The short answer – persistent organic pollutants, POPs also known as “forever chemicals” eg Pesticides, PCBs, solvents, drugs, industrial chemicals and aside from those that come from volcanoes are man-made, stay within your cells long term.
The more overweight you are and the older you are, the more toxic you are and if you choose to go on a weight loss program the more that program must focus on detoxification or you may lose fat but become even more toxic!
Toxins like to stay in the body and accumulate as you age. However, we choose to cut calories, fast and/or exercise to lose weight but don’t always combine a personalised detoxification program at the same time. The result is more symptoms of toxicity;
- Mental fatigue, difficulty concentrating
- Fatigue or lack of energy
- Trouble sleeping or loss of appetite
- Anxiety, stress, mood swings or depression
- Headaches, dizziness, body aches
- Palpitations, shortness of breathing
- Low immune system
At the same time as you try to lose weight in the absence of detoxification your metabolism slows down and your active thyroid hormone also goes down. That to me sounds like a disaster and increases the likelihood that your weight loss won’t continue indefinitely just because you are on a diet and exercise harder and harder.
Short term benefits in blood chemistry such as blood fats, blood sugar, liver enzymes can all improve but in the long run the bio-accumulation of these toxins can lead to changes in your physiology. They come out of storage from within the fat cells and can be redistributed to other areas of the body such as the liver or brain. They also accumulate and become more concentrated in the fat cells as you lose fat. The result can be storage within the body when you mobilise them through weight loss but don’t also focus on detoxification and excretion.
Some of these chemicals slow down how good your liver is at getting them out in the bile. The toxins gets loaded up in the bile and it gets dumped from your gall bladder into the gut to get excreted later. However that bile can be recirculated 14-17 times and the exact chemical can make the bile itself more sluggish with the net result more toxins being taken back into storage.
Similar issues can happen with the kidneys, as kidneys along with the colon, are your major excretory organs for the work that’s done by your liver and gut in detoxifying and making safe the released from storage chemicals, following a weight loss diet.
If your thyroid and metabolism, and especially your sleeping metabolism slows down from the storage of these toxins during initial weight loss you can better understand why your long term weight loss might slow down.
These toxins in the long term challenge your brain, nerves, hormones, heart function.
-If you have tried to lose weight and it’s worked then it didn’t or,
-If you lost weight on a diet or exercise program and noticed more symptoms and just didn’t feel as good as you would have expected…
Then detoxification was the missing link.
There are some people that will read this and think maybe having a bit of fat to lose but not losing it especially as you age is no bad thing?!?! Well based on your ability to detox and the amount of these persistent chemicals in your body that actually might be a valid theory!
Science is fascinating and humans throw up head scratching questions all the time that’s why I love digging in to each persons challenges with detailed questionnaires and lab tests, that answer the question of what is going on inside your body.
Without detoxification those that stay the same weight through out life have a greater risk of all cause mortality than those that steadily lost weight.
Fluctuating weight also increased risk whereas those that steadily gained weight had less risk of all cause cardiovascular disease.
Especially losing weight in midlife without detoxification. There’s a kind of “Obesity Paradox”.
If you have low toxic load and more fat thats not as great a risk. High toxicity and you are leaner leads to greater risk of ill-health. Dementia being a common issue for having a high toxic load and being lean.
More toxins and more fat is better for health! Well within reason, being over weight isn’t healthy. But if you are toxic the toxins have somewhere to stay out of trouble to a degree. However the bottom line is you still need to detox as the toxins can still leak from fat cells and cause problems in different parts of the body.
If you have a higher toxic load losing weight fast isn’t a good idea and losing weight especially as you get older and not also detoxing is a bad idea. You mobilise the stored toxins and then because you can’t get them out they get stored elsewhere in places like brain tissue or your bones.
You can find out how toxic you are from a combination of detailed questionnaires and specialised lab tests investigating environmental chemicals and also heavy metals. That way you can learn what the toxic sources are and how best to get rid of them and lose weight.
Losing weight is always a good idea, right?
Getting fatter can’t be a good thing, also right?
Well it’s a strange thing that as you lose fat you increase the release of toxins stored in that fat.
So if you stay fat from midlife to old age it’s not the best for the your health, that’s well established. If you stay lean that’s a good thing.
If in midlife you go for it and lose weight and are thin in your old age then you can actually increase your risk of suffering symptoms and health challenges, dementia being a specific one. The reason is the weight loss increased the release of stored toxins but without a focussed campaign on detoxing those toxins got stored elsewhere that in future can cause issues.
If however you steadily gain weight across the years, 5lbs every decade, then you’ve got somewhere to pack those toxins away.
Obviously there are health issues beyond toxins, they are not the be all and end all but they have a major role in your current and future health as well as your current and future weight loss.
Once you identify your degree of toxic load and the toxins that are challenging your body you will be better placed to personalise an approach to mobilise the toxins from storage in your fat and how to detoxify them and then excrete them avoiding re-storage and minimise the slow leaking you get from toxins sorted in your fat cells. The re-storing of toxins and the low levels of toxins your body still has to deal with after weight loss places a constant strain on detoxification. If you know what toxins to avoid and then how to remove them then you have more healthfully lose weight and detox at the same time which is a win-win for further health.
Image: https://unsplash.com/@moniqa