| Notes | Book |
You can loose weight more easily if you understand something about how glycogen works in your body.
Glycogen is stored in your muscles and converted to glucose, according to the energy needs of the muscles. Some glycogen is also stored in the brain and there is a lot of glycogen in the liver. The brain needs a steady flow of energy. When it uses up all its stored glycogen, it calls for glycogen from the muscles. If the muscles run out of glycogen, then you get hungry.
So to keep from getting hungry so often, make sure there is plenty of glycogen stored in your muscles. To do that, you need to use most of the glycogen stored in your muscles on a regular basis. Then your body will get in the habit of making and storing more glycogen. Your muscles will have larger glycogen reservoirs, and you won't get hungry so often.
Exercise makes you loose weight. But there is more to it than just calories burned. By increasing your glycogen throughput, you can decrease your appetite.
To maximize your weight loss using this principle it is important that you do the right type of exercise at the right time. You should hold short exercise sessions several times a day. This helps maximize your glycogen throughput, decrease your appetite, and keep your metabolism high. You should stop exercising a muscle when you start to feel a burn, and never push yourself to actual pain. When you push your muscles into pain, you are no longer using the glycogen cycle, so you are not helping your glycogen capacity. Painful exercise also creates fatigue poisons, which do not help your health.
I favor lifting weights. It allows control of how much exercise different muscles get, and you can exercise a lot of muscles without stressing your heart and lungs. At first I tried various types of machines, but they broke a lot. Then I started using a free-weight bench, and I have been using it for several years now with no problem. I do 30-minute sessions 4 times a day. Sometimes I miss a session if business has to be done, and sometimes I substitute physical labor like gardening or carpentry. I never break a sweat, except in the hottest weather, and I hardly ever have sore muscles.
Without this level of exercise, I gain weight really easily. With it, I still have to watch what I eat a little, but it is not difficult to control my appetite and lose weight if I need to. Before I started this program, I was always hungry no matter how much I ate, and no matter how fat I got. Now I occasionally forget that it is time to eat.
And it is good to be 64 years old and still be able to push 70 pounds 240 times a day without working up a sweat. That helps when there are physical things you need to do.