Ridding Fat
Ridding Fat | Peak Points * Balance your diet at 60 percent carbohydrate, 25 to 30 percent fat and 10 to 15 percent protein. If you are typical, this means considerably less fat in the diet. And that likely will mean fewer calories. * Burn more calories via exercise and an active lifestyle. You won''t lose weight solely by cutting back on eating. * Make sure your workout schedule consists of equal parts aerobic exercise and resistance training. |
If asked why we exercise, some of us might point to our biceps and say we want to look stronger, more chiseled, and be more apt to turn heads at the beach. But most of us would instead probably point to our bellies and say we want to look less bloated, less flaccid, less likely to be mistaken for a landlocked whale at the beach. Both answers, however, depend on one thing: ridding the body of fat.
The two major components of fitness—strength and endurance—have a direct bearing on how much fat hangs on the body. Without lean muscle (which displaces fat), there is no strength. Without aerobic fitness (which burns fat), there is no endurance. Sounds pretty simple: "I exercise, therefore I am lean."
But even a slightly pudgy person realizes that fighting fat is never easy or fast—which in many minds are the same thing. "The biggest mistake people make is thinking they will lose a tremendous amount of weight with exercise in the first several weeks," says Peggy Norwood-Keating, director of fitness programs at the Duke University Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, North Carolina. "If they do," she adds, "they''re probably overtraining."
This isn''t meant to be a downer. It''s meant to be realistic and practical. If you''re primed for quick and easy solutions, you''re setting yourself up to be suckered by nutritional nonsense in the form of "revolutionary" fad diets or hardware hucksterism in the form of worthless gadgets hawked on some infomercials, says Norwood-Keating. You''ll end up poorer and smarter, but not consistently thinner. Dieting, in particular, has become a dirty word in serious weight-loss circles as research finds that rapid drops in poundage almost never last, and that on-again-off-again flab fluctuations are inherently unhealthy. We assume you''d rather hear (and we''d certainly rather tell you) about achieving actual results in ways that really work.
A quick, but important, aside: As a field of science, nothing is completely certain in weight loss—but greater certainty exists than you might expect if you''ve been paying attention to news stories, says James Hill, Ph.D., associate director at the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. News organizations love reporting stories that seem to turn conventional wisdom on its head. This can get awfully (and unnecessarily) confusing.
A now-classic example is the 1995 front-page headline in The New York Times suggesting that eating pasta makes you fat. This assertion wasn''t based on a study, but on a mishmash of concepts that individually were valid but together didn''t add up to what the headline said they did. "I think (the writer) got the story wrong," says Dr. Hill, who was quoted in the article. Even studies often reach surprising or contradictory conclusions. Truth, however, generally lies where the heaviest weight of evidence falls—and that''s probably with the tried and true.
Focusing on Fundamentals
It''s easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of weight loss—how many calories you must burn to lose a pound, the relative badness of saturated versus unsaturated fat, the mathematical equation for converting grams of fat into calories. Getting hung up on this stuff is like being a sports geek who would rather cite statistics than pick up the ball and play the game. Here''s all you really need to know to get the job done.
Appreciate calories. The word "calories" is a technical term, not a bridge-club topic. A calorie is a unit of energy. Think of weight loss as a systems engineering problem: Food brings energy in; movement and body operation use it up. To lose weight, you have to burn more energy than you take in, says David Levitsky, Ph.D., professor of nutrition and psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
There''s been a lot of talk in recent years about what kind of calorie on the supply side is most important. One idea that''s been bandied about is that taking in too much fat is much more damaging than taking in too much carbohydrate. That''s because (we''re told) calories of fat are stored more efficiently as flab than calories of carbohydrate are. This is true, but not very significant, according to Dr. Levitsky, whose research is sometimes cited on this issue. In other words, that''s getting lost in the minutiae again.
