Struggle To Keep Weight/Fat Off
Trying to keep fat off your frame can be an uphill battle if you don’t have genetics that may work in your favor. For the same reason fat can come off much easier for others and much more slowly for others or stubborn to remove in certain parts of the body.
And for anyone going the dieting cycle of a bodybuilder, there’s usually a long period of time that you’re adding pounds to your frame just so you can shed as much fat as possible during your cut. Ideally this is what we want to do when trying to put on muscle but unfortunately there is such thing as too much too soon when it comes to this.
What I mean by that is that many people are unaware of the amount of fat that they put on during one of these lengthy “bulking seasons” and they wind up with too much fat to lose for their diet. The result is a desperate cut to lose fat, which cuts into your muscle you’ve built up or subpar results that wind up with a hard physique and plenty of squishy fat covering all your hard work.
I’m briefly gonna go over why fat accumulates as fast as it does and why it can be even harder to get rid of fat once it’s on your body.
How Your Fat Cells Work/Grow
Your fat cells in your body are designed for one purpose and that’s for the storage of excess energy that can be used at a later time. The fatty acids that you consume from your foods get stored in complex lipid chains known as triglycerides, which are later stored in the fat cells also known as adipose tissue.
As more triglycerides are stored in the adipose tissue, the cell continues to expand until it reaches its maximum capacity for storage. At this point the cell will then divide and continue with storage until it’s no longer required.
Now when each of us were born, we were predisposed with a certain amount of fat cells, this number being around 5 billion. By time an adolescent reaches adulthood, the average amount of fat cells in his/her body will reach around 25-30 billion.
When fat cells are filled to their maximum capacity they seek more help for additional storage by converting other stem cells into fat cells. Fat cells do this by sending signals to stem cells to change them to “pre-adipocyte cells”, another term for a fat cell.
The bad news with all of this is that once these fat cells are created your body keeps them forever. Many people think they get rid of these fat cells for good by liposuction or other types of surgery, but recent studies have already proven this false.
Downsides of Fat in the Body
Gaining muscle comes with the territory of putting on fat, so there’s not gonna be much that can be changed about that. What we do want to discuss is what happens when people take bulking too far and gain unnecessary amounts of fat.
According to findings from the University of Michigan, there’s a molecule known spfr5 that is a known contributor to influencing the pathways of fat cells to grow larger. The interesting thing about the study was that they found that spfr5 molecules were higher in individuals with higher amount of fat cells than others, which correlated with the theory of outside factors inhibiting weight loss for obese individuals.
Another well-known contributing factor to obesity problems is the hormonal production of leptin in individuals. Leptin is one of the hormones responsible for appetite suppression and when it’s released makes us want to put down the fork and stop eating.
Leptin is produced by the fat cells, so you would think that chubbier or fatter individuals would want to stop eating, the problem is they don’t. The reason why is because people with higher fat cell counts produce more leptin than average individuals and they become resistant to it.
With leptin resistance also comes another common epidemic known as insulin resistance. The body produces insulin in large spikes in response to raised glycemic levels in order to rush nutrients to the body’s cells. Fatter individuals also produce too much of this much needed hormone and causes a host of other problems besides compounded effects of weight gain.
From all this we can conclude that more fat isn’t worth short term gratification of “looking bigger” when it comes to long term problems with health and increasing the amount of fat cells in our bodies permanently.
The Wrap Up
Once excess fat is stored in your body, it creates a new cells and they’re there forever. You can always burn fat and get rid of excess weight at any time, but your body will always be more susceptible to put on fat easier than average people and you’ll always struggle to get rid of weight. Gaining excess fat is like a snowball effect that can be prone to get worse the longer you don’t discipline yourself to control your diet until it’s too late. Many people never grasp this concept and ruin their physiques forever by not following this advice and pacing themselves.