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End-of-Summer Weight Gain
Have you noticed yourself starting to gain a few pounds of winter weight already?
At summer’s end, nature dishes out a series of influences best described as a perfect storm for gaining weight. Let’s dissect this storm and look at some strategies to safely navigate unwanted pounds.
Nature’s making a concerted effort to store an insulating layer of fat at summer’s end to prepare for winter. With proper preparation, understanding, and respect for this storm, its surge can actually offer many benefits. Unchecked, you will pack on those pounds.
Keep reading to learn how to get the most out of this seasonal change without storing weight you don’t need!
Summer Eaters Beware
Summer’s end offers a plethora of ripe fruit just begging to be eaten. Fructose in fruit easily converts into fat in the liver, much needed insulation to endure a cold winter. Omnivores (like bears and humans) would tend to gorge on sweet, ripe fruit to the point of excess—think how many apples fall from just one tree! Yes, it seems we were meant to eat them, but a nice healthy layer of insulating fat may result.1
The nice thing about this fruit fat is that it is distributed equally throughout the body for insulation, rather than camping out mainly on the belly, hips, and thighs.
Fruits also cleanse the gut with fiber. A little too much fruit triggers a loose stool: nature’s way of spreading seeds and dispelling accumulated heat from summer. This is much the same as when your child gets a fever accompanied by diarrhea—the diarrhea is there to dispel the heat (fever).
As summer’s high temperatures build up in the body, in an attempt not to overheat, the digestive strength becomes weaker, according to Ayurveda. Conversely, in winter, when it’s cold outside, the body’s internal heaters turn on to keep us warm and better digest more dense winter foods, like meat, root veggies, and grains.2
We Recommend You Are HOW You Eat
Nature’s Intention: Food Ripened on the Vine
With weaker digestive strength and metabolism this time of year,2 nature offers a harvest of easy-to-digest foods ripened on the vine all summer long. Fruits and veggies from the garden are predigested, or cooked, by the sun.
Unfortunately, most folks are squeezing in the last barbecues and eating fried chicken, ribs, burgers, fries, shakes, ice cream, and of course, it wouldn’t be a barbecue without some beer!
Sadly, as far as I can tell, none of these were naturally ripened on the vine and thus, are extremely hard to digest, even in winter, when digestion is at its best. The perfect storm just got bigger as we continue to eat foods that we don’t have the digestive juice to digest well. The result: weight gain.
Summer Cravings
Just when we thought the storm was weakening, it instead gets stronger. With cooler nights and winter just around the corner, the brain starts to crave certain tastes that will help insulate the body and slow, or calm, the nervous system for winter.3
You guessed it – the appetite increases in the winter3 and, according to Ayurveda, the brain starts craving sweet and salty tastes. Each individual has a menu of favorite foods that will provide those tastes, such as chips, desserts, chocolates, coffees, breads, and carbs, carbs, carbs. When the brain picks a food from that menu, all willpower goes out the window and we find ourselves eating way too many of those fatty foods we know we shouldn’t be eating!
We Recommend Ayurvedic Intermittent Fasting
Summer’s Parasympathetic Charge
As days get shorter, the rest-and-digest parasympathetic nervous system is activated in preparation for shorter days and longer nights. With higher parasympathetic activity, the rest more and eat more nervous system in winter is a weight gain recipe. The body burns calories less efficiently and will store more fat.3
Circadian changes in winter encourage the body to get more sleep and have less daytime activity, which adds to even fewer calories burned and more fat stored.3,4
The Final Surge
Naturally, the fall harvest is abundant. Once perishables have been eaten, foods with more density that can store and last through the winter remain. These foods, like grains, nuts, seeds, and root vegetables, are late harvesters, giving nature time to build more density in the form of concentrated proteins and fats.
While very insulating, these dense foods are also harder to digest and more easily stored as fat.
Good news! Navigating weight gain’s perfect storm is about building an even layer of winter fat, rather than excess in the wrong places.
Prevent End-of-Summer Weight Gain
- Give yourself permission to eat lots of ripe veggies and yes, it’s okay to eat those fruits as well. Better a small healthy layer of insulating fat than the damage that a month of binging on barbecue and vacation food can do. Fill up on the good stuff!
- This time of year, accumulated heat will dehydrate us. As the brain often perceives thirst as hunger, we start eating. Try to drink 1/2 of your ideal body weight in ounces of water per day.
- Boost digestive strength, so that if you eat heavier food, you help your system digest and process it. Consider one capsule of both Warm Digest and Beet Cleanse about 15 minutes before meals with a full glass of water. This will help boost digestive strength.
- Fear not those extra pounds! October is a great detox season and a great time to lose the pounds and fully reset digestive strength you will need this winter to stay healthy. Consider our Group Colorado Cleanse, held each spring and fall. If you are not ready for a two-week cleanse, I suggest you start with our four-day Short Home Cleanse. Download our free Short Home Cleanse eBook here.
What do you do to prepare your mind and body for winter?
