Accidentally Overweight Report

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The Accidentally Overweight Report

By Dr Libby Weaver (Ph.D)

What to eat and how much to eat for optimum health and your ideal body shape and size can seem like a confusing and at times overwhelming area to explore. Right now you could walk into a bookshop and pick up a book that says eat plenty of carbohydrates as they are essential for energy and right beside it on the book shelf will be a book that tells you not to eat carbs because they make you fat and tired.

How on earth are you supposed to make sense of this well meaning, but conflicting information? How do you work out a way of eating that fuels you with great energy all day long while burning fat? What do you do if you feel like you’ve tried everything to lose weight only to regain it back? Have you ever put your mind to losing weight and made an enormous effort to eat well and exercise regularly for little or no reward? Accidentally Overweight: The Book explains all this and more.
This report gives you insight into the 9 primary factors essential for your body to be able to access fat to burn it for energy. To get the most out of this report, reflect on your own health and body while you consider each factor. You will soon see the aspects of your body chemistry that you will
need to target with the help of Accidentally Overweight.



Calories
You can’t eat like a piglet and expect your body fat to co‐operate. If you eat well and exercise
regularly though and body fat still poses a problem for you, then your answer is probably not in the
calorie department. There will be other aspects of your biochemistry that need to be addressed.
If you do overeat at times even though you know you would be better off not doing so, then getting
to the bottom of why you do this could change your life. The reason may be biochemical or
emotional or both. Both are explored in Accidentally Overweight.

Stress Hormones
The human body makes two dominant stress hormones. They are adrenalin and cortisol. Adrenalin is
our acute stress hormone while cortisol is our chronic stress hormone. In other words, when we are
stressed for a long time, it is cortisol that tends to take over as our dominant stress hormone.
Historically, cortisol was designed to save your life when food was scarce so even though food may
be abundant for you today, cortisol sends a message to every cell of your body that your metabolism
needs to be slowed down so that those precious fat stores can keep you going until the food supply
returns. Cortisol lays fat down around your middle, on the back of your arms and you grow what I
lovingly call a back verandah. Most people’s response to fat accumulation around their tummies is to
go on a diet which means eating less food. This confirms to your body what cortisol has driven your
body to believe is true, when in fact the opposite is true and food is likely to be abundant for you.
When you restrict your food intake on your “diet” you slow your metabolism even further making it
feel like you only have to look at food for weight to go on!

So if cortisol is a contributing factor to your weight gain, going on a calorie restricted diet is not your
answer. Sorting out your cortisol is and there are numerous methods that you can use to do this.

Sex Hormones
The major sex hormones for women are estrogen and progesterone with testosterone also playing a
role. The balance of these hormones can influence whether you are storing fat or burning it.
Estrogen lays down fat. Progesterone on the other hand, is essential for us to be able to access body
fat to burn it. Reproductively, progesterone’s job is to hold the lining of the uterus in place after
estrogen has laid it down. Biologically though, progesterone has many functions. It is one of our
most powerful anti‐anxiety agents, it is an anti‐depressant, it is a diuretic meaning it allows us to
excrete any excess fluid we may be carrying and it is essential for burning body fat. I think most
women want bucket loads of it forever!

If estrogen is far too high for the amount of progesterone being produced, body fat will be stored. It
is however ESSENTIAL to get to the bottom of why there is either poor progesterone production OR
why estrogen is in excess. Some people have excellent progesterone levels but their estrogen is
simply far too high to balance the progesterone. The liver plays a central role in whether estrogen
levels are appropriate or far too high for body fat to be burnt. Getting this hormonal balance right
can change a woman’s life for not only will she burn body fat far more easily but her menstrual cycle
will cause her, (and those around her!) far less PMT grief!

Hormonal imbalances can also be magnified after pregnancy. Getting on top of your hormonal
balance can change your head space as well as your body.

The Liver
The liver is the second largest organ in the human body after our skin. One of its primary roles is that
of detoxification. Detoxification is essentially a cleaning process with two phases and during this
process the liver decides whether to fully process a substance or recycle (reabsorb) it.
The liver has to process things we consume such as alcohol and caffeine but also things we absorb
through our skin. You only need to think about the way nicotine patches work to realise how
effectively we absorb substances through our skin. The liver also has to detoxify substances the body
naturally makes, such as cholesterol, our stress hormones and our sex hormones. The liver also picks
up any shortfall in digestion so if people have constipation or IBS, the liver will have an additional
workload.

The best way to imagine how the liver functions is to compare it to a motorway. When you first drive
onto a motorway, you want to go 100km per hour but sometimes you have to crawl along at 30km
per hour because the traffic is all banked up. The same thing happens with your liver. You want
things to fly through your liver at 100km per hour and be fully dealt with, not crawl through at 30km
per hour. It is when the traffic in the liver gets all banked up that it can impact on how we feel and
function every day, including our hormonal balance.

