Yes, that's right, liver. Not the kind you eat, but the kind you own. I love info. My belief is that the more information you have, the better off you are, so that is why we are talking about our liver today.
This week I have been doing some reading on fat loss, a topic that boggles many of our minds. I have decided that I need to learn more about the inner workings of my body regarding food and metabolism. With each passing decade, keeping unhealthy fat off our bodies gets harder and harder. The trainer on my tape at Koko fit club said today that every decade we lose 10% muscle mass. Muscle mass is what keeps our metabolism going. Something about the cross fibers of the muscles deteriorating if we don't exercise and continually keep building muscle mass our entire lives is evidenced in older people by loss of balance and dimished daily activity. He says it doesn't have to be this way if we exercise to build muscle mass. I have this whole exercising thing down to a science between Bikram yoga and Koko fit club, but I still didn't know exactly how fat got out of or off of my body, so I did a little more research and found something amazing about our livers.
Our liver is responsible for removing the fat out of our body by covering it with bile and escourting it out. Our liver continues to do that 24 hours a day, unless we interupt that process by what we eat or drink. If we eat natural, one ingredient foods (an apple only has one ingredient in it), our liver functions just fine as a never-ending fat burning machine. We interrupt that process by eating foods with chemical additives (processed foods) and drinking alchohol. When the liver detects either a chemical or alchohol in our system, it immediately stops processing our fat and starts working to rid our system of the chemicals and alchohol. (I never knew my liver was so focused.) While it's doing that, as we keep eating (especially processed foods), our liver cannot keep up and all the fat that keeps coming into our body will be stored where? You guessed it – around our belly.
Armed with this knowledge, I then went on a quest for good liver cleaning foods to get mine in tip top shape. This is what I found:
garlic, grapefruit, beets, carrots, green tea, leafy green vegetables, avacados, apples, olive oil, whole grains, broccoli, cauliflower, lemons & limes, walnuts, cabbage, and tumeric
What? This, except for the tumeric, is what I basically eat, but I am still not pleased about my belly. I guess the only culprit is the wine. I admit it. I'm a wine lover, but right now, on the cusp of sixty, wine is my worst enemy because my metabolism is far from that of a thirty year old. I've had so many social engagements lately that I think my liver was busy processing wine for the past two weeks. It has not been engaged in fat processing at all. In fact, it has just been sending it to the very belly I exercise to get rid of. Hypothesis: no matter how much I exercise, if my liver is busy processing wine every night, I am never going to lose an inch on that belly. I cannot imagine what I'd look like if I also ate processed foods (anything in a box with a list of ingredients), white flour and sugar. Thank goodness I ditched that stuff long ago. Time for a Plan B.
Eating & drinking: eat only one ingredient foods: fruits, vegetables, chicken, fish, nuts, whole grains and for a social drink – stick to a gin & tonic, and after one, minus the gin
Exercise: need to build muscle mass – for every pound of muscle you add, you increase the rate of your metabolism by 7%. At my age, I better get building. My Koko fit club program has moved me to the next level in cardio and weight training. It's an eight week program, 24 sessions, so I need to do it three times a week. Today I completed session 3. I really do love this place – it really does have fit figured out! I will also keep my Bikram yoga 3-4 times a week. I have discovered I really love night yoga.
And, yes, my dear brother, (he keeps tabs on me) NO WINE! It's the middle of the weekend and there's none in the house! Lol!
And so, as another day goes by, that's the skinny on the liver, hopefully by learning this info it will also be the skinny on me, and …..I have written.
Let's remember one thing………
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