Finally, inflammation keeps your body from responding properly to adiponectin, which helps regulate blood sugar and body fat. Add up all these responses, and you get weight gain.
Insulin resistance. Insulin is a hormone that moves sugar out of your bloodstream and into your cells. When I say, ‘sugar’, I don’t just mean the sweet white stuff that sits on the table. I mean the starches found in grains, the fructose and glucose found in fruits and vegetables and the lactose found in milk. These sugars enter your blood, where they are meant to provide energy for your body and brain, as long as insulin helps move them into your cells.
But when you are consuming too much sugar (in the form of sweets, starches or dairy products) or when your system is inflamed, your body secretes too much insulin and keeps the insulin in your bloodstream longer than it’s supposed to. After a while, your cells can’t ‘hear’ all that excess insulin. Your insulin receptors stop responding to the insulin, and your blood sugar remains high. You may eventually have trouble manufacturing enough insulin, putting you at risk of developing diabetes. Meanwhile, you can’t use that extra blood sugar for energy, and it ends up getting stored as fat.
In addition, all that excess insulin in your blood tells your body you have enough sugar around for fuel, so it doesn’t need to burn stored fat. Insulin resistance basically slams the doors to your fat cells shut. Insulin resistance also makes it nearly impossible to lose weight. And inflammation virtually guarantees that you will suffer from insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance slams the doors to your fat cells shut.
Fluid retention. Inflammation doesn’t just help you hold onto your body fat, it also causes you to retain fluids so you feel bloated and heavy.
Digestive problems. When inflammation rages through your intestines, your digestive system can’t operate efficiently. If you have an imbalance of gut bacteria, with more bad bacteria than good, you will actually extract more calories from the food you eat and store them as fat. If your gut wall is damaged and leaky, you will struggle to be able to absorb your nutrients. The result is that even though you are eating, you still feel hungry and unsatisfied because your body can’t get what it needs from your food.
Loss of energy. Inflammation causes you to feel sluggish and fatigued. If your body is inflamed, you are not going to feel like moving much, so you become even more sedentary. The less active you are, the more resistant to insulin you become – and the vicious cycle continues.
I hope you’re beginning to see why I told Leslie to pull out of her diet any high-FI foods that might be causing an inflammatory response. The fastest way to gain weight that you can’t lose is to allow your body to become inflamed. And the fastest way to drop those extra pounds is to remove the sources of inflammation and let your body heal. That’s what the Virgin Diet is all about.
As we just saw, inflammation causes you to gain and retain weight in several different ways – and those extra fat cells don’t just sit there, either. They release more inflammatory chemicals, creating the mother of all vicious cycles. Inflammation can lead to obesity. And fat – especially belly fat – releases inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, which are messengers that your body uses to start the inflammatory process. So your fat cells are producing more inflammatory messengers, and all that inflammation is making you gain more weight, and then your fat is basically making you more fat! How unfair is that?
Fat releases inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.
So all that extra fat you might be carrying around is not benign, like a backpack. It’s more like carrying a bomb in your backpack. It’s why I want you to lose fat quickly and lower inflammation quickly by pulling the 7 high-FI foods from your diet.
Following the Virgin Diet will also help you overcome insulin resistance. As part of the programme, you’ll eat every 4 to 6 hours and stick to moderate portion sizes of clean, lean protein; healthy fats; high-fibre, low-glycaemic carbs; and non-starchy vegetables. (I go into more detail about the programme in Chapter 8.) This is the fastest way I know to get your blood sugar levels balanced and your insulin working efficiently once more.
Inflammation doesn’t only create insulin resistance. It also creates leptin resistance, which makes it even harder for you to lose weight.
Leptin is a hormone that responds to how much you’ve eaten and signals the brain that you’ve had enough (satiety is the technical term). Leptin also helps burn fat by cueing your metabolism to run faster when you have extra fat to burn and slowing down your metabolism when your body needs to hold onto fat. You can see how our ancestors might have needed this hormone to help adjust their metabolisms depending on whether food was plentiful or scarce.
When leptin is working well, you eat until you don’t need any more food and then you stop. When your system is leptin-resistant, you have a lot of leptin circulating in your blood, but your brain can’t ‘hear’ it. You end up with too much leptin in your blood and not enough in your brain. That’s the situation for the vast majority of overweight people. As a result, they experience increased hunger, food cravings and weight gain. Even though they’re overweight, their bodies believe they’re hungry and go into a state of fat storage.
If you want to lose that extra weight, you have to heal the leptin resistance. Healing inflammation will go a long way towards getting your leptin working properly again. And pulling the high-FI foods is key.
If you want to lose that extra weight, you have to heal the leptin resistance.
Meanwhile, if you keep eating high-FI foods, you continue to feed the problem. You might think you are making healthy choices with your nonfat yoghurt, omega-3–rich eggs and low-fat soy milk, but every bite of high-FI food is potentially triggering an immune response that could flood your body with inflammatory chemicals and start the whole cycle over again. So basically, any time you eat a problem food, you’re setting yourself up for weight gain.
Any time you eat a problem food, you’re setting yourself up for weight gain.
All of the top 7 high-FI foods are potential sources of inflammation, which is why it’s so important to pull them from your diet. Once you do so, your