An ideal way to lose weight

Many of you will identify with this. You are about 5-7 kg overweight and want to get your weight down to the recommended level. So you sign on at the gym and are regular during the first few weeks. But when you weight yourself day after day, the needle refuses to budge. You get disheartened and stop. ‘The gym doesn’t work for me,’ you recon, and hang up your gym shoes.

Giving up on the gym a few weeks into the effort is the worst thing you can do because if you are regular, it is entirely possible that you may not be losing weight, but you are losing fat.

How is that?

What happens is that when you are slightly overweight and your workout is a combination of cardio vascular exercise like walking/ running and weight training, you lose fat. But your muscle mass has increased at the same time, your weight remains static.

One pound of muscle looks denser than one pound of fat. Fat is a flab, it is loose, all over the place. Muscles are denser, more compact. So, you weight won’t change, at least in the beginning. Because the fat loss is compensated by muscle gain, there will be signs to indicate that you are on the right track. After some time you will notice that your clothes are getting looser, your stomach and arms feel taut, and your strength is up.

But this does not mean that you start doing weights with a vengeance to build muscle in the hope that it will make you look super toned and sculpted. Yes, you can weight train, you will build muscle. But you can only lose the excess fat in your body through cardio-vascular exercise. You can not achieve fat lose without cardio. Ideally, you should do a combination of cardio and weights. Cardio to lose fat and weights to tone your body.

The good news is that unlike fat, muscle burn a lot of calories. So the more muscle mass you have, the easier it is to burn fat and your efforts at gym will sooner or later translate into weight loss too.

The gender riddle in weight loss

The fat cells of women are very different than men’s. This can be seen very clearly in the way women and men lose weight when following unisex food regulation and exercise plans. But it’s interesting to see how exactly they differ when it comes to common foods and exercises that people hoping to lose weight usually resort to. Let’s see following examples:

Eating less

When people first begin to notice that they are slightly overweight, they begin to eat less, or at least try and consume fewer calories. The effects on men and women are as follows:
Men: They tend to lose muscle which shows on the scale as weight loss. There is muscle and water loss together with a little of fat loss.
Women: The same diet plan makes women feel starved, which leads to a better control over fat metabolism. This is not good as it sounds. It means that the fat cells become more efficient at storing fat, which means that beyond water loss, a woman will not lose much weight per week on this diet.

Exercise

Men: Men typically burn more carbohydrates and fat during high intensity exercise.
Women: They burn more fat when they do low intensity, long duration exercise.

Fad Diets

Men: They can knock of weight on high protein diets because they have a higher protein metabolizing capacity than women.
Women: They tend to lose weight better when on high fibre diets, because fibre is an excellent fat binder and help flush out fat better.

Eating fatty food

Unfortunately, eating fatty food affects women more since their fat cells are eager to store fat. This is because women are prone to hormonal imbalance, primarily because of the cyclical hormonal flux during menstruation, and also because of effects of pregnancy and menopause. If a woman takes additional hormones during pregnancy that only add to the imbalances. This entire means that a woman’s fat cells react to hormones within the body all the time.

This is why women who want to lose weight must realize that their hormonal status plays an important role in their effort to lose weight. In fact, many weight loss clinics today ensure that women detoxify and purge their liver of accumulated hormones residues before they attempt to lose weight. This makes it easier for them to burn fat.

To summarize, the best way to tame the female fat cell is to decrease the consumption of fatty foods in the estrogenic phase of the menstruation cycle, eat more fibre, eat small frequent meals that are primarily unrefined, control water retention, do low intensity long duration exercises and detoxify the liver.