Why must we address the immune system before actively seeking out fat loss or other health and fitness goals?
Imagine a car assembly factory. All the machines have specific jobs to carry out in order to accomplish what the factory was designed for. As a car factory runs, junk and pollution are created which need to be dealt with lest the production of our car factory loses efficiency or comes to a halt due to waste products clogging and interrupting its vital processes.
Your cells are very similar. Think of each cell in your body as its own car factory. In carrying out metabolism/cellular processes, with age cellular junk accrues along with cells that no longer divide (senescent cells/old cells). All the while maintenance of cells decrease and slow down.
The inflammatory signal noise from cellular junk is interpreted by your body’s defenses as a system-wide injury. The correction of injury is governed by our immune system.
Over time these immune signals constantly beaconing a threatened state, create chronic systemic inflammation. Inflammation is simply a proliferation of immune cells.
As a result of these signals for immune recruitment, inflammatory macrophages which are killer immune cells, show up at the onset of injury to deal with this junk. Eventually they need to go away and make way for the anti-inflammatory macrophage cells which clean up that debris and clear the area.
If constant signaling of injury is occurs and is not addressed, with age large populations of the inflammatory macrophages proliferate.
When your tissues, blood, gut and body fat get too many inflammatory macrophages and too few anti-inflammatory macrophages you:
Even at major caloric deficits, if your body is not primed to shrink fat you are in for one heck of an uphill battle. Simply losing body fat drive the problem of weight gain long-term.
In working on health building with clients I take an immune-centric approach because I seek to obtain the greatest degree of results with the least amount of energy. Whether they are trying to lose weight, build muscle, get more energy, balance hormones or conquer a disease/disorder, the immune system offers us the greatest degree of control because the immune system acts as a master control point over the body.
