10 Key Signs You Are Fat Adapted (No Equipment Needed)

hello health champions how do you know if you're truly fat adapted well if you're still having cravings and ravenous hunger and sugar cravings then you're probably not fat adapted yet so today we're going to talk about what fat adaptation is I'm going to give you ten signs to tell if you're getting into true fat adaptation coming right up hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything so what is fat adaptation fat adaptation simply means that your body has the ability to burn fat when mostly fat is available another way of looking at that is called metabolic flexibility so if mostly carbs or mostly fat or mostly protein or a mix of all of those are available then the body does just fine it has the metabolic machinery to switch from one to the other on very short notice that's metabolic flexibility and the only reason that this is even an issue is that we have trained our body away from being fat adaptive we've trained the body away from metabolic flexibility by having a couple of generations of people who have had virtually nothing but carbohydrate and carbohydrate is a fuel that raises blood sugar which is dangerous to the brain that's why an excess leads to diabetes and neurological problems and so forth so the body has to dispose of the carbohydrates first and if we eat frequent carbohydrates then the body never really gets to anything but the carbohydrates they become the priority and the body becomes dependent so that is the reason that if your carb dependent you've shifted all your metabolic Machinery over to carbohydrates so now when the carbohydrates disappear when you go on a low-carb diet your body says I've got no food I don't recognize where my regular food is I'm starving even though all that fat is available both in the diet if you eat a high fat diet and on the body your body doesn't have access to it because it has to retrain and become fat adapted and what that means is has to up regulate all the cellular machinery all the receptors and the enzymes and the mitochondria involved in fat metabolism and that takes a while it can take a couple of weeks if it has been totally basically shut down ketosis is something that's measured together with fat adaptation because ketones is a byproduct of fat burning so if you're in fat burning you're making ketones you're in ketosis but they're not really the same thing because you can have some ketosis without being fat adapted so every night when you're sleeping and every morning when you wake up you have some ketones even if you have a carb dependent metabolism during the night you go eight to ten hours without food and your body shifts a little bit but then if your carb adapted you go straight up and you have toast and orange juice and cereal and oatmeal and you fill up the glycogen stores and the body forgets all about burning fat so you never get into being fat adapted so even though you can have a little bit of ketosis from time to time it doesn't make you fat adapted so we need to understand that difference and I heard some people talk about this I wanted to make a comment about diuresis they said that diuresis is a sign of being fat burning and it's not it's even less so than the ketosis because diuresis is when you lose fluids that have been bound up in the body and the reason is that glycogen which you can store carbohydrates as glycogen you store about 1,500 grams about three pounds three to four pounds and that binds about three to four times its weight and water it's like a sponge it holds water to it so when you burn through the glycogen stores that water has nothing to hold on to and you flush it straight out so the first five six seven pounds that you lose on a low-carb diet is water and that's normal and that's okay but it doesn't mean you're burning fat or that your fat adapted it just means you're reducing your glycogen stores which is a good thing on the way to becoming fat adapted another thing I heard was that your fat adapted when you burn through all the glucose that's lingering that it can take a couple of weeks to become fat adapted because glucose is lingering and that's just not how it works because your body makes glucose all the time even when you're completely fasting your body makes glucose because you still even in a ketosis even in a fasting state you still are going to maintain a blue glucose of in the 70 75 80 range so glucose does not linger you burned through the stores pretty quickly and then your body makes it as needed has really nothing to do with whether your fat adapted or not so how long does it take to become fat adapted to where your body is metabolically flexible again well it depends primarily on two things it depends on how insulin resistant you are the more insulin resistance you are the higher your fasting insulin the tougher it's going to be for you to be fat adapted because that high insulin level locks the fat away so even though you're eating the fat you're kind of burning it but your body can't see the burn the body fat so you're not truly fat adapted because you're still gonna get hungry because you're depending on dietary fuel because of that high insulin level the other factor is how long have you been insulin-resistant and how long have you been carb dependent if it's been going for a decade or two then you can probably count on two to six weeks for your body to completely shift its machinery and that's if you're very consistent do you have to be patient here's the good news though if you are consistent with it if you truly become fat adapted so if you've been on a low-carb diet myself for example I've been low-carb for probably ten years I've been in and out Aikido probably been in low-grade keto for 80% of the time for those last ten years so if I go on a vacation and I do a little carb loading I make a few exceptions and I eat more carbs then I notice immediately I get hungrier I gotta have frequent meals my body is screaming for food but if I come home and I just cut out the carbs then I'm back in true fat adaptation in 24 to 48 hours because I do have the metabolic flexibility so that's the good news once you get this done right then you don't have to do it over and over and over it gets easier and easier so here are the 10 signs that you are getting fat adapted number one thing you're gonna notice is less hunger you eat your meals and you're not super hungry between meals you don't need snacks etc just overall less hunger number two less carb cravings you don't feel like when you're eating a meal that oh I have to have that rice I have to have that potato a lot of people they can't just have meat