Article by Mike Westerdal
Hormones are the 'traffic cops' that direct the activities and responses that manage the body's metabolic systems. We can have an impact on the way that hormones manage traffic in our body by manipulating factors such as diet, activity levels, weight training, sleeping, resting, managing stress levels and others.
Influencing the hormonal traffic cops provides a measure of control over the operation of our metabolic systems. One particularly strong influence we can have is on how our hormonal traffic cops partition the energy our bodies use.
When it comes to energy storage and usage, the body uses the same banks--fat, glycogen, muscle tissue or proteins--to deposit or withdraw energy. The process of managing where energy is deposited or withdrawn from is known as energy partitioning.
Diet has an especially strong impact on the way our metabolic systems partition energy. Interestingly, evidence indicates that brief, strategic periods of under eating can manipulate the hormonal traffic cops to tell the body to partition energy to allow for the simultaneous building of muscle and burning fat.
This is made possible in part because these controlled periods of under eating trigger the release of human growth hormone.
One of the key functions of growth hormone is to maintain growth and lean body mass during short periods of time when we don't have access to food. This occurs because growth hormone mobilizes fat fuel energy to be redirected (partitioned) to protein synthesis (muscle growth).
Our bodies are not designed to maintain muscle mass during extended periods of under eating--these situations trigger a survival response where the body is going to use anything and everything--including muscle--for fuel. But they are however, optimally designed to manage short, controlled periods of under eating, allowing us to convert excess body fat into lean muscle mass.
Imagine a training system and meal plan that was designed specifically for the maximum release of growth hormone for building lean muscle and burning fat... a system like this would not only build a stronger more athletic body, but may also reverse the aging process.
