The Origin of your Dad Bod
Why is it that when men gain weight, they tend to develop potbellies?
The answer has to do with how the body stores fat. When men gain weight, the default storage place is the belly. Think of it like the trunk of a car, said Dr. Zhaoping Li, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Just like people loading up a trunk for a picnic at the park, “you can put things there; no problem,” Li told Live Science.
But if men eat too much and don’t get enough exercise, then just like a jam-packed trunk, that belly space is going to run out of room, Li said.
Ok, everyone can stop their own personal experiments, science has finally stepped in and gave us the cold hard facts that support what we’ve been trying to prove ourselves over the last 50 or so years. It was a valiant effort, it really was, the millions of you who’ve been testing feverishly for most of your lives are hero’s, I commend you.
For most people, they seem to have one consistent voice that’s always chirping them, telling them that they need that bag of chips, that candy bar or that soda. This my friends is the great and powerful Brain-Gut 1-2 punch, they work like synchronized swimmers in perfect coordination with each other to make you pick and consume that crappy food choice. The brain rewards this sugar/ fat rush for a quick second but then reverts the body into a crash once the quick sugar spike is over. All this excess glucose in your system can’t be burned right now so your body says ” Hey, I’ll definitely use this a little later. Let me just store it over here real quick”. Guess where it goes, right to fulfill our dad bod ambitions. And this, is the vicious cycle on how dad bods are created. Look back at this post on different types of hunger and how to fend them off.
The promising thing about all this is your ability to alter your brains chemical reactions to begin to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling when you consume nutritious food. And the best news is that this goes hand and hand with weight loss. By eating more fruits to fulfill your sugar crave, you get to feed your sweet tooth and not have to deal with the sugar spike. Our trusty friend “Fiber” is there to slowly release the sugar into our bodies an not trigger the storage-to-fat process. Your brain will begin to adapt and give you that same rewarded feeling for eating an apple as it used to with that candy bar, you’ll feel better, be more nourished, have more energy and lose that nagging foe.
The hardest part is getting started, once you see and feel the results you begin the crave the good stuff. I’m gonna get soft on ya for a minute but I wanna leave you with this quote to ponder on:
Deep Right. It’s a one person race, and one you want to last a while.