Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

There are no short cuts to weight loss. In my experience, I still find that the most effective way to help people lose weight is with the combination of a healthier diet and exercise along with addressing underlying metabolic imbalances — such as insulin resistance, thyroid gland function and stress levels (because stress hormones impact both insulin resistance and thyroid hormones).

However, there have been recent discoveries, and much discussion¹ about the role that so-called brown fat may play in weight loss. Brown adipose tissue — brown fat — is common to many mammals. It’s different from our blobby yellow fat in that it has a very high metabolic rate and contains a protein that converts calories directly to heat. That helps it do its job, which is to keep mammals warm in cold weather. Even when brown fat isn’t kicking in to raise body temperature, its high metabolic rate also helps keep those animals lean.

As humans, we are born with some brown fat, but it was thought that we lose all of it as we age. However, recent research in the New England Journal of Medicine² has discovered that adults do retain some brown fat, and that brown fat is inversely proportional to body mass index (BMI). Researchers now think that increasing our brown fat activity may help us lose weight.

Since the primary trigger for brown fat thermogenesis (burning) is having adequate levels of T3 thyroid hormone,³ metabolic balance and optimization is the most important factor in keeping brown fat as active as it should be.

However, I did some research and there are ways to enhance brown fat activity.

Have you noticed over the past several years that people are starting to get comfortable with the idea of carrying around “a few extra pounds?” I see this a lot in my new patients: the thinking that if you can work out “hard” you can be “fat but fit.”

Don’t believe it.

Take a recent conversation I had with one of my patients, who I’ll call Alice. She’s middle-aged. When she came to me she was “a little on the heavy side,” as she put it. I told her she really would have to drop the extra pounds to avoid heart disease and other serious health problems.

We’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in our practice — many people are still afraid to eat fat. Even those who are experiencing the benefits of a low-carb, higher-fat diet can’t seem to make the change without having some guilt or concern about the butter on their sautéed vegetables or the cholesterol in their steamed shrimp.

The discovery of “leptin” in 1994 created an explosion of interest in the “biology of white adipose tissue” — otherwise known as FAT. You probably remember those photos of seriously obese mice sitting next to their slender littermates — and the only difference between them was that the thin ones had been given this magic [...]

Hate is never a good motivation for anything except generating more hate. It should be obvious that hating our fat is never really going to produce anything except more self and body hate. This kind of thinking will never lead us to being thin. Love can only do that. But how do we learn to love something that our entire society hates?

From 1977 to 2001, the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages containing fructose increased 135 percent. In 2006 five different publications came out showing that adolescents, college students and adults under 50 were consuming as much as 20 percent of their calories from sugar-sweetened beverages — and that doesn’t include the sugar calories from cakes and desserts. Most of this sugar comes from fructose and “fructose on steroids,” also known as high-fructose corn syrup.