Managing your baby fat cell population is a topic you most certainly did not learn about in school. Yet, how skillfully you do this will determine if you become overweight or are able to lose extra weight. As I stated on the cover of my Leptin Diet book, the million dollar question is: How fit is your fat?
As you gain weight not only do your existing fat cells expand in size, but baby fat cells are called into duty and become mature new fat cells to accommodate storage of extra calories. If you aren’t overweight then some of your new baby fat cells will become mature, at approximately the same rate at which old fat cells die off.
Until recently nobody knew exactly where your baby fat cells lived. In a new study clever scientists engineered mice so that baby fat cells would glow green, allowing them to pinpoint their exact location and to follow their development.
The researchers discovered that baby fat cells are an important part of the circulatory system structure within white adipose tissue (your stored fat). These baby fat cells are actually embedded within the walls of blood vessels. When you eat too much food, then there are extra calories in your circulation. Some of these extra calories enter your white adipose tissue circulation. When your body senses this it rapidly calls baby fat cells into action to store the surplus calories.
This means that if you are already overweight and you eat too much food, you will immediately turn baby fat cells into new adult fat cells, expand your fat cell population inappropriately, and store the extra calories as fat. This also means that you have to be good almost all the time, in terms of following the Leptin Diet, if you want to lose weight over time. While an occasional larger meal may not trigger this mechanism, especially if you are active following such a meal, a pattern of several days in a row of larger meals is sure to trigger the growth of new fat cells.
It is fairly obvious that if you are overweight or have ever been overweight then this mechanism is a weak spot in your metabolism, meaning you don’t have the luxury of testing it very often without encountering weight gain and a progressively fatter waistline. Thus, take pause and think about it before you eat in response to stress, break down and binge, or simply start eating more than you really should. Get the image in your mind of your baby fat cells lapping up all the food you just consumed and turning themselves into blubber that will be quite difficult to get rid of – and maybe, just maybe, you will eat less on a regular basis.
