Many years ago a much beloved fairy tale floated around the health and physical culture environments, the tale of magical spot reduction. It seems most everyone has a particularly obnoxious area on their body that likes to accumulate extra fat. For some people that area is the pouch around the belly button and for others it is the “love handles” sitting on the top of the hips. Some folks hate the backs of their arms and others it is the area under their chin. Until recently a really favorite area that just had to be eliminated was the butt. Now women are injecting fat (and other much nastier substances) into their butts. In any event, there always seems to be some area that needs to be reduced.
Curiously, these annoying areas seem to be particularly invulnerable to normal weight loss tactics. Starve yourself and you will lose fat anywhere except that one spot you hate. Maybe that is why you hate it so much, you go to battle with it and it always wins. Physiologists think that these difficult areas of fat accumulation have less blood supply than normal fat tissue. In reality, it is true that if you take the temperature of a difficult fat spot, it will generally read 1 to 2 degrees colder than surrounding tissue. Less blood supply means less
ability of the hormones that stimulate fat release to activate the fat holding cells. It also means that there is less blood flow to carry away any fat that is released.
Over the years there have been a wild assortment of contraptions designed to help you lose that stubborn fat spot. Some of them try to beat the fat away with wiggling belts and pounding paddles. Others try to melt it away with hot herbs, sauna “wraps”, space blanket sauna suits, and heat lamps. Many sorts of electronic gizmos have been foisted on the gullible market to stimulate fat loss through various magical frequencies of magnetism and electricity. Even homeopathic remedies have been used to generate fat loss. None of them have ever worked, but hope goes on forever.
Of special note is the spot reduction myth that you can exercise the fat off. All sorts of exercise equipment has been tried to mobilize fat by creating a demand for energy right where the fat is. The problem is you can’t
exercise fat. What you exercise is muscle tissue under the fat. And for most people what muscle tissue burns is sugar, not fat. If you are in ketosis fat burning mode, the fat those muscles will burn is derived from the blood flow carrying fat and ketones released by the liver, not the fat tissues around the muscles. The liver will first pull fat from the metabolically active fat stores around the organs. When that is gone then fat under the skin will come off from where the blood flow is greatest.
As you can see, stubborn fat is stubborn for a reason. That is why spot fat reduction has always failed…at least until now. A new weapon in the war on fat has been released in the last few years. It began as research into laser therapy for healing injured tissues. As the laser equipment got more sophisticated and the research into laser interaction with the cells advanced, it was discovered that our cells respond to certain very specific frequencies of light. Those frequencies are right around
635 nm and 840 nm. Visually the 635 nm light looks like a deep ruby red color while the 840 nm light is actually invisible to our eyes in the infared range, meaning below red. The energy producing mitochondria in our cells that turn sugars and fat into chemical energy called ATP, respond to those wavelengths of light to trigger the production of more energy. It is like our mitochondria act a little like plants, that are able to turn sunlight into simple sugars. Here it is the reverse process and the light helps the mitochondria generate more energy from the burning of sugars and fat.
Why is this important? Because everything that happens in our body depends on ATP energy. When you have a damaged tissue, adding more ATP energy speeds up the healing process by supplying the energy to make the new proteins and chemicals needed in the healing process. This will be the subject of a future newsletter when I talk about using these wavelengths of light for skin rejuvenation and organ healing. For right now the interesting thing researchers found while investigating this healing process was that at sufficient intensity, these wavelengths also caused the outer membranes of fat cells to open up and dump their stored fat out into the fluid around the cells. They have actual photomicrographs observing these cells dripping out little globules of fat. Subsequent surgical studies found that when fatty tissue was exposed to this light, it became very limp and jelly like with an oily feel compared to fat tissue a few inches away that was not exposed to this light.
What does this all mean? It means that certain wavelengths of laser light actually squeeze fat out of the fat cells under your skin. Once this was discovered, laser devices with multiple rotating laser heads were built for “instant” fat loss. These were very expensive and treatments in plastic surgeons offices would run $300 to $500 per session and would typically be applied 6 to 8 times. Tape measure testing of various body parts would show up to an inch of fat loss per spot, though they usually measured 5 to 7 areas and told you the total loss over all areas. That way you could tell your friends how you lost 4 to 7 inches of fat at the clinic. Patients were pleased.
A couple years ago further research demonstrated that laser light was not needed, any light source would work if it was the right wavelength and intensity. The laser manufacturers tried to insist that the laser would penetrate deeper than regular light, but the research shows that the laser light scatters and becomes regular light in the first millimeter of skin. Now a new company called UltraSlim has produced an LED fat loss system, and they claim an average of 3.5 inches of fat loss per treatment. These claims sound pretty fantastic to me, but their research appears to be good. The
trouble with this system is that it is still very expensive and the cost to patients is about the same as the laser systems. The advantage is that since laser is not involved, it is safer and you don’t have to be a medical doctor to use one in your clinic. You can check them out atwardphotonics.com. Check out the gallery section.
I have been experimenting with LED light for years for treating skin and for wound healing. This fat loss system naturally grabbed my attention. I went back to the original research and it appears that it really does what they say. What I don’t understand yet is where does the fat go? Fat is not eliminated from the body through the bowels, kidneys, or skin. The only way fat ever leaves the body is by being burned for energy in the cells. A tiny bit of the fat may be used up by the increased metabolism created by the light affecting the energy production pathways mentioned above. But the bulk of
the fat released would need to be burned up by the patient either dieting or exercising it away. I will be doing further research on this issue.
In the mean time it does seem perfectly reasonable to use this red light/ infared light protocol to treat stubborn fat areas. Their smaller size means there is a much better chance of eliminating the fat fairly easily. Treatment just on the abdomen or neck or arm should work well.
Knowing how I am do-it-yourself kind of guy, I have adapted a heat lamp array normally used in hair salons and special LED lamps designed for plants
that have the proper wavelengths for skin usage for use in the office. A simple 8 minutes of exposure to the desired area is the correct dosage to produce results. For the month of June this stubborn fat loss system is available to you at no cost. After that I think a $5 charge per treatment is appropriate. This treatment is something you will want to do a couple times per week. I also recommend being on a fat loss diet/exercise program to burn up the fat released. I am also working on creating a whole body treatment system for skin rejuvenation, organ/gland treatment, as well as fat loss. I have to build a treatment area for that purpose.
This should be fun to play with to see just how nicely this protocol reshapes peoples bodies. I enjoy experimenting with new forms of therapy to improve peoples lives.