Enzymes and Natural Weight Loss

Enzymes and Natural Weight Loss. They are the catalyst that speed your weight loss.

Enzymes have to be a part of any natural weight loss plan. In this lesson, I'll be explaining how they work with your metabolism and how they another crucial factor in your natural weight loss. Understanding this will help you make choices in lifestyle and diet that will rapidly get rid of fat and boost your metabolism. You will also feel drastically higher levels of energy and vitality.

As earlier stated in the first lesson, "Chemical Reactions", a chemical reaction usually requires a catalyst. Without a catalyst, the chemical reaction can still occur but it will occur much slower or will not occur at all.

In, the "Chemical Reactions", I gave the example of gasoline and oxygen being catalyzed into a chemical reaction. Gasoline and oxygen can exist next to each other without anything dramatic happening. But when electricity in a certain form is applied, there is an extremely rapid and explosive reaction. That is a catalyst

In the human body there are several catalysts. Oxygen is one very common one. So is water. But one extremely important catalyst for the human metabolism is the category of Enzymes. And yes, the results can be explosive as well.

There are so many different enzymes that can be listed and more are being discovered but there is one common denominator for all of them. In the human body, when chemicals are combined, enzymes are the catalyst part of the metabolic chemical process:

"Chemical reactions involves the combination of two or more chemicals, a catalyst, a specific environment where that reaction is occurring, the breakdown of the chemicals into simpler forms, a release of energy, a recombination of the simpler chemicals, an end product and usually waste."

From the moment food enters the mouth and you start chewing, your saliva begin to break the food down. From the mouth, to the stomach, small intestines, colon, liver, kidneys and gall bladder food is broken down to more and more basic components that re-combine and combine with other elements to provide the building blocks the body needs to maintain, repair and build new tissue.

Substrates

An enzyme, at every stage break down substances within the body to its elemental forms. When food is broken down it turns into something called a "substrate".

At every stage of break-down (of which there are hundreds) a new substrate is created.

There can be many stages of breakdown but at each stage there is one enzyme or more that is breaking down a substrate into two or more simpler and smaller substrates.

Every time matter is broken down into another form, energy is released. So any enzyme also have a secondary effect of assisting in the creation of energy. So that fulfills the second part of the definition of metabolism in the "Speed Up Your Metabeolism" page.

It is also a very important point to make here that almost each enzyme is mainly made of amino acids. Amino acids are the basic building blocks of protein nutrients. So almost any enzyme is mainly a protein.

The last point about enzymes here, is that they are destroyed and made inert at high temperatures. So cooked food have no enzymes. Raw food that is still alive, like fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, sprouts, etc. all have enzymes. All life forms have them. That is one of the things that keep them alive!

Because these living foods provide what the body needs in it most basic elemental form (as I explained in "Nutrition and Weight Loss"), hardly any energy is spent digesting them. In the nutrition field, these foods are considered "predigested". I think that term is a bit gross but it does communicate the essence of what they do.

These foods are so close to what your cells need AFTER the digestive process. These foods also metabolize so efficiently that there is very little waste in converting these foods to energy and rebuilding the body. There is also, logically, very little energy needed to process any waste.

You will have a very hard time finding an abundance of overweight people whose diet are primarily made up of raw, living foods. Especially if the raw foods do not contain a lot of sugar (more on this later). But don't worry I will not be asking you to eat only raw foods or go on a raw food diet.

In the previous lesson, I talked about the three things that a weight loss diet has to include:

When you look at a country or society that has a lot of obesity, and obesity-related diseases, you will find an absence of the three points above. They may or may not be eating a lot but in the end the cells are not getting enough nutrients.

If they do get nutrients the source of those nutrients are so poor that the waste created from cells and the digestive system provide more harm than the good the nutrients provide.

The waste matter is toxic and highly acidic. Fat begins to store this. Fat seems to have, as one of its purposes, a buffering effect of acidic and toxic material. It stores it so they do not circulate in the system and cause direct damage.

Processed Foods

Processed foods do not have life in them. They are completely lifeless. There is not one enzyme in them. That is what processing does. For example, when something has been "pasteurized" it has been processed for mass production. Pasteurization is blasting the food with heat. It kills each enzyme. But it makes it easier to mass produce these foods and keep them on the shelves longer.

As an example, orange "juice", "100% fruit" juices and the like are all pasteurized. You can read the label and see for yourself. After pasteurization, all you have in a "juice" is sugar in water that tastes like the fruit it is named after. There are no other elements these juices break down to in the end. The incredible amount of starches promoted in our society as part of a staple diet are so heavily processed there are no nutrients in them.

In contrast, REAL juice contain more than sugar and water. First of all, the enzymes are present. There are also the micro-nutrients contained in the vegetable or fruit being juiced. The micro-nutrients are the minerals and vitamins that are absolutely required to metabolize the macro-nutrients. Micro-nutrients in raw foods are very abundant. Even better, they can be assimilated very easily compared to getting them from vitamin and mineral tablets.

You want to lose weight? You want to start reducing your fat percentage? Start increasing the amount of enzymes in your food. Increase the amount of raw foods in your diet. I am not suggesting you completely convert to eating only raw foods. But simply look at every meal you eat and determine just by looking, what percentage of your meal is raw? The most common way the western world eats raw food is with fruits and vegetables.

Fruits and vegetables is a great start. If you begin increasing the amount of green colored vegetables in your meals and do this consistently you will find yourself eating better and feeling better. You will also lose fat.

The more often you eat raw green and yellow colored, fresh vegetables, the faster you will lose fat and get lean. It is very simple and very effective. It is NOT the be-all and end-all by any stretch. But it is a consistent contributing factor that works with human metabolism.

The reason I say to focus on the "green" and "yellow" colored vegetables is simply because I want to make it simple for you to make choices and they all are lower in sugar content.

Sugar is not the enemy and I do not want to suggest that. But if you are overweight, trying to lose weight in a healthy way, and also feel healthier, excess sugar is most likely one of the root causes for your excess weight.

Excess sugar is a direct contributing factor to being overweight. In the American diet, it takes a lot of knowledge and skill to navigate through the constant assault of sugar filled food products.

To conclude I cannot emphasize the importance of and enzyme rich diet in your weight loss program. At every stage of your bodily processes, the enzyme is speeding up the creation of new cells. Just as the word "catalyst" implies. They are the primary element that boosts your metabolism.

They are the components in the digestive system that begin breaking down food into nutrients. Starting with your saliva. There are a multitude of stages wherein food breaks down and in each case enzymes are there to facilitate it.

Even after the digestive process is complete with a substance the smaller particles that are created go into the blood stream. In the blood there are more reactions that take place. Especially when the oxygen in the blood mixes with the particle. Then the food particles are broken down further into the smallest components until they reach your cells. Then within the cells there are more reactions where the cells use these nutrients to do their job. The cells then use enzymes to build new cells and enzymes are involved in each of the steps of repairing, maintaining and building cells as well.

Not only are enzymes used to break substances down, they are used in the regeneration process as well. Enzymes also recombine substrates together to create new substrates.

I won't get into all the complexity of all of it but even for a simple piece bread, there are over 100 chemical reactions that go into effect starting with saliva breaking it down into one substrate after another and then reassembling those substrates into more complex substances needed by the body to live.

Lesson to Learn:
The lesson to learn here is when you are rich in enzymes your metabolism works faster and more efficiently.

Second, when you are rich in enzymes, the necessary organs of your body for optimal living are fed and nourished.

Third, the unnecessary parts, such as excess acid, toxins, excess fat are not fed. In fact, the exces fat is used as fuel faster. So you starve the fat and feed the rest of the body!

Fourth, enzymes are destroyed by excess heat (like from cooking).

Last, enzymes are destroyed by being out of their range of acidity or alkalinity. Enzymes have a pH range they can exist in. When the environment the enzymes exist in become to acidic or alkaline, they die.