glucosis-my term for a carbohydrate metabolism. Glucose and ketones are the only two fuels that come from food.( Alcohol is a third fuel.)
I find that people understand the concept better when I tell them, " If you ' re not in lipolysis, you ' re in glucosis." The two fuel sources are your body ' s alternative, completely parallel options for energy metabolism.
This terminology has helped many of my patients convince their doctors or dieticians that Atkins was the right path. If you have a doctor who tells you lipolysis( and ketosis) is bad, counter with this question, " If I ' m not in lipolysis then I will be in glucosis, right? So, why is it so bad for an overweight person like me, with hyperinsulinism, to be living off my own stored fat?"
If you think about it for a moment, you ' ll understand why such a dual system exists. Before the invention of agriculture, in the first few hundred thousand years of human life, periods of severe food shortage must have been uncomfortably common. Human beings had to be able to burn their own body fat for fuel on those recurrent occasions when the larder was bare. Naturally, our bodies devised a highly efficient system for doing just that.
Have you ever wondered what sustained bears and other hibernating animals during their long winter sleep? It was the utilization of their fat stores. When you dial down the volume of insulin production, as you do in lipolysis, your body is equipped to burn your own body fat in a similar way. It takes place smoothly and is self-sustaining. For you, this is a sort of biologic utopia. The process of losing weight becomes as painless as eating naturally was when you were piling on pounds.
Why Does Lipolysis Work?
You ' ll remember that insulin ' s job is to convert all your excess carbohydrate into stores of body fat. In a normally functioning body, fatty acids and ketones are readily converted from fat tissue to fuel. But in overweight people, high insulin levels prevent this from happening.
Most obese people become so adept at releasing insulin that their blood is never really free of it and they ' re never able to use up their fat stores. By primarily burning fat instead of carbohydrates, lipolysis breaks the cycle of excess insulin and resultant stored fat. So by following a fat-containing, controlled carbohydrate regimen, you bypass the process of converting large amounts of carbohydrate into glucose. When your carbohydrate intake drops low enough to induce fat burning, abnormal insulin levels return to normal-perhaps for the first time in years or decades.'- '
Hunger Is Reduced
One of the most attractive features of Atkins is that lipolysis, and the resulting production of ketones if you have triggered the secondary process of ketosis, helps suppress your appetite. Frankly, it first attracted me because back in the 1960s, when I was a young doctor with an ever-increasing paunch, I wanted to slim down. But I knew very well that I couldn ' t stand being hungry for very long. I had too big an appetite and too little willpower, two facts that haven ' t changed much.
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