Shannan’s Journey

All that may be confusing, but now you know why some people can eat 500 grams of carbs daily, do no cardio, and still lose fat. Their adrenaline is higher, their metabolic rate is higher, they’re easily accessing stored fat for energy, and insulin doesn’t prevent them from doing so to as great of a degree as others.

For the rest of us, in order to stimulate round-the-clock fat burning, we’ll want to either increase adrenaline, or our sensitivity to it. There are three ways to do that:

1) Exercise intensely. Exercise is a very potent stimulator of adrenaline. The more intense the activity, the better. This doesn’t mean you should go out and do intense full body workouts and HIT cardio seven days a week, but if you can recover from it, more intense activity has better fat burning and nutrient partitioning benefits.

If you routinely like to do a mix of low and high intensity exercise, a good rule of thumb is to start your workouts off with more intense variations (weight training and HIT cardio) to boost adrenaline and free up a lot of fatty acids, and end it with low-intensity stuff to burn off more of the mobilized fat stores. A 30-minute session of leisurely cardio will be more effective if it’s preceded by an intense weight training workout.

2) Lower your insulin. Lowering your insulin allows easier fat mobilization. Performing fat burning exercise in a state of lower insulin allows adrenaline to immediately begin mobilizing fat. That means doing your normal cardio preceded by a low-carb meal, after weight training or on a low carb day (when your blood sugar and insulin are lower).  This is a superior way to do it rather than coming home and eating a couple of bowls of Cap’n Crunch, and we all know that one

I’m personally am a big fan of totally fasted early morning cardio, but provided you have a protein drink or some BCAAs, it does have utility for this purpose.

3) Supplement wisely. Supplements like coffee and even green tea all have positive effects on elevating adrenaline. A good stimulant stack can increase your metabolic rate by up to 15%, largely due to increases in adrenaline.

Be judicious about your use of the stronger stimulants though. They are effective, but they work best if cycled off 1-2 days per week. Furthermore, you shouldn’t use them if you suffer from burnout or adrenal fatigue.  Never do anything supplement consistantly without a break.  L-tyrosine increases noradrenaline, is perfectly natural, and can be used anytime.

Stimulants blunt insulin sensitivity in both fat and muscle cells, which, in addition to raising that threshold where insulin shuts off fat burning mentioned above, means less nutrient uptake in both fat and muscle cells. This means your body doesn’t store fat as easily, but it also struggles a bit to replenish muscular glycogen and send amino acids into your muscles.

However, as long as you exercise, you can selectively increase muscle’s insulin sensitivity. Combine stimulants and smart training, and you’ll get less nutrient uptake into fat cells and, relatively normal nutrient uptake into muscle cells, so more of the food you eat ends up in your muscles.

“Can’t I just have some coffee and donuts, and go watch TV?”

Whatever you do, don’t do that! One of the problems with using artificial stimulants to boost adrenaline is that adrenaline frees up energy stores and inhibits energy uptake in the muscles (and fat) to make more energy available to the brain.

That’s not a bad thing, as long as you burn off the freed up energy stores, which you do when you exercise. However, when you combine a sedentary lifestyle, along with excessive nutrition and artificially high adrenaline, you’re pouring a lot of nutrients in your bloodstream (from your crappy diet), and you also have adrenaline breaking down lots of fatty acids in the blood stream that don’t get burned off.  So instead of getting burned off, all this fat and glucose sits in the bloodstream with nowhere to go but your butt or your gut. This is the bane of the Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, and the couch potato crowd.

Over time this can lead to symptoms of metabolic syndrome — insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and increased visceral fat. The take home point here is that stimulants can be an asset unless you’re taking in well over your maintenance calorie level, and sitting on your butt. In that case, all the above benefits are totally negated.

Insulin and adrenaline play a game of tug of war on fat cells. Lowering insulin or increasing adrenaline leads to easier fat loss. Increasing insulin or decreasing adrenaline leads to easier fat deposition. The more adrenaline you produce, the higher your metabolism, and the more carbs you can eat while still burning fat.

By taking steps to optimize the adrenaline/insulin ratio, you use more fat for fuel around the clock. Since you’re burning more fat for energy and storing less of it, more of the calories you ingest can be directed to your muscles instead of fat.

This allows you to shift body composition toward a leaner and harder side. You can also maintain muscle better when in a strict cutting phase, and stay much leaner when in a muscle building phase.

Now I know it’s all easier said than done but, that doesn’t mean we all can’t start tomorrow

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.