Mechanics of COHEN

[bibabs]

Guys I need help!!!
Can anybody out there elaborate, why COHEN works as opposed to a Kilojoule limiting diet. As you can see I have completed my journey successfully, but I have a friend who has just started, and is asking me questions I do not really have the answers to.

I have some theories, but as you will know when you are trying to help someone get their mind right theories do not do the thing. I would rather have the facts to present to her.

eg I know it is chemcial and not a calorie counting thing. Yet as she put it, if you consume less calories than your body needs, you HAVE to lose weight. My counter to that was, that with some people, obviously including ourselves in this, the body cannot convert the carbs and sugars to energy, so then it just stores it as fat. Somehow the combinations and qty of food prescribed by Dr Cohen rectifies this and gets the cnversion process going. If we then have a deviation, it upsets the balance that got the process going, hence the body reverts to storing the carbs and sugars as fat.......any improvements on this ( I believe this is the sort of cycle experienced by Type 2 diabetics?)

Sorry for the long post, but wanted to get into specifics

[sundaymorningstaple]

From what I am able to gather your are basically right. However, at the same time it also is true about the calorie counting. Your friend is right that if you consume less than you burn you will lose weight.

However, what our program does is also trick the body into thinking it is getting sufficient caloric intake in order to curb the triggers that tell you you are hungry. e.g., the insulin triggers & serotinin levels.

This means we can do the program without the addition of chemicals like appetite suppressants and/or supplements (other than a good multi-vitamin). By tricking the serotinin levels into thinking we are getting sufficient intake it let's us burn fat instead of going into "starvation mode where it stores everything" (another word commonly used here is "Ketosis") It's this ketosis that makes Atkins work as well. If you trigger an insulin response then "hunger" hits us. This is why it's so important not to exercise if you don't normally do so, and to back off your normal routines if you do. Otherwise you will trigger an insulin response as well. This is still basically a kilojoule limiting diet but with the added advantage of not actually counting calories (the good Doctor has already done that for you so it's transparent as it's already in your plan). It's the retraining of our thought processes that is the major point of this plan. It's teaching us how to eat all over again. It's showing us that we can eat healthy and almost anything we want "BUT IN MODERATION" and in the process shows us what foods are bad for each one of us during the refeed processes. It's a process of "UN-learning" all our bad habits.

[bitten]

thanks for that SMS-

brilliant explanation. i shall keep it close at hand when my addled brain cannot explain such things!!!!

look at you dashing to the finish line.....how cool is that?

bitten

[meagain]

Matt Church has written books which explain it very well. Basially, cohens' gets your Serotin lelvels correct which help you feel full and burn fat.

[ConnieK..]

Can I just add also that I did 800- 1000 calories a day for two years while burning at LEAST 2000cals/day and did not lose anything due to PCOS and very advanced insulin resistance. The eat less than you use formula, does not work when insulin is not working effectively.

Just my two cents worth.

Connie

[bibabs]

Thanks for that SMS.
Connie, you too. Connie basically confirmed what I maintain, that with a lot of us COHENITES ( not all) it is a case of insulin resistance to a greater or lesser degree.
Let's face it..if you do not have a problem with losing weight, i.e. if you are the kind of person ( and my sister is) who can cut back on the calories for say 10 days and lose 3-4 kgs, you would not pay the amount we do to get a personal diet worked out for you. I think most of us are attracted to Dr Cohen out of desperation to lose the excess weight, because nothing else seems to work.

[Delta]

Hi folks,

my take is to agree with everything already stated.

Prior to Cohens I was placed on a low-GI diet, (diagnosed pre-diabetic), that didn't do very much for me at all as I still didn't have the other hormones being balanced with the rest of diet. (My main storage facility was around the tummy which is pretty standard for that type of problem). I believe that it is only thru the correct address of these hormones in conjunction with a lower calorie intake that we get the benefits that retrain our bodies back to a balanced state.

Cheers,

Dee.

[shrinking_moi]

I think you have some good explanations. I wanted to add that the way the program works is that we don't get enough energy in our foods so our body burns our fat stores as energy.
Plus the foods we eat are all foods that keep blood sugar low.
X
Ez

[Maya]

SMS - THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH!!!!!

OH, GOD THIS WAS GOOOOOOD THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

THIS IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOO PRECIOUS !!!!

[bibabs]

Hi Guys, had it from the Horse's mouth so to speak. Just to add to what Delta said.
Why we store fat:

Gi Index is determined by how fast food is broken down into glucose, which is the form any food needs to be in to enable our body to use the energy.
So a glucose sweet for example will have a GI of 100 because it is immediately available to the body, whereas red meat would have a far lower GI becaue a lot of digestion has to be done before it becomes available. It also is released slower into the bloodstream, because of this.

All humans have an optimal bloodsugar level at which the body is comfortable with..no hunger pains or fainting spells etc. So when a large amount of Glucose becomes available at once ( like with the glucose sweet) it send the bloodsugar skyrocketing and the pancreas is stimulated into secreting large amounts of insulin ( hence an insulin spike) Insulin is the carrier to get the glucose to the cells. So in this instance each insulin molecule is carrying an enormous parcel of glucose. When this is delivered to the cell, the poor thing is overwhelmed because it cannot use all the energy delivered at the time, so what does it do, it stores it as fat.

At the same token if a portion of meat was eaten ( that had the same enery value as the sweet) the release is obviously a lot slower. Each parcel delivered to the cell is much smaller, so it uses the parcel for energy, and no fat is stored.

The combinations and types of veg and fruit we get I believe is what influences the Human Growth hormone and the other goodies we need to enably fat burning etc.

So if you have a protein first, it starts the insulin going slowly, so the process is active when the sugar hits, and the shock is not so big.

So there you have it