Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and transform your life

By Shawn Stevenson

Every single cell in our bodies is made out of the food that we eat, and, more astonishingly, what we eat largely controls every action that our cells take.

Epigenetics - the study of our cellular function above genetic control.

Even though our brain only accounts for about 2 percent of our body’s overall weight, it actually consumes 20 to 25 percent of our caloric intake - what we eat automatically affects our brain’s performance.

Section I - Eating for fat loss

Make the Connections

• Subcutaneous fat - body fat that sits right under your skin and is spread throughout your body.
• Visceral fat - the fat we store deep inside of our torso, around our organs and under our abdominal muscles. Generally what we’re talking about when we think of carrying extra weight around the belly.
• Intramuscular fat - used as on-site energy by your muscles to utilize for things like basic movements and moderate exercise.
• Brown fat - currently the subject of numerous studies because of the profound effects it has on your metabolism.

The three previous fat communities (subcutaneous, visceral, and intramuscular) are all fat communities that store energy (they’re in a class called white adipose tissue). Whereas brown fat (or brown adipose tissue) is a fat community that doesn’t store fat..it actually burns it.

• Beige fat - appears to have the flexibility to act like either white fat or brown fat.
• The number of fat cells in your body will remain relatively constant throughout your lifetime. Genetically, you have a certain number of fat cells in your cards, and “gaining fat” primarily means packing more stuff into those fat cells. We do have fat cells that die and are born all of the time - they are simply replacing each other.
• Lipolysis - the process of withdrawing the energy from your fat to use as fuel
• Lipogenesis - the process of storing energy as fat in your body
• Your body’s use of fuel works on a hierarchy. It will go for glucose first, then glycogen, and only then will it proactively go through the work of breaking down deposited fat to use it for fuel.
• One calorie is the amount of energy you need to heat up 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
• Thermos effect of food - it costs calories to absorb calories…Your stomach acid is critical in breaking your food down into more digestible components.
• Sometimes calories from the foods you consume are simply not digested.