit so many obvious mistakes. In the Bhagavad-Gita Krsna mentions: “That understanding which considers irreligion to be religion and religion to be irreligion, under the spell of illusion and darkness, and strives always in the wrong direction, O Partha, is in the mode of ignorance”. Unfortunately, this pretty much defines many aspects of our current society.
One of the first doctors to point out this mechanism was Jason Fung, who started by using this system to treat his diabetic patients and later noticed that it also works very well for people wanting to lose weight or to improve their health in general. If you are interested, you can check his book “The Obesity Code” or find some of his seminars online.