Current medical reports for the treatment for fatty liver disease indicate that more than one third of North Americans need treatment for fatty liver disease and if left untreated will progress on to liver inflammation, cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure and liver cancer. The excess fat in your liver massively increases your risk for diabetes, stroke, heart attack, specific cancers and ultimately an early death. Obesity is a very visible symptom of a fatty liver, but most sufferers have symptoms that they just get used to rather than do anything about. Not doing anything about a fatty liver is not an option if you want to regain your health and live longer.
However, fatty liver disease is a condition and not a disease as the name suggests and therefore it can be treated and cured without the need for expensive medication, pills or surgery.
To be clear, Fatty Liver Disease can be reversed with the right treatment.
So How Does a Fatty Liver Get To Be Fatty?
Carbohydrates are sugars that your body needs to survive. Before any carbohydrate can get into your bloodstream, it must be broken down into a single form of sugar. Of all the types of sugars, there are only four, glucose, galactose, mannose and fructose, that can pass from your intestines to your liver. Of these four sugars, only glucose can pass without change from the liver into the normal blood flow. Galactose and Mannose are rapidly broken down in your liver and do not get into your general blood flow. The main sugar that the Liver works on is Fructose, which is converted to glycogen, the storage form of sugar in your liver. This is then fed into your bloodstream in a controlled manner based on your blood sugar level. However, the liver can store only so much glycogen; as soon as the glycogen stores are full, the fructose is then converted to a type of fat called triglycerides. If surplus amounts of triglycerides accumulate in your liver, you develop a fatty liver.
How Your Liver Is Meant To Work
Everyone understands that calories burnt should equal calories in. This is a natural balance and is reflected in the livers conversion of fructose to either glycogen to be burnt as fuel or stored as fat in triglycerides for burning later. As the blood sugars drop, the body calls for the triglycerides to be converted to glycogen and this effectively burns off the stored fat. As the blood sugars rise, there is no further call for glycogen and the liver converts the fructose to fat.
So How Do We Get a Fatty Liver?
The liver is effectively making either fuel or fat based on your blood sugar level. Having a fatty liver prevents the insulin receptors in your cells from responding to the normal insulin in your blood which causes a rise in blood sugar which causes your pancreas to release even more insulin which causes the liver to convert more sugar to fat (triglycerides) which then fills your liver with more fat to cause an even more Fatty Liver. You can see this is a downward cycle that will only end in serious medical problems unless a change is made in diet and lifestyle.
Left unchecked, you develop excess fat in your body, usually around the belly (leading to obesity), high blood sugar (leading to diabetes), high insulin and triglycerides levels (leading to heart attacks) and a greater risk of specific cancers as well as a range of other associated diseases.
So What is the Treatment For Fatty Liver Disease?
The liver will only burn off the fat when it is called to do and that requires the blood sugar to be low enough that the liver starts to burn the triglycerides to raise the blood sugar level.
Whilst exercise is always recommended it is not actually needed in order to treat a fatty liver. Provided you can control the foods you eat it is possible to have a fatty liver diet that does not leave you hungry, and yet always leaves the liver burning away the surplus fat. The aim is to have a slow burn so that your body can manage the gradual changes which is critical to the long-term success and maintenance of the fat loss.
So How Can We Do This?
The full details of what foods and drinks can be consumed as normal and reduce a fatty liver are outlined in a holistic treatment guide for fatty liver called the Ezra Protocol. It outlines the foods that boost blood sugar more than others, and those that can easily be replaced with other common foods items so that your diet is about maintaining a healthy blood sugar level rather than trying to starve yourself. It also outlines the physical and mental areas to examine and improve to give you the best chance at permanent fat loss.
The Ezra Protocol shows that restricting carbohydrates is much more effective than simply cutting calories or limiting fat intake. In medical tests, low-carbohydrate diets lead to greater reduction in fat from a fatty liver and gave longer term sustained weight loss than low calorie diets. By lowering the carbohydrate intake, focusing on those that generate fructose (which is the sugar that generates the fat) you get a sustainable and consistent way of asking the liver to burn fat and also maintain a healthy blood sugar level. The whole purpose of restricting the sugar generating carbohydrates is to keep a non-high blood sugar level so that the liver always burns off more fat than it stores. Following the whole process in the Ezra Protocol will lead to a slow but consistent weight loss, initially from your fatty liver, but then from your whole body, until you reach your ideal in-balance weight. Which is the ideal result for non-surgical treatment for fatty liver disease.