and vegetables they don't feel satisfied unless they have also stuffed in some carbs number three is you don't feel a need for snacks a lot of people have been told and trained to have three meals plus three snacks plus an evening meal maybe but as you get fat adapted your everything levels out and you notice that there's no problem at all skipping the snacks number four no ravenous hunger so the character of your hunger changes too that's some people they just get totally out of control they can't function they get sleepy they get headaches they get irritable they get angry they go out of their mind their body is screaming for food that all goes away you're not gonna have that kind of hunger anymore and then you'll wake up one morning and notice you want to skip a meal it's like I'm not hungry and that's something that you should take the cue that don't eat if you're not hungry your body is trying to tell you something it has plenty of food it has plenty of energy resources just leave it alone and skip the meal sign number six is you'll notice you get fat cravings that when you eat a meal you want it to be really fatty if it's not dripping with butter if it's not a lot of fat in there your body senses that it's missing something so then you're wondering well now I just replace the carb craving for a fat craving no not really it's just that when you're eating your body knows it wants that dense concentrated high-quality fuel and with a carb craving you're perpetuating the problem with the carb craving you're creating a blood sugar roller coaster with the fat craving you're just providing your body a stable fuel that it needs and if you eat it when your body asks for it you'll notice it becomes easier and easier and easier to go longer without food something else you might notice at this point is that if you get up in the morning and you forget to eat breakfast like your long weekend then you get busy with something you go out in the yard and all of a sudden it's 5:00 in the afternoon and you haven't eaten anything and you didn't really think about it because your body is fat adapted it has a stable source of fuel you don't need all that snacks that's a great sign that your fat adapted another interesting sign is ketone strips because when you first start burning fat and you're making some ketones a lot of them are gonna spill out in the urine so the ketone strips that you pee on they measure the ketones that get out of the body but as you get more and more fat adapted your body produces more ketones and you would expect that ketone strips to show a higher rate of ketones but instead they start showing a lower number maybe even just a trace and that's because even though you're making more ketones your body has up regulated its machinery to burn not just fat but also to utilize the ketones and now your body is using them instead of spilling them out in the urine so at first the ketone strips are going to show increasing amounts and then they're gonna show decreasing amounts and that's a great sign sign number eight no mood swings because a lot of mood swings have to do with blood sugar and they have to do with energy supply so if your carb dependence you're gonna have blood sugar swings as you get fat adapted you have virtually no blood sugar swings today I measured my glucose and it was 80 before I ate and then I had a very large meal 1,500 calories or so and afterwards my blood sugar was a hundred and one so they're very very slight changes in blood sugar and that reflects in your mood number nine it's also going to reflect in your energy level because your mood and your energy often go together so when your energy supply is stable then you always have energy throughout the day so some people experience much better energy but primarily what you'll notice is stable energy you're not dependent on food you're not dependent on snacks to function sign number ten mental clarity ketones is a fantastic fuel for the brain it likes it much better than glucose actually and it's a more stable fuel plus when you become fat adapt you've also decreased the inflammation in the body you've decreased inflammation from grains and sugar but also because insulin in itself drives inflammation and inflammatory processes so when you bring insulin down and become fat adapted now the brain has more stable and it has better fuel and less inflammation so for a lot of people this shows up as mental clarity the brain fog lifts and they can think they can live in a way that they never have felt for years now it's important to understand that while most people will experience most of these signs not everyone is going to experience all of them and that goes especially for the last two the energy and the mental clarity because there's so many other factors that influence that and primarily we're talking about people with sensitivities and autoimmunity and other sources of inflammation and maybe hypothyroid so if you're not getting all ten then chances are that you have a little bit more of a complex situation you're not in the 80 or 90% but don't despair just keep being consistent with these things and then maybe look for some help from someone who can help you iron out those last few details and then a little bonus for you and this is kind of interesting it's not necessarily due to fad adaptation per se it might be more due to habits and neuroplasticity but here's a fact your taste buds will change and this is a good thing because people think that oh I can never eat that way because I'm used to eating this way well you can change your taste and one way that you'll notice the first thing that you'll notice is that things that you used to like that we're sweet now taste nauseatingly sweet so for one example milk chocolate if you used to love milk chocolate and you taste it now it would taste almost disgusting it would so sweet so nauseating of course nowadays you don't eat milk chocolate so you wouldn't know how that tastes but I'm just saying hypothetically and if you were to fast for a couple of days and then you come back and you eat a piece of 85% chocolate it will be like the sweetest thing you ever tasted this is a good thing because you can learn to eat things you can learn to like things everything that you think you like is because you learn to like it so just learn to like the things that you know are better for you simple as that if you enjoyed this video make sure to check out that one thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 591,013

Rating: 4.9518576 out of 5

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Id: nABhyA0V8AQ

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020