Sorting out liver function can also change your life and lead to far more effective fat burning.

The Thyroid
The thyroid gland is a little butterfly shaped gland that sits in your throat area. It makes hormones
that play an enormous role in your metabolic rate as well as your temperature regulation.
The thyroid gland can become over active or under active and it is the latter scenario that can lead
to weight gain that is incredibly difficult to shift until this issue is addressed. The thyroid gland is also
susceptible to auto‐immune diseases, meaning your immune system, which is supposed to defend
you from infection, starts to see the thyroid gland as a foreign substance and attacks it leading to a
change in its function. Infection and/or poor liver function are two factors that can initiate this
process.

It is important to work out the path that lead someone to altered thyroid function for behind the
“why” that lead you there is an enormous part of your fat burning, well being answer. Accidentally
Overweight explores the “whys” as well as ways to support the optimal thyroid function.

Insulin
The pancreas is another gland that makes a hormone intricately linked to body fat burning or
accumulation. Insulin is made by the pancreas and it is a fat storage hormone. We make it when we
eat carbohydrates. Yet we must consume some carbohydrates as they are vital to the function of our
brain, kidneys and red blood cells, in particular. So how do we manage this?

When it comes to body fat accumulation, it is the OVER PRODUCTION and/or big surges of insulin
that are the problem, not insulin itself. Many people have excellent blood glucose levels (also called
blood sugar levels) inside the normal range, yet they have to make a huge amount of insulin to keep
their blood sugar levels within the normal range.

So whether it is big surges of insulin on and off over the day as your blood sugar flies through the
roof and then subsequently plummets and then surges again, or because of your overproduction of
insulin, accessing body fat to burn for energy will prove difficult. Accidentally Overweight helps you
identify if insulin may be a factor for you and ways to solve this part of your puzzle.

Gut Bacteria
Recent research has found two distinct groups of gut bacteria inhabiting the colon can influence
whether you are storing fat or burning it. The big long scientific names for these classes of bugs are
Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. People with more Bacteroidetes in their large bowel have been shown
to burn fat more readily while those with more Firmicutes are more likely to store fat. Even if two
people ate the same amount of calories (kilojoules/energy) the dominant gut bacterial species can
make those calories seem almost like a much larger amount for people with more Firmicutes.
Addressing gut health and digestion can change your chemistry to one of fat burning rather than
storage. Accidentally Overweight describes digestion in detail and the foods to minimise to get great
results altering your gut bacteria.

Alkalinity
The concept of alkalinity can be a confusing one. It relates to the pH of your blood. Everything you
eat and drink has an eventual effect on your blood pH.

When it comes to body fat, the best way to imagine how alkalinity plays a role is to imagine how car
battery acid might burn your skin if it touches your hand. To exaggerate this scenario to
communicate this process to you, when the blood is constantly pushed to the less alkaline (hence
more acidic) end of its spectrum and the cells of your body are bathed in it, to protect them from the
acid burn the cells insulate themselves with fat.

To make the cells feel safe that they can let go of their layer of fatty protection, we need to push our
chemistry to be more alkaline.

Emotions
Humans store fat when they don’t feel safe, whatever that means to them. I don’t necessarily mean
safe from burglary (although if this has happened to you then it is likely to be one of your safety
“rules”).

We have rules about what it means for us to feel safe, usually in the areas of relationships, finances
and work. Trouble is, we don’t usually know what they are. Some of us have had traumatic
experiences in life that have led to us not feel safe, while for others they created meanings about
what things that happen mean when they were little that they continue to replay now they are
adults. It’s like an itch that constantly gets scratched only you usually don’t realise why you felt a
yucky feeling in your tummy or why your heart started to race or why “suddenly” your mood has
changed.

As an example, you may have had a chat to another mum at the school gate on the morning school
run, someone you like and possibly admire, someone whose life you might be curious about and you
are hopeful that you might become friends. You leave that morning experience feeling happy. You
then do the school pick up run in the afternoon and that same lady ignores you. There is no
conscious thought that she has “rejected” you but if you had been paying attention that moment,
you would probably have noticed a momentary sick feeling in your tummy. Her snub changes your
mood and hence the way you go on to treat/relate to the people you love the most in this world for
the rest of the evening. Only trouble is you can’t put your finger on why you had such a lovely
morning and such a dreadful afternoon. In this head space, you couldn’t care less about the diet you
started two days ago. You will eat whatever you like in this head space. But that only makes you
dislike yourself more... and the vicious cycle continues.

Many people overeat so they don’t have to truly feel or acknowledge the emotion behind their
behaviour. Some just say they love food.

Accidentally Overweight explores emotions as a factor that can block fat burning. And if this is a
factor in your body fat, then exploring this could literally change your life.

Don’t be Accidentally Overweight any longer. Explore the whys behind your body fat with the help of
Accidentally Overweight.