Normal Day 132 - 113.6

I went and bought some new jeans the other day and was really surprised to see myself in the mirror. There isn't a full length mirror in our new house, so I haven't really SEEN myself in a mirror in months. At first, I thought that there was something wrong with the mirror -- it looked like a distorted funhouse mirror that makes you look skinny. I didn't recognize my body, it was thinner than I recalled. It was a bit of a shock -- a very nice one.

The more I hear about people suffering from obesity in places where it didn't previously exist, the more I am convinced that this 'obesity epidemic' is being created by predominately outside forces. Something environmental, like a foreign toxin or substance in our food or water or air is messing up the human metabolism. I think it is absurd to keep saying that people around the world have just become a bunch of lazy, gluttonous slobs.

When our body cannot excrete a toxin and doesn't know what to do with it, the toxic substance tends to get walled up inside of fat cells in order to protect us. I've been reading research papers related to lipophilic toxins and it seems that every paper I read leads me to more and more questions about the subject. The more I learn, the more these lipophilic toxins appear to be a significant factor in the obesity problem. I will definitely be writing more about this topic in the future.

I've been wondering, where do these lipophilic toxins go when we lose weight? For instance, what would happen if you starved yourself into an anorexic body weight? Surely, they would have to leave then, wouldn't they? Apparently not -- they do not leave that easily. Small quantities are excreted through feces. However, when we lose weight these toxins just become more concentrated within our fat cells. Or even worse, they leave the fat cell only to be deposited within the brain! Some scientists have hypothesized that this could explain why it is so easy to regain weight, perhaps our bodies are trying to dilute these overly concentrated toxins.

These lipophilic toxins have a long halflife inside the human body. For example, TCDD (Dioxin) has a half life of 5.8 to 11.3 years. Even if you were able to eliminate absorbing any more of these chemicals (which we can't), who wants to wait that long for these substances to break down to an acceptable level? Especially, if they turn out to be responsible for creating metabolic disturbances leading to obesity ... and oh-so-many other problems and diseases.

So how can we help our bodies excrete these lipophilic toxins? As we saw when Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with Dioxin, we do not currently possess the medical knowledge for adequately removing this poison from our bodies. I read that they used successive liposuction treatments to help bring down the Dioxin stores within his body. There are also some cases of Dioxin poisoning where the non-absorbable fat, Olestra, has been used to help the body excrete the toxin faster. And another study that showed that mice had a 30 fold increase in the rate of excretion of 14C-hexachlorobenzene when their diets were supplemented with Olestra. Danish scientists have been able to reduce dioxin concentrations by 70% by exposing fishmeal to UV-B light for five days. (Would exposure to sunlight have any effect on the lipophilic toxins within the fat cells in our body? Because that would be an awesome diet -- we could all lay out on the beach munching on Pringle light potato chips fried with Olestra -- and fighting for our place in line at the toilet. ha!)

I have so many questions and so many things that I would love to see studied.