It Can Be Done (Weight Loss) & Without Using Drugs.

Achieving lasting weight/visceral fat without GLP-1 Agonists that is.

Like most stand-up comedy I come with some good (but painful) news and some bad (but very sweet and easy) news so here goes with the TLDR first and then in a bit more detail. First the bad news :

The health of the nation is getting steadily worse & the rate of change is only increasing, You aren’t a special snowflake and your base physiology (shorthand for how it all functions) is the same as everyone else, On average you’re going to start getting sicker earlier than my generation did and that sickness will start with silent metabolic disease that leads to diabetes and/or fatty liver disease & that will progress to heart disease, strokes and in some, cancer. The primary cause comes down to what you’re feeding tour body with and secondly what you’re not asking it to do ; in short, not exercising in any useful way. There, that’s the bad news ; you’re getting sick but don’t know it, you’re going to get a lot sicker and when you do you’ll be lucky to see a GP and even luckier to get seen at all quickly when you attend your local A&E department because you can’t get an appointment with your GP. What’s more ; i’m sorry to say that most of it is your fault but aided and abetted by the food industry, so called, and it’s partner in profit – big pharma. The TLDR of the TLDR is that congratulations ; most of you are going to get sick, some of you will get fat and sick and some will end up fat, sick and stupid aka having Dementia as well as everything else.

The details.

When I first wrote this piece I loaded it with references and then realized that I wasn’t trying to write an academic essay but attempting to be engaging, thus I binned that entire section and slotted in a few explanations about each section ; if I was able to do it on my old computer I would add a whole load of footnotes but as it is I can’t so here goes :

My knowledge and experience with healthcare is largely institutional knowledge : it’s what we’ve been seeing for the last 30 years at least. It is also a view supported by every academic medical paper iv’e read in the last few years. I won’t quote here but the rates of diabetes and morbid obesity alone have skyrocketed in the last ten/fifteen years.

The good news is that you can do something about it and live a long healthy life, especially early on in life but to do so is a lot of work although relatively simple ; but just like common sense not exactly being common it isn’t the standard, or usual way of going about life. Once again i’ll start with the short and simple news : it can be done but it can only be done by you except that occasionally you’ll need specialist knowledge or assistance. Firstly though you’ll have to take complete responsibility for your own health and life ; it’s your body after all. What you have to do is simple but can be extremely difficult for some.

The first thing, even the only thing if it’s all that you can do, is to remove as much sugar from your diet as possible ; for me that meant biscuits and most cakes while for others it would be the high fructose corn syrup found in industrially made sweet drinks, confectionery and industrial baking. For a second thing start walking regularly – and I mean walk most days ; it doesn’t have to be a 30 mile death march across Dartmoor – all it takes is a few sessions of maybe 15-20 minutes ; the ideal is to get a pedometer and try and walk 7500 steps a day, every day (I usually allow myself one day off per week as rest). Number three in my top five is to add protein in your diet ; I usually include an egg in my breakfast and a cooked chicken thigh at lunch. With that the only specific exercise as deliberate exercise is to perform a set of ten bodyweight squats once per day and try to build that up over time ; muscle counts far more than medicine. Number five is the one that might cause some difficulty and it’s to do all of your eating within 8 hours per day and have the rest of the day/night in a fasted state ; I often don’t achieve a 16/8 but can almost always make it to 15 hours fasted.

The details : I’m sorry but diet trumps exercise every time unless you’re a committed gym bro (Or gym babe) doing insanely hard workouts with weights and, this is really important, eating an appropriate diet. Apologies once more as your enemy isn’t fat or salt but is sugar – almost uniquely so except that we should include HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) which is basically sugar – except even more metabolically dangerous than table sugar (sucrose).

If you really want to go down the route of taking responsibility for your health then one thing you have to do is acquire knowledge and one of the first things to get to grips with is how sugar (particularly too much sugar) acts in your body and what Insulin does : hint – Insulin’s role isn’t primarily blood sugar control although that’s a bonus – it’s primary role is that of a growth hormone, It’s a slightly strange take on the subject but some nutrition physiologists say that gaining visceral fat is an evolutionary success story and today the primary way that your body metabolizes and stores a poison (sugar) in an initially safer form ; ultimately of course it isn’t safe at all but highly metabolically active in it’s own right.

Your friend supermarket Karen, also known as vaccine Karen and Electric car Karen, might try to come across all morally superior when she’s trawling the supermarket for low fat this and low fat the other. The problem is that fat isn’t and has never been your enemy except when it is. Butter, Lard and Olive oil aren’t trying to kill you or do awful things to your cholesterol (cholesterol isn’t even the enemy that Karen thinks it is) but seed oils could be doing you a whole load of harm because they are fundamental causers of inflammation. While supermarket Karen is proudly displaying her low fat organic yoghurt or whatever ask her how much added sugar it has to make it even halfway palatable ; it’s usually lots.

What am I missing ?

That’s my big question to myself : my answer at this stage is that i’m not paying enough attention to the factors that ultimately decide ones health and longevity far more than crude body weight/BMI. Even now iv’e come to the realization that simple body weight isn’t that useful a guide on it’s own and what i’m doing already is regular waist circumference measurements and having all of my bloods checked.