I have always wondered why I never burn calories and lose weight for brain activity. After all it does take a lot of energy to think, learn, memorise, recall, imagine, analyse, comprehend and so much much more that we simply take for granted that our brain actually does. Well, I’m sure so many of us would be thrilled if we were told that brain activity actually burns fat. But sadly the truth is anything but that!

There is a whole complicated science to metabolism – one that even experts who claim they know are actually very often only guessing. But to put it simply in lay man terms, here are the rules:

• Rule #1 – A large portion of the food we eat does indeed go towards maintaining the body. But the rule of food for the body is that in every morsel you consume, only a portion is ‘spent’ for maintenance. One portion is always ‘saved’ as fat for future use! You could say your body follows the principle of saving up for a rainy day always!

• Rule #2 – If you don’t eat, your brain does not get enough energy for it cannot use energy from the stored fat cells. That is why we often feel ‘faint’ and ‘light headed’ if we abstain from food for long hours. There is evidence to show that our clarity in thoughts diminish with lack of proper nutrition by way of food.

• Rule #3 – Yes indeed stress and worrying are also brain activities and it very often looks like you lose a lot of weight to worry. But the sad fact is that you lose ‘muscle’ weight and not ‘fat’. That is, when you are too worried and start looking thinner and haggard, and presuming you are not eating much, you are actually using up muscle mass to sustain your body as it is simpler to burn muscle than fat. Now here is the catch – rule #1 applies here. So body burns muscle to get energy for maintenance but also stores a part of it as ‘fat’ for future. So in high stress and worry you actually burn up muscle and store more fat!

• Rule #4 – Now that the first three rules establish the fact that we must eat food for energy for the brain, a portion of the food is always stored as fat and too much stress only burns muscles and not fat, the only way to have a healthy body is to eat nutritiously AND exercise your muscles! Now that brings us to rule #5 but if you are not yet convinced of the first four rules, it is pointless proceeding. So time to revise and get convinced before you proceed…

• Rule #5 – Your heart is just one muscle – a very crucial one no doubt. But not the only one! It is the job of the heart to pump pure blood into the veins but all nutrients needed for the functioning of the body – oxygen, water, minerals, waste material that need to be removed – every thing literally moves around the body by the contraction of muscles – all of them. Every time you contract and release a muscle you generate mitochondria the power cells of the body. It is the movement of muscles that work as body pumps moving fluids around the body. And the strength of your muscles directly depend upon how much you have used them! 

‘Muscle building’ normally makes one think of hypertrophy – the exaggeratedly well defined musculature of body builders. But today’s research shows that when you begin strength training as in lifting weights, the first adaptation is to the neural  component of strength expression. That is, the muscle’s ability to generate force is strongly limited by the nerve’s ability to sustain high-frequency signal. So when you begin by lifting small amounts of weight, you first work on the neural pathway. Systematic and proper strength training produces structural and functional adaptations to the body. Neural adaptations to strength training involves first overcoming the inhibitory mechanisms as well as improve the intra and inter muscular coordination. In simple terms – 

• • Nerves control the contraction of muscles
  • If we sparingly use certain nervous pathways, like an unused road, the pathway becomes slow
  • When the nerve’s signal reduces in frequency, the force to be generated by the muscle for contraction diminishes
  • The muscle appears to have ‘stopped listening’ to the signal

So Rule #5 simply states – don’t kill your muscles through disuse! Lift weight.

Written by Gita Krishna Raj  |  Published in Food & Health in February 2016