Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Find Your Model Health, the official podcast of Shameen's Model Health. For those looking to optimize their long-term weight and health goals. I am Shameen Lenny. I'm a biohacker and fitness and nutrition expert, and of course, I'm your host.
Thank you for joining me for another episode, and I hope you're all settling back into routine nicely now that kids are back to school. Before we move on with this podcast, I must state that the information in these podcasts should not be taken as medical advice, but used for informational purposes only. So, okay, as we are done that, let's move on with our podcast. So this week's podcast is Oxygen for Weight Loss or Oxygen for Fat Loss.
We think of reducing our sugar and eating cleaner and drinking more water, even exercising more as we start a weight loss campaign or journey. But we rarely hear about oxygen unless you have had me show that you're telling me to get outside and walk and get some fresh air. We rarely hear about it, and how important it is to deliver oxygen to the South, and how your ability to deliver oxygen to the body may be the missing link to some people's fap burning abilities or circles. It's obviously an essential nutrient because without oxygen we would die.
So, women owe super essential nutrients, but it gets overlooked in regards to fap burning or fatty acid oxidation. So, we need oxygen for oxidation. So, the basics of oxygen, well, we know we needed to survive. First, we have to breathe it in.
It goes into our lungs from there. So, from the lungs, it goes to our blood and then to our cells and into our energy power plants or powerhouses, also known as our mitochondria, where it combines with our macronutrients to make ATP or energy. There are obviously a lot of variables involved, but that kind of gives you the gist of it. So, we breathe in about 20% oxygen and exhale about 12 to 15%, depending on the quality of the air, the altitude, your act, and their individuals, oxygen or take ability.
So, there are some variables and they can vary from individual to individual. But we want to make sure that oxygen is getting into the cells effectively, especially if we want to liberate fat cells or encourage fatty acid oxidation. So, to liberate fat cells means if we want to take the fat that's on our body and put it into our blood stream, and that is also known as fatty acid oxidation. For this, we want to make sure we have good blood pressure, good circulation, and a good quality of oxygen coming into the body for a nice amount of time.
So, above I mentioned altitude, and I wanted to bring up this study, obviously related to altitude. The study was published in the journal obesity in 2010 and titled, hyperbieric hypoxia causes body weight reduction in obese subjects. So, it was done on health retreat, and they found the ones that were at higher altitude were better for fat loss and long-term fat burning than those retreats that were down on a beach or at lower altitude. And it was shown and I quote the doctor in charge, Dr.
Lebel says, The levels of hormone, the hormone leptin, which suppresses appetite, rose during their week at high altitude, while the hunger hormone bremen was unchanged, and this meant they were less hungry during their stay. Their metabolic rate was also higher at altitude, which meant they burned more calories, and this combined with the lower calorie intake caused the weight loss. So, it improved leptin resistance, and this may be due to the body's ability to adjust to the altitude and improve that delivery of oxygen to the muscles, where the air is thinner or higher, the body would have to take in more oxygen to get that same percentage of oxygen intake. And then this sparked the ability to oxidize fat and correct the leptin resistance, because we know that fat cells may be leptin, and as they started to break down the fat, the body also resensitized to the leptin.
This also begs the question, if a hyperbieric chamber may be affected with fat loss also. If anyone would like to test that out, there is a hyperbieric chamber here in Erdary, so you could go test it out and let me know. And metabolism was increased most likely because of the faster availability of oxygen to the cells and production of ATP. So, the faster the oxygen got into the cells, the faster the body was making energy, and therefore you had an increased metabolic rate from that.
And this is just from being like at the top of a mountain. Now, study showed that, we're going to get a little bit of time, so that the optimal range, or VO2 max is about 70%. So, VO2 max is also known as maximal oxygen uptake. It's the measurement of the max amount of oxygen a person can take in or utilize during exercise.
So, for some, this could be a moderate-paced walk of like 30 or 40 minutes, that gets them at their 70% VO2 max. But what this means is that there's this window of opportunity around 70%, that allows us to burn fat. Now, if we can improve, so this is all in regards to exercise, if we can improve our ability to take in oxygen, then we can improve fat burning around this rate or the 70%. And of course, depending on how you improve the oxygen delivery, you may even be able to burn fat for fuel at 70 or 80 or even 85% of your VO2 max.
And this is where highly trained athletes that train in the zone of 85% or more, so that high-intensity endurance kind of zone, they can, with the right training and the correct oxygen, they can still be in fat burning zone at 85% of their VO2 max, whereas the general population who don't maybe use hyperbark masks or chambers or train at the top of mountains, we generally turn off fat burning after 70, 75% of our VO2 max because that's when we go anaerobic. And anaerobic means without oxygen, so we don't have that oxygen there and helping with that fat burning. And that brings us to those limiting factors for your ability to burn fat. And these kinds of, from a mechanical standpoint, they're three-fold.
That means that if you're missing one of these three, then you will struggle to burn fat. And this is a mechanical point of view because obviously there's other variables, and I spoke a lot more about other things that play a big part in fat burning, but looking at this in regards to the mechanics and the oxygen, these limiting factors, they're three. Number one, you need a fat burning engine. So in our case, in human beings, we need good healthy functioning cells or midochondria, so those powerhouses.
Then we need oxygen, and then we need fat to burn. If we want to be fat burning, we need fat to burn. We need these three things. If you don't have one of these three fatty acid oxidation will stop, or it won't happen.
So oxygen goes hand in hand with fat liberation, or fat for fat burning. Okay, so fat liberation, back to our fat liberation, as I mentioned up above, the fat liberation is where we take fat from our body and we liberate it, or we move it into our bloodstream so that it can then be shown to cells and tissues to be burned for energy, and this can be fat anywhere in the body. So what are the best ways to liberate fat, especially that subcutaneous fat, or that stubborn fat on the hips and thighs and the arms, you know, that fat that just will not go? We need to liberate that so we can join the oxygen and go into the cells to be burned as energy, right?
Well, how we do that? We need to keep anything that improves circulation and warms up the body. A warmer body has better circulation. And that kind of goes into thyroid and the liver and stuff, but I'm not getting into that now.
So walking and rebounding being the tough for movements or exercises for improving circulation, then we got resistance training, dancing, swimming, cycling, and even hiking at a high altitude would obviously be super smart if fat burning is your goal. So keep that in mind as the spring and summer months come in, unless you don't have a problem, hiking in minus 20 degrees, which the cold plays a part to. But that could be super smart if you want to burn some extra calories. So I mentioned warming up the body.
This includes consuming foods that warm up the body. They can be very helpful for improving circulation, which again helps liberate fat, or moves fat from the body into the bloodstream to use for energy production. I also, above or earlier in the podcast, mentioned quality of air is important. So this means that walking or exercising early in the day, when the air is cleaner, is going to be more favorable before traffic builds up and those fumes and pollution get into the air.
It's going to be wiser to walk as early in the day that you can. And also walking or exercising in the colds can then add to your fat burning too. There are many studies to back this up. I'm not going to get into it now.
Not only for how the cold can help convert white fat to brown fat, which is more easily burned or liberated for energy, but also the body has a higher demand for oxygen in the cold. Not to mention the added calories that you burn from shivering. So if I say to you in the future, if we're talking one to one and I say, please get outside and go for a walk. Can we make this happen?
And you tell me that you're going on the treadmill for a walk and I say, no, I want you to go outside. The treadmill is not as beneficial as going outside in the air. We didn't even mention the sun and vitamin D, but you get what I'm saying. Now you're going to understand or hopefully this persuades you to get outdoors a lot more and move and taking some nice clean air.
So for yourself, need oxygen without oxygen. You're going to die for fatty acid oxidation or fabric burning. You need oxygen. So I really hope this podcast is going to help you get outside.
And I don't want to hear the excuse of it's too cold because I've covered that too and there really are no excuses. So please, please, sharing is caring. If you know someone that will benefit from this, please do share with them. Even if it's just one person, if there's someone you've been encouraging to start walking this new year or trying to convince them how beneficial getting outdoors is, and this podcast may just be what will tip them over and get them moving and hopefully help improve their health.
But thank you for listening. I hope you're enjoying the weight loss series over on the Facebook page. Next week, we will continue with that and there's going to be some videos and more posts. So keep an eye out and you know where to reach me.
If you need me, through Facebook or my website, that's your name's not all health. And thanks again, people, for listening for another year. Have a great week and we'll chat soon. Bye.