Health Fitness

What every woman wishes she knew about burning fat

Would you like to know the secret to getting rid of stubborn fat?

First, a little background story. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Arguing whether exercise or diet is more important for weight loss is almost as big a conundrum.

My mother has been heard to say that she could never be as skinny as I am because she can’t run a marathon. Well, I don’t like