Chapter 10 · Ruby Cherie
Physiology of Lean vs. Overweight Individuals
January 24, 2025
And so now if we relate that to lean people versus overweight people. You have this continuum and the physiology, even though we're all mammals, we're all humans, the physiology between those two people is not the same. So people who are really overweight have a really easy time pushing fat into the bloodstream. They have a problem getting rid of it after that fact. They can transport it. They can get in the bloodstream. This is why you get a lot of overweight people and you look at their labs, high triglycerides, really fucked up blood fats, dyslipidemia, all this. But then you go to a lean person, their problem isn't oxidizing. They can get rid of energy really easily. Their problem is getting the fat to where they get rid of it in the first place, because the leaner you get, the less the body wants to relinquish that fat. So now we can also talk about like the HIIT and like steady state cardio. How's that tie in here too, because if you're really overweight, when you were talking about how like intense stuff and stress creates a response to hormone sensitive lipase. Now what that does, hormone sensitive lipase, it is sensitive to catecholamines, which means under stress, your body thinks that it needs energy. It knows it needs energy. So you're going to try to get energy in the bloodstream. Hormone sensitive lipase is activated. And so what that's going to do is take that triglyceride that's in your adipocyte, your fat cell, and it's going to break it down into a glycerol and a diacylglycerol and a fatty acid. Then it's going to break it down from diacylglycerol and a monoisoglycerol and a fatty acid. That glycerol and that fatty acid is going to go into the bloodstream. And what we're hoping is that fatty acid can find its way into some cell where it can be turned into heat or energy. Now, really overweight people don't have a problem with that. So for really overweight people, walking is the gateway drug into getting better mitochondria. But we also have to realize that anything that's low intense, you're going to adapt to really quickly. So once you've adapted, let's say you give somebody 10,000 steps. You have a decision to make. You're either going to go longer or you're going to go harder. So it's like you go from 10,000 to 12,000. Okay, cool. So now we've created a bigger stimulus. When you adapt to that, what's your decision? 14,000, 15,000 steps, or you just go harder. At some point, you just simply can't do more steps. At that point, that's where like,
dedicated steady state cardio works really well because now i've taken a like you can't get any more lists any more low intense steady state you can't get lower than walking but you can go up from there so you can go to faster walking at some point you can't walk faster because then you're jogging so then in order to do that maybe you get on an elliptical and you crank it up a little bit So that's how you progress. You have to do more volume or you have to do it harder. And logistically, the thing that makes the most sense is to go a little bit harder. And what's nice is you're losing weight, you're getting in better shape, you can go harder, it's not a big deal. Right? But you have those two tools leveraged. Now when you get to the lean side, the problem again is relinquishing the fat. So while low and moderate and high intensity steady state cardio is still beneficial for people who are lean, if you're trying to get real lean like Ruby or myself and we're dick skin lean, like you want to have skin that feels like your eyeball. like if you do your if you squeeze your your eyelid like that and you want skin that's that thin then like stage competition the the easiest way to do that is yeah throw in a little bit of hit and it doesn't it doesn't make hit special except for the fact that hit helps to create a situation where it's easier to get fat out of the fat cell so it doesn't make hit better than less or miss or his, it makes it different and valuable in a different situation. Now, going back to that, like people who are overweight don't need to do HIIT. Like the whole purpose of HIIT is to help with that fat, like fat breakdown aspect. You need that when you're already at an average level of body fat or really lean, but don't do it until you need it. Like you don't need it. Right. You said this at the mentorship, just quickly, you said this at the mentorship where most people don't even do HIIT. It's just crap. They basically, they'll do these classes.