Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

clogged, and the carbs you eat are stored as fat because your body literally has no other choice.
    It’s a vicious cycle because insulin resistance shuts down your body’s ability to burn fat. So if your muscles aren’t receiving the carbs—because your body is resistant—then you produce more insulin and those carbs and sugars are stored as fat.
    Even worse, it’s not just that your body is getting fatter. It’s also having trouble building muscle. Those same carbohydrates that are getting trapped in your bloodstream are also blocking your ability to transport proteins and amino acids to your muscles so that they can grow, recover, and help your entire body work the way it should. And because your muscle cells need sugar to grow (remember, carbs are fuel), your body feels that it needs to create sugar. How does it do that? (Wait for it . . . wait for it . . .) By breaking down muscle in order to provide your body the sugar it thinks it needs to function. Only problem? You have the sugar, but it’s trapped. So you hold on to the sugar as your body eats away at your muscle.
    Oh. Fuck. Not so hard to see why we become fat, right?
    Inevitably, your body craves more and more carbohydrates as you become more insulin resistant. And it’s not your fault. You’re trying to feed the machine (your body), but the equipment isn’t working right, so your body is literally plotting against you. And if you think having screwy insulin management only affects your physique, you’d be underestimating the power of the dark side . . . we mean insulin. It can cause problems with everything from your boners to your brain. Oh yeah, and you can die . . . of the beetus. *
    Our entire goal in the diet and exercise portion of this book will be showing you how to manage and control insulin so it’s your bitch. And by that we mean you won’t have to worry about everything you eat turning into a ticking time bomb. Instead you’ll be able to eat carbs, proteins, and fats, and your body will use them in a beneficial way.

    CORTISOL
    If you’ve ever watched infomercials at two A.M. , you’ve heard of cortisol. The so-called stress hormone is a bit of a double-edged sword, particularly with regard to its relationship with fat.
    Produced in your adrenal glands, cortisol is primarily a catabolic agent. Although the word catabolism is normally associated with muscle loss, it simply refers to the breakdown of substance for energy. This can certainly relate to muscle, as prolonged elevation of cortisol has been definitively shown to lead to proteolysis, or muscle breakdown; however, short periods of elevation have been shown to lead to lipolysis, or breakdown of fatty tissue. And if there’s any type of breakdown we love, it’s of fatty tissue.
    There’s also evidence that links cortisol to the storage of abdominal fat. In other words, if you have high cortisol, you’re likely to store most of your fat on your belly. All of this makes cortisol an interesting hormone when you consider that producing it can break down fat and help you get lean . . . or it can cause you to store fat in the worst area.
    What makes cortisol even more complicated is that you want it to rise during activity. It is directly linked to your fight-or-flight mode, which means that when cortisol rises, you can use that stress to improve your performance. This is a great thing for your training, as you want more intensity. But if cortisol remains elevated for too long, it causes a rise in blood sugar, which makes you crave all sorts of unhealthy foods, according to researchers at the University of Southern California. What’s more, it can make you insulin resistant. And as you already learned, insulin resistance is a badass motherfucker that you want no part of.
    The question, then, is how do we ensure that it’s used for increasing performance and not for ruining our bodies? Simple: you manipulate cortisol through diet and training. And we’ll teach exactly how to do that starting in chapter 8.

    THE TWO BIGGEST REASONS YOU DON’T HAVE THE BODY YOU WANT
    We’ll be blunt—if you’re struggling to become the man you want to be, chances are your efforts are being sabotaged by two foundational problems: metabolic slowdown and program stagnation. Before you can even begin optimizing your hormones, you need to key in on these two areas.
    Metabolic Slowdown
    At their core, most programs aimed at fat loss are based on a single thing—what we call energy deficit.