Wow, we have Ulysses S. Grant as a part of our audience.
Cool.
Ulysses S. Grant asks, "I keep hearing that the body needs time to become fat adapted.
Doesn't it know how to burn fat right away?"
I feel like I answered this question last time.
Okay.
So the body does need time to get fat-adapted because yeah, the body knows how to burn fat,
but fat adaptation is not about the body knowing how to burn fat, it's about the body increasing
the expression of enzymes involved in burning fat.
So everything that you do in the body requires enzymes.
Enzymes are proteins that need to be made.
Making proteins is an energy-intensive process.
All biological organisms try to conserve energy because energy reserves are absolutely critical
to biological function, and so whenever you don't need to do something, you tend not to
do it, whenever you do need to do something, you tend to do it.
And so your body's going to take signals from your usual diet to see whether it makes sense
to make more proteins to be involved in burning fat versus carbohydrate.
As humans, we do this all the time, we plan things, and yeah, there might be some things
that we do sort of on autopilot, but the more energy or the more money which is a signifier
of energy reserves, you spent energy to get the money, you hold on to the money, you're
going to transfer it for some value in the future.
The more energy and money things require, the more we think about whether we're going
to invest in something, right?
And so it doesn't cost a lot of money to drink a glass of water.
You're probably going to do it on autopilot, and if you drink a little bit more water than
you needed, you're going to maybe pee an extra time, but you don't care.
But when it comes time to buy a house with two extra rooms, then you're probably not
going to do that unless you have a pretty high probability of needing that room because
you're expanding your family.
So, you probably will do that if on a two, three, four, five year time horizon it makes
sense to, and you will probably not at all do that because you don't want to waste the
money and time on it if you do not expect to need that room over a five-year time horizon,
and you can pick something over a six month time horizon or a one month time horizon,
or one year time horizon, there are innumerable examples where, as humans, if something's
going to take effort, we're going to think about whether it makes sense and we're going
to plan accordingly.
So your body's doing the exact same thing.
It's going to increase enzymes involved in fat digestion and metabolism if you've been
eating fat, and because it's expensive to do that, it's going to cut back on them if
you haven't been eating fat.
All right, Ulysses, I hope that helps answer your question.