The All-Day Fat-Burning Diet: The 5-Day Food-Cycling Formula That Resets Your Metabolism To Lose Up to 5 Pounds a Week by Yuri Elkaim Read Free Book Online

it considers these proteins foreign and potentially dangerous, even if they’re seemingly harmless foods.
    With constant exposure, these proteins can eventually trick our immune system into attacking our own body because many (for instance, gliadin from wheat and casein from dairy) closely resemble the proteins of our very own tissues. This is known as molecular mimicry, and it’s one of the leading causes of a host of health issues. Take, for instance, Hashimoto’s disease—a type of autoimmune disease that accounts for 90 percent of hypothyroidism cases, in which constant consumption of gluten (specifically, the protein gliadin) can turn the immune response against the thyroid. It’s all because the protein in gluten resembles our thyroid tissue. Gluten isn’t the only cause, but it plays a big part.
    But let’s bring this back to the gut and how it might be setting your body up to store too much fat. One such way is via the generation of toxins called lipopolysaccharides (LPS) that arise as a result of bacterial imbalance within your gut. These toxins have been shown to stimulate the formation of new fat cells, thereby promoting weight gain. 32 In addition, these cause leptin resistance, which significantly impairs your brain’s ability to respond to the “I’m full” signal you get after eating. Thus, you tend to eat more.
    It’s not just the toxins coming from bad bacteria that prove problematic. The composition of bacteria within your gut can also be a big factor that determines whether or not you’re set to gain and hold on to weight. A 2010 study in the
British Journal of Nutrition
showed that among 50 women, reduced numbers of the bacteria
Bifidobacterium
and
Bacteroides
and increased numbers of
Staphylococcus
, Enterobacteriaceae, and
Escherichia coli
were detected in overweight compared with normal-weight women. 33 Obviously, certain bacteria are not as desirable as others.
    The dietary approach you’ll discover in this book will help foster the good bacteria and starve off many of the not-so-good ones so that you can enjoy better health and easier weight loss. The best part is that this will all happen as a strategic by-product of simply eating the healthy foods you’ll enjoy on the All-Day Fat-Burning Diet.
    FAT TRIGGER #5:
    Sugar Overload
    It’s fitting to follow the section on gut health with a discussion of one of the foods that’s playing a leading role in ruining it—sugar! If you’re someone who has a sweet tooth, then you undoubtedly know how challenging it can be to kick those sugar cravings. Sugar is an addictive drug, and it lights up pleasure centers in the brain in a way similar to what happens when we take hard-core drugs like cocaine and heroin.
    I believe that added sugar is the single worst ingredient in the modern diet, especially as it pertains to fat loss. Numerous studies show that eating excess amounts of added sugar can have harmful effects on metabolism, leading to insulin resistance, belly fat gain, high triglycerides, and increases in dangerous low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. 34 , 35 Sugar is fattening, partly because it doesn’t get registered in the same way as other calories by the brain, making us eat more. Not surprisingly, studies show that people who eat the most sugar are at a high risk of future weight gain and obesity. 36 That’s frightening since our average sugar consumption has skyrocketed in the past 75 years with the advent of glass bottling technology, refrigerated vending machines, and the use of high-fructose corn syrup as a cheaper sweetening option.
    At a very basic level, sugar makes you fat because it’s quickly broken down and its glucose component spikes your blood sugar. As a result, insulin is released to remove all that excess sugar from the blood, and it’s stored in your muscles, liver, and fat cells. The important thing to note is that your muscles and liver can store only so much in the form of glycogen before a