After reading how your body works in my previous post, I'm quite sure now you begin to understand why every diet plan advise you to eat 5 to 6 meals per day. The idea is all about to maintain your blood sugar tank, not to overflow, while it keeps us from hungry, which in turns slowing down our metabolism.

Think there is a blood sugar tank bandwidth, with lower limit and higher limit. When you take some food, you going to bring your blood sugar level up to higher level, and due to your physical and metabolism activity, it will gradually going down to your lower limit. And when it goes down to lower limit, you probably begin to feel hungry – time for refueling.


So what will happen if you take excessive calories in your meal? The calories derived from your meal will actually burst off your higher limit of your tank, and the excessive calories will be stored into fat cells.

You might be thinking to starve so your body can turn fat cells into your tank? Unfortunately, our body is really smart and its designed to switch into survival mode – and slowing down your metabolism. So during the survival mode, when you run out of fuel, you will probably losing some fats along with your muscles.

There is lot of diet plan been introduced out there such as Atkins diet, South Beach diet, Mediterranean diet, Abs diet etc. I didn't make specific comparison between all those, and of course they have their own good points and bad points, but I strongly believe the same principle still applies. I personally prefer the Abs Diet, written by Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko – I love the powerfoods part, and this diet is really simple - easy to follow.

You are free to choose which diet you'll going to stick to, but if you come from a place where it’s difficult to get those foods recommended by the plan, then how?? The answer is by knowing how our bodies work especially our metabolism, and then create your own diet plan.

We all know Obesity is our enemy, and the first thing we should do is to know our enemy. So, let's back to school and begin with knowing how our body works first. Or else, you are just shooting an arrow in the dark.

1, Think your body system as a car..

..the different is, the car is running on gas, but our bodies is running on blood sugar (glucose). If you ever did a blood test, there is a result showing you how much sugar concentrated in your blood, usually stated as mmol/liter.

When your running out of sugar, brain will detect it and send signal to your body system, and then hormone are released that instruct fat cells to metabolize fat and converted them to sugar form into our bloodstream.

And it also works in reverse way, which means if your bloodstream is overflowed by sugar, it will be converted to fat cells. This mechanism translates to our sugar fuel tank.. and the tank definitely has its size and normally its proportionate to our body weight.

2, Don't forget the Law of conservation of energy..

..states that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another, e.g. friction turns kinetic energy into thermal energy.

The food you eat, will become a food energy that soon will be converted to different form of energy.

Any under utilized food energy will be converted to potential energy - which is stored as fat cells!

3, Metabolism cause you burn calories 24/7..

..even at your resting state, just as a car still burning gas even on idling state. Oopss, did I mentioned the car again?

Basically,even there is no physical activity, your body still using the energy for the functioning of the vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, brain and the rest of the nervous system, liver, kidneys, sex organs, muscles and skin. For men, caloric expenditure due to metabolism is averagely, say about 1500kcal.

A good handicap for us, I guess. So if you are thinking to lose weight, your strategy is to play with your metabolism and how to rev up you metabolism.