The big picture is this: Fat is an issue because it has more calories per gram than carbohydrates do—nearly twice as many, in fact. That means you can eat roughly twice as much beans, pasta, cereal and potato than you can bacon, hamburger, cookies and ice cream to get the same number of calories. But make no mistake: Even if calories of carbohydrate are somehow "better" than calories of fat, you''ll still gain weight on carbs if you eat more of them than your body uses.
Manage your eating. Let''s say you''re the manager of a major utility and one quadrant of your power grid is getting overloaded with more energy than it can safely store. Do you cut the flow to your entire service area so that everywhere lights are dimming and computers are fritzing? No, you target the problem and selectively reduce the energy that''s causing it. Likewise, if you''re trying to get rid of a potbelly, it makes no sense to drastically deplete your entire body''s power supply. "You lose lean muscle mass as well as fat if you simply restrict calories, and that will work against you," says Norwood-Keating. "You really need to eat sufficient calories to sustain both exercise and your resting metabolic rate."
The general recommendation for a well-balanced diet, says Norwood-Keating, is one that provides 60 percent carbohydrate, 25 to 30 percent fat and 10 to 15 percent protein. Beyond that, there are a couple of less important but helpful ways to redistribute energy flow and regulate peak consumption, according to experts.
* Eat early, not late. Most obese people get from half to three-quarters of their calories after 6 p.m. This is a mistake, since the body seems to be more efficient at storing fat during the night, says Jay Kenney, R.D., Ph.D., nutrition research specialist at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, California.
* Eat often. Large meals cause a surge of the hormone insulin, which makes the body hold onto its fat stores (probably as an eons-old way of warding off starvation). Eating many smaller meals throughout the day keeps insulin levels down and fat-burning potential up, even when you eat the same number of calories, says Thomas Wolever, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto.
Burn energy with aerobic exercise. To use up more calories than you take in, activity is essential. Aerobic exercise is particularly important for actual weight loss, however, because it''s the type of exercise that will tap into fat stores while you do it. We covered the main components of this type of exercise—intensity, duration and frequency—in Aerobic Exercise on page 27. But here again, it''s important to keep focused on the basics.
"There''s a misperception I see all the time that if you lower the intensity, you''ll burn more fat," says Norwood-Keating. "It drives me nuts." This notion (which may even form the basis for easy-does-it "fat-burning" classes at your gym) is based on findings that lower-intensity activity burns a higher percentage of fat calories (compared to carbohydrate and protein) than higher-intensity exercise. But note: The percentage of burned calories that are fat is higher, not the total amount of calories. And what you want to do is burn more calories. "Within a set amount of time, higher intensity exercise will still burn more calories, even though the percentage that''s fat will be less," says Norwood-Keating.
Consider the telltale results from one study at The Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas. Three groups walked three miles a day. One group walked the distance fast (in 12-minute miles), one at a moderate pace (15-minute miles) and one at a slow pace (20-minute miles). The slowest group burned the most fat, which seems to imply that low-intensity exercise is superior for fat burning. But the slow group also exercised the longest. If the fast group had kept on going for the hour that the slow group was walking, they would have burned more calories.
Rev your metabolism with resistance. Losing fat means changing body composition, and nothing goes more to the heart of body composition than resistance training, says Norwood-Keating. This is not just a matter of making muscles bigger or leaner (although that certainly helps). It''s also a matter of creating more lean tissue, which takes more energy to sustain than fat does. From a power utility point of view, fat is a blighted factory building with a darkened parking lot. Muscle is the same building blazing with interior light and humming with heavy industrial machinery. Developing your muscles "enhances your burn capacity by giving you a higher metabolic rate," Norwood-Keating says. The more lean muscle you have, the more calories you burn even when you''re inactive.
Work the gut. It''s a weight-loss truism that spot-reduction is impossible: You can''t do a single exercise (sit-ups) to reduce fat in a single part of the body (the gut). Still, it''s important for a number of reasons to work the abdominal muscles if you want to lose weight (or look like you have), explains Norwood-Keating. First, abdominal exercise is part of any overall strength-training routine. Beyond that, firming up the abs lends greater structural support to the back and torso, which improves posture. Plus, stronger gut muscles do a better job of holding the stomach in.
The Fight-Fat Workout
Aerobic exercise versus resistance training: It''s really not an either/or proposition. You need to do both regularly, says Norwood-Keating. She advises her clients to work both elements into their routine, with the time divided 50-50. An hour-long workout can easily contain a 30-minute aerobic routine and two sets at each station of our Core Routine (see page 121). If you''re out of shape or are heavy enough that a sustained aerobic workout is quite taxing, Norwood-Keating recommends that you start with a 10- to 12-minute aerobic warm-up, do your weight routine, then finish with a 10- to 12-minute aerobic cooldown. (Remember: Even split aerobic exercise has tremendous benefits.)
For specific muscle exercises, you don''t need to look much further than the Core Routine, which hits all the major muscle groups and will help make you firmer and leaner. There are, however, a number of abdominal exercises that would be worth adding to your routine. Some of them you can do anywhere, anytime, such as vacuums. Here are some other abs exercises our experts suggest.
The Meaning of "Lite" In addition to the fallacy that you can''t over-stuff yourself with calories of carbohydrate, there''s also the erroneous notion that you can eat as much as you want of anything labeled low-fat, nonfat or "lite." In truth, some products with low-fat or lite labeling still contain significant amounts of fat. Confusion over the meaning of these terms prompted the Food and Drug Administration to issue regulations on their use. When making food decisions, be aware of what the following terms actually tell you. * "Low" means that the product falls under a legal limit for whatever claim is being made. To be "low-calorie," a product must have 40 calories or less per serving. To be "low-fat," it must have three grams or less per serving. To be "low-cholesterol," it must have less than 20 milligrams per serving. The bottom line is that these products don''t have a lot of the bad stuff, but they do have some. Note the serving size (now required to be reasonable, but still typically on the small side) and watch your intake. * "Free" signifies an actual absence of the stuff—or at least so little of it that it hardly counts. It''s the "healthiest" term, but taste may be an issue. * "Reduced" means this particular product has 25 percent less fat, calories, sugar or whatever is being claimed than it used to have, or than a similar product (often with the same name) does. Its real meaning to you depends entirely on how bad the original is. * "Lean" is a meat term meaning the cut has less than ten grams of total fat, four grams of saturated fat and 95 milligrams of cholesterol per serving. * "Extra-lean" is twice as good as lean on the fat scale: It must have less than five grams of total fat and two grams of saturated fat—but is still allowed 95 milligrams of cholesterol per serving. |
Reverse Curls
Lie on your back, with your thighs at about a 90-degree angle to the floor and your knees bent and touching each other. Your feet should be positioned together loosely by your butt, and your hands should be behind your head. This is your starting position.
With your hands behind your head, raise your chest toward your knees while simultaneously bringing your knees toward your chest. Return to the starting position. With this and the following exercises, remember to exhale as you come up and inhale as you lower yourself back down.
Exhalation Roll-Ups
Lie on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor about two feet from your butt. Place your hands on your stomach, with your index fingers pointing toward your navel.
Roll your shoulders and upper back off the floor. At the top of the motion, gently exhale, pushing the air out so that your stomach tightens. Pause for two seconds, roll back down to the starting position and breathe in. Do five to six repetitions.
Reverse Trunk Rotations
To hit the abdominals, the obliques and muscles along the spine and lower back, try this exercise.
Lie on your back with your arms extended straight and perpendicular to your sides. Your knees should be bent and together, and your feet together, tucked close to your butt.
Keeping your shoulders and arms in contact with the floor, drop your bent knees to the right side, so that the outside of your right leg touches the floor. Raise your knees again, pass through the starting position and drop your knees to the left. Do two sets of 8 to 12 repetitions.
