Discovery Health : Jonathan Ross

July 17, 2009

With the 5 Worst Weight Loss Myths out of the way, it's time to look in the other direction: The 5 Best Coming Trends in Fitness and Fat Loss. Each one will have it's own separate post, but here is the list, with the current topic in bold:

1. Fat as the largest endocrine system gland

2. Shifting attitudes about human movement patterns

3. Quality of the workout gets better results than quantity

4. How leptin and other metabolic hormones affect fat distribution

5. Exercise increasingly connected to activities rather than just exercise

Body Fat is Increasingly Considered to be the Largest Endocrine System Gland

The glands of the endocrine system and the hormones they release influence almost every cell, organ, and function of our bodies. The endocrine system is instrumental in regulating mood, growth and development, tissue function, and metabolism, as well as sexual function and reproductive processes.

The foundations of the endocrine system are the hormones and glands. As the body's chemical messengers, hormones transfer information and instructions from one set of cells to another. Although many different hormones circulate throughout the bloodstream, each one affects only the cells that are genetically programmed to receive and respond to its message.

A gland is a group of cells that produces and secretes, or gives off, chemicals. What does this mean for body fat?

Obese and thin X-ray Modern research into the effect of body fat and fat cells is changing our understanding of weight gain, fat loss, and perhaps most significantly, the extra difficulty in losing fat once you’ve gained a significant amount of it and the relative ease in regaining it once you have.

Once you fill up a fat cell and still have more fat to store, your body makes more fat cells. And once they are there, they never go away. And the more fat and fat cells you have stored in your body, it begins to become what many researchers are calling “the largest endocrine gland” in the body. The fat begins to exert a strong influence on metabolism that is not favorable.

"If you have excess fat, even in small amounts, the body starts mounting an immune response," says Dr. Gokhan Hotamisligil of the Harvard School of Public Health...it's "almost as if the body is perceiving excess calories as an invading organism."

Fat cells also secrete estrogen, leptin (more details on this in item #4), ghrelin, resistin, adiponectin, and a few other hormones and compounds. Resistin interferes with the operation of insulin. Fat Cells in Adipose Tissue Adiponectin interferes with resistin. The more your fat cells fill up with fat, the resistin you make...and the less adiponectin. Fat can also active the inactive form of cortisol (stress hormone) and make it active, creating a stress response in the body. It's easy to see how fat starts to take control of many bodily systems to perpetuate itself.

Personally, I’ve seen this many times over the years. I call it “physiological momentum.” Your body tends to want to stay the way it has been most consistently most recently. This cuts both ways – it makes it harder (though not impossible) to get in shape if you’ve been out of shape for any length of time, but it also makes it easier to stay in shape once you’ve there for a while.

The bottom line: This new understanding of fat and fat cells (in addition to the enzymes that promote fat storage or release in the fat cells) will most certainly lead to better medical, nutritional, and exercise programming and hopefully more sensitivity in the general public to the struggles faced by those that have a lot to lose. It really is harder than simplistic and glib “eat less and exercise” or “burn more than you take in” platitudes make it appear to be.

Jonathan Ross
National Body Challenge Fitness Expert
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