Why Vitamin C Is Essential to Fast Weight Loss

The key to losing weight fast is to work with your body’s natural mechanisms to motivate it to burn stored fat.

What is vitamin C?

Water soluble vitamin, found in fruit & vegetables, water soluble means we need to take it daily because unlike fat soluble vitamins the body does not store it. 

Vitamin C helps in the weight loss process in two very significant ways:

• It helps regulate the hormone insulin that tells your body to store fat
• It’s part of an important amino acid that burns the stored fat you already have. 

To understand the first mechanismof weight loss using vitamin C, you first need to understand what the hormone cortisol is and how it works.

Cortisol is one of the stress hormones. Each stress hormone (adrenalin is another) has specific tasks in the presence of stress.

When the brain perceives stress, which can be anything from a paper cut to a job loss, it stimulates the release of these stress hormones to do their various jobs.

All of those jobs are meant to protect the body from both the physical and the mental impact of whatever might be causing the stress in the first place.

Cortisol’s specific job is to store body fat, specifically belly fat. Our bodies are designed to associate stress with a possible lack of food.

In the old days, stress might mean that you were either on the run from a predator, an enemy tribe, or a natural disaster.

This might mean that you wouldn’t have the time or ability to find, prepare, and eat food.

Today, the presence of stress is more likely to mean that you’ll just lose your appetite, but the result is the same: no food.

So your brain sends out a supply of cortisol and that cortisol takes glucose and converts it to fat,

Still with me?

Rather than allowing it to go through the process of being converted to glycogen, which is what your food becomes so that it can be burned as energy.

The role that vitamin C plays in this mechanism is that it is an incredibly powerful antioxidant that reduces the impact of stress on the body.

With enough vitamin C on board, your brain perceives less stress and therefore sends out less cortisol. This prevents new belly fat from being stored, which brings us to the second way that vitamin C aids weight loss.

Vitamin C and L-Carnitine

There are two keys to fast weight loss: don’t store new fat and get rid of the fat you already have. L-carnitine is part of that second step.

Once less cortisol is being released into your bloodstream, your body is perfectly willing to get rid of the fat you already have stored up for the next ice age or attack by wooly mammoth.

But it has a mechanism for that too, and you’re going to need plenty of vitamin C for it.

Once the brain gives the okay to get rid of stored fat, it needs to turn that fat back into glycogen so it can be burned as energy.

Your body has no other way to get the fat to exit your body. You can’t just digest it again and get rid of it through your intestines. You have to burn it off, in the form of glycogen (energy).

Your liver is where the stored fat can be changed back into glycogen, but first the stored fat has to get from your abs to your liver.

This is where L-carnitine comes in. L-carnitine is a neat little amino acid that actually transports fat cells to the liver. You can look at it as public transportation for fat cells and the only bus stop is the liver.

In fact, a recent study from Arizona State University showed that L-carnitine can boost fat loss by as much as 30%.

But, remember...you need lots of vitamin C to make L-carnitine. This is where making sure you get enough of the nutrient really comes into play again.

Vitamin C is a soluble vitamin; we don’t store much of it. However, we use a lot.

Remember, vitamin C is essential to all cell growth and cell repair and your body also needs it for your immune system.

Those are bigger priorities, as far as the body is concerned, than losing weight. So, it’ll take what it needs for those priorities and then whatever vitamin C is leftover can be used to make L-carnitine so that you can look awesome in a bathing suit. 

So now that you know why you need vitamin C to lose weight, how do you make sure you’re getting enough?

The best way to get almost every nutrient is through whole foods, so your first step is to eat a diet loaded with great vitamin C-rich foods. Some of the best are spinach, kale, strawberries, pomegranates, grapefruit, and oranges…essentially any type of fruit or vegetable. 

Do your best to eat at least one vitamin C-rich food at every meal.

You can also consider supplementing with vitamin C if you have a hard time eating enough of these C-filled foods.

How much vitamin C you need to burn fat is completely individual, so there is no set dosage to give you. Try starting out with two 500mg tablets twice a day. If you don’t have any problems with loose stool, you can go up to three doses per day, but that should be all you need.

Loose stalls are a sign of bowl tolerance meaning that the body has enough for its needs, so just cut back if need be.

It’s not unusual for women to lose as much as 3-5 pounds per week this way. 

Give your body a few days to get things in gear, but when it does, you’ll be amazed at how quickly stored fat starts disappearing!

If you'd like to learn how to support your own personal nutritional needs then i'd love to talk to you.

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