The Biggest Lie About How To Burn Body Fat

Today we are going to dive into The Biggest Lie About How to Burn Body Fat.

So the biggest lie about how to burn body fat is that you must create a calorie deficit. You must burn more calories than you bring in.

The logic has been, the lie has been, that weight control is all about calories in vs. calories out.

If you eat too many calories, you store fat.

If you eat less calories than you need, you burn body fat.

But that’s not true.

That’s not the full story.

You may be running miles and miles a week and never burning body fat!

Why?

Because burning body fat is more sophisticated than just calories in and calories out.

There are more players involved.

Players like hormones.

Players like chemical signals.

Players like time.

And this is what I’m going to walk you through today.

The player of TIME.

How burning body fat is actually a very time-dependent process.

And then we’ll go through some examples of when you think you’re burning body fat, but in reality you are not and what to do about it.

I want to show you that your body is amazingly capable of burning fat and doing what you want it to do if you feed it right and if you understand your body as a woman over 40.

No supplements, no gimmicks, no protein powders. Just real science from a real dietitian so you can take real control over your weight.

Firstly, you need to understand some basic physiological truths about how your body uses food for energy.

Your body burns fuel in a specific order. Meaning, your body burns certain things for energy before it burns other things.

I’m going to explain this through an analogy, like I do everything.

Let’s say you come home from the grocery store with a lot of groceries. Ok? You put all the bags on the counter and start to think about putting all those groceries away.

But you’re hungry, so you open the grapes and just start eating them right out of the grocery bag.

The rest of the food you put in the fridge for later. Now, you went to Costco and have more food than will fit in your fridge so the rest of the food you haul downstairs to the deep freeze.

Ok, if we go back through the story, this is how your body burns energy.

The groceries you bring in and set on the counter is like food you just ate and has turned into sugar and is circulating through your blood stream.

The food in the fridge is the leftover sugar that you didn’t burn and is stored as sugar in your muscles and liver as glycogen. Glycogen is a fancy word for sugar that your body can store for later.

Then, the deep freeze food is your fat stores. This is the body fat we are trying to burn when we sleep. This is the belly fat. It’s in the deep freeze.

Ok, so pull this all together, your body will eat all the food from the counter first. Then it will reach into the fridge and eat most of the food in there. And then, and only then does it begrudgingly go downstairs to the deep freeze or belly fat to use that for fuel.

Ok, is everybody still with me? Let me in the comments if this is making sense still. Do we have any questions about this so far?

So, your body burns sugar in your blood first (this is the food on the counter) then it releases stored sugar from your liver (this is the fridge food), then after most of that is gone, it will release fat from your belly to be burned.

What this means, the fact that our bodies use this specific order is that each of these things take time.

So, in order to burn body and belly fat you have let enough time pass for your body to burn through your sugar & glycogen.

What I’m explaining to you is that burning fat is not calorie dependent. It’s time dependent.

Now it’s also dependent on that door to the basement not being locked. If it’s locked, then you’ll actually find your body screaming for you to shop for more food.

The lock on the door is a broken metabolism. The lock itself is insulin. Remember the hormonal player in the fat-burning game?

But let’s say the door is unlocked and it will open, even if it just opens a crack. That’s all we need. A crack.

We are deep into this now, everyone still with me? Type yes in the comments if you’re with me. Who is surprised about this information. Is this new to anyone? Most women think that fat is burned when the calories “go away” and that’s kinda true, but it’s not the full story.

So, let’s use an example now.

Let’s say you wake up at 6 am and have a quick breakfast of coffee with coffee mate French vanilla creamer and a bran muffin and a banana.

Then you hop in your car and go to Spin class.

What is your body going to use to move your legs on that bike?

Is it going to use fat?

Nope… you have food on the counter, don’t you!

You are going to use that muffin, banana, and sugar creamer to get through spin class.

Then let’s say you come home and make a big protein shake. Are you burning fat now, after class, the so called after-burn time when you burn more calories at sitting than normal?

Nope. You just handed yourself more fuel to burn instead of body fat.

Do you see how this is coming together?

The calories in calories out method of just eating less and moving more don’t always result in body fat being burned for energy.

In fact, in our example, the best case scenario is that you don’t gain weight from your food. You maybe maintain your weight… but you haven’t burned any belly fat.

And just to add one more detail, if you really want to burn fat, to get into your deep freeze, remember, that door to the basement, has to be unlocked and open. If that door is shut, you’re still not burning body fat!

That’s the moment your body starts screaming for more food, more sugar!

That door is your hormones.

So you have multiple layers and multiple systems that control your body fat, not just how much you do or don’t eat or if you exercise or not.

If you are serious about burning body fat, you have to understand how all the players work together to create the perfect environment for your deep freeze to release your body fat. But most of us where never taught this concept.