Return from Vienna: Fixing the Damage, Part 1 | Dangerously Hardcore
Extract:
Let’s recap. Skipping breakfast accelerates fat burning, spares lean tissue and prevents the formation of new fat cells. Eating breakfast—specifically a traditional breakfast containing copious amounts of carbs—creates new fat cells, stops fat burning and triggers the destruction of lean tissue if blood sugar levels fail to rise high enough.
Cortisol levels naturally rise through the evening and peak around wake-up time. Cortisol, as you know, catabolizes body tissue, which can include muscle, but only if certain signals in the body direct it to do so. The specific signal: elevated insulin levels and high cortisol levels. That high-carb breakfast switched on the potential to burn muscle (although what happens in most cases is far worse, but I’ll get to that in a second).
If cortisol acts alone, in the absence of insulin, it forces the body to preferentially burn body fat; this is the exact scenario you find yourself upon waking, if you don’t screw it up by eating carbs. And if you don’t eat anything, or very little, cortisol continues signaling the release of body fat for metabolism, just as it did through the previous hours of snoozing.
Let’s say that you don’t care because you’ll ensure you eat enough carbs so that muscle won’t get burned. You want to build muscle, lots of muscle and you want to do it now; extra cardio can burn off the fat. Slow down, killer. There’s another problem with high insulin levels plus high cortisol levels. When the two are elevated together, the body gets another signal: start making as many new, empty fat cells as possible—the max number of which being determined by how much body fat you already have stored, the more fat, the more empty fat cells created.
