Shin Ohtake
Creator of Max Workouts
Inhibiting And Activating The Right Fat Receptors
The KEY to burning stubborn fat is to inhibit alpha-2 receptors, while activating beta-2 receptors. Sounds simple enough… but here’s the dilemma, both alpha-2 receptors and beta-2 receptors accept the same key. And in this case the “key” is the hormone “catecholamines”.
Catecholamines are epinephrine and norephinephrine, also known as the fight or flight hormones. They’re produced in response to any kind of stress… good or bad. But for our purposes, we’re only interested in stress that we can control… the good kind… exercise.
Technically all exercises produce catecholamines, but not all exercises produce optimum levels of catecholamines to maximize fat burning. I’ll show you the most effective way to produce the greatest the amount of catecholamines in your body… but first we need to be able to inhibit the alpha-2 receptors on your fat cells, so all of the catecholamines “keys” can “lock” onto beta-2 receptors to accelerate fat burning.
So the big question is… how do we inhibit alpha-2 receptors while still keeping beta-2 receptors active?
The answer lies with one powerful hormone… insulin.
Insulin plays a pivotal role in all process involving fat gain or fat loss in your body, and studies have shown that lowering your insulin level produces a favorable environment that inhibits alpha-2 receptors. And ideally, decreasing your dietary carbohydrate intake to less than 20% of your total daily calories has been shown to help you achieve optimal insulin levels for burning stubborn fat.
This isn’t surprising since low carb diet is considered by many nutritionist a safe and effective way to lose weight by managing insulin levels. My only suggestion is to make sure that you increase your carbohydrate intake to 40% of your total daily calories (or higher) at least once a week to make sure that your hormones keep functioning optimally. If you stay on a low carb diet for too long without a break, you can disrupt the hormones causing you to experience low energy, low libido, loss of strength and decline in endurance, not to mention, it can also stall your fat loss efforts.
So now that you know how to achieve optimum insulin levels to inhibit the alpha-2 receptors, you’re ready to start burning off stubborn fat… right? Not quite yet… these fat cells are called “stubborn” for a reason. The problem is stubborn fat regions have notoriously poor blood flow and without adequate blood flow the catecholamines needed to initiate the fat burning process can’t reach the fat cells.
Unfortunately increasing blood flow to these stubborn areas isn’t that simple. Usual steps that increase blood flow throughout your body, like increasing your heart rate by exercising, isn’t effective for stubborn fat areas.