What is the difference between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation? There are two types of inflammation:
- Acute inflammation: The response to sudden body damage, such as cutting your finger. To heal the cut, your body sends inflammatory cells to the injury. These cells start the healing process.
- Chronic inflammation: Your body continues sending inflammatory cells even when there is no outside danger. For example, in rheumatoid arthritis inflammatory cells and substances attack joint tissues leading to an inflammation that comes and goes and can cause severe damage to joints with pain and deformities.
Chronic inflammation is involved in the disease process of many conditions. It happens every time your immune system has to fend off irritants or stressors that come into the body.
- Bad bacteria in our food and water
- Environmental toxins (pesticides, PCBs, and dioxins)
- Non-food based allergens (dust mites, pollen, dander, cedar, etc…)
- Processed/inflammatory foods (sugars, trans fat, additives, preservatives, GMOs, etc…
- Stress, lack of sleep, hormonal imbalance, blood sugar instabilities, etc…
The odds are pretty high if you’re living in modern society, you endure daily triggers that cause inflammation.
How Do I Address Inflammation?
Countless studies prove that changes in diet, lifestyle, and exercise will reduce inflammation. The obvious first step if you’ve been living less than an ideal sedentary lifestyle eating processed foods, yo-yo dieting, drinking, and not taking care of yourself is to lower the inflammation in your body.
To turn off the inflammation in your body, you need to send the right messages to your genes, cells, and tissues.
The biggest takeaway of this article is that food and lifestyle habits communicates with your body. Food either positively or negatively affects your weight, metabolism, and level of inflammation.
There’s a simple four step-process for reducing inflammation to stimulate your fat-burning metabolism and release stubborn fat caused by an inflamed (fat-storing) body. Fortunately, this simple process requires very little exercise, in fact, for 21-days you’ll want to perform LESS exercise than what most so-called fitness experts would suggest.
Step 1: Eliminate the 8 inflammatory foods from your diet
The fastest way to reduce inflammation aside from eating whole, unprocessed foods (see step #2) is avoid the foods that got you into this inflammatory mess in the first place.
The 6 inflammatory foods to avoid include gluten, soy, HFCS, sugar, and unsaturated vegetable oils. These foods and others contribute to the majority of the inflammation in our society, especially inflammation that leads to stubborn fat.
Step 2: Add the 121+ anti-inflammatory, metabolism-boosting foods to your diet
Aside from avoiding the main inflammatory foods, adding the healthiest, most powerful foods to your diet comes in at a close second.
Healthy fats contribute to producing the right kinds of prostaglandins and help promote healthy cells.
Proteins lead to the production of lean muscle, which helps eliminate the hormonal effect of fat cells.
Fruits and vegetables have anti-inflammatory properties because they contain powerful bioflavonoids, carotenoids and antioxidants.
Once you choose to start eating the right foods, the next step is to learn how to create metabolism-boosting, anti-inflammatory meals, snacks, and smoothies.
Step 3: Balance your macro-nutrients (proteins, fats, carbs) so you stabilize blood sugar, optimize digestion, and regulate hormonal activity
This step is crucial to achieving a healthy body since it focuses on balancing the main hormones responsible for weight loss (insulin, cortisol, and leptin).
Step #3 is where most women go wrong, because of years of metabolic damage, they think they can just start “eating healthier.” Unfortunately, you need to be more aggressive in your approach if you want to lose weight.
This involves learning how to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, and how to balance your macronutrients.
Step 4: Exercise smart.
Not all exercise is created equal. If your exercise of choice leads to excessive cortisol secretion and muscle catabolism, then you could be adding fuel to the fire of inflammation.
The best form of exercise stimulates your fat-burning hormones like growth hormone and adrenaline and keeps your fat-storing hormones low like cortisol and estrogen.
This type of exercise is referred to as “metabolic”, since it not only burns calories during your workout, it keeps your fat-burning engines revved up all day. This is known as the “After-Burn Effect.”
The after-burn effect only happens when cortisol is kept regulated. There is a specific form of exercise you need to avoid to keep cortisol from making you store fat.
Remember, you can reverse inflammation by adjusting your diet, restarting your metabolism, exercising, and transforming your habits. It comes to simply saying NO to certain foods, saying YES to certain foods, finding an efficient way to exercise, and transforming your lifestyle habits.
