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Curb your appetite by activating your gravitostat

Have you ever seen a FAT giraffe or zebra ? You haven’t. Your body should be keeping your weight in check, find out why yours isn’t

You’re heavier than you should be. Eish !

The big question is WHY !

On paper at least, your body should be keeping your weight in check. After all, when did you see a FAT giraffe or zebra.

Weight management is something Mother Nature should take care of…….

Weight management by default

Granted……… Mother Nature’s priority is to keep you FAT ENOUGH.   Historically, dying of starvation was a real and ever present danger.

Eating too much was not a particularly common problem.

But, even in by gone times, being too heavy, was NOT advantageous.  As the heavy specimen, you’d have been first choice for a hungry predator.

More dinner (yum) and an easier catch.

Weight watching

So how does Mother Nature keep a check on weight ?

No it’s not by looking in the mirror.

The eye is able to see the extra layers, but the eye is not a particularly reliable source of information. Think rose tinted glasses……….

So the brain relies on status reports…..

Reporting on energy stores

Up until now, the status report, believed to carry the most weight –  was the fat cell mass i.e. the number and size of your fat cells.

The fat cell report is all about energy reserves.

The more the merrier……….

But the fat cells don’t have to carry the weight, BONES DO, so they send a report too.

The bone report

This is what a group of Swedish researchers have recently uncovered.

The team made the discovery, when they “artificially” made two month old mice, heavier, by implanting a custom designed capsule, that weighed 15 % of the animal’s body weight, into it’s abdomen.

The control mice also underwent a surgery to place a capsule in their abdomen, but the capsule they received was light weight, weighing around 3 % of their body weight.

The presence of the “weight” sparked dramatic weight loss, in just 14 days.

Weight loss in mice after 14 days. Red bar is mice with light weight capsule, black bar is weight loss with heavy weight. Copyright 2017 John-Olov Jansson et al.

The weight loss was brought on by a decrease in eating.

Food intake of mice. Red bar with low weight capsule. Black bar with high weight capsule. Copyright 2017 John-Olov Jansson et al.

At this stage, the chemical signal, that sparked the weight loss is a mystery…it’s not one of the usual suspects.

Bone objections

But the team established the weight loss was incited by osteocyte lamenting.

It seems, rodent bones have a built in gravitostat (a heaviness machine).

The bone’s measure heaviness.

And let the brain KNOW, it needs to DO SOMETHING, when they’re NOT COMFORTABLE with the extra weight the body is carrying.

Of mice and men

In rodent’s – the brain obliges.

Feeding decreases.

So why do human bones not put a stop to HEAVINESS ?

Outsourcing the load

The team speculate the problem is the bones are not experiencing much HEAVINESS.  You see, modern human bones spend most of their days, NOT bearing heavy loads.

The job of load bearing, has been outsourced to chairs.

Chair legs might take strain from increasing heaviness, but they don’t have a hot line to the brain – so NOTHING happens.

Feeding continues.  Heaviness increases.

Activate your gravitostat

Load up those legs, by making a point of standing more.

After all, sitting is the NEW smoking !

NOTE : If you’re up to it, you might want to “trick” the gravitostat by weighting yourself down – it’s a strategy used by gym bunnies. By enhancing the load, you might just get a bigger reaction  !

Further reading

Want to discover more ways to create BETTER BODY CHEMISTRY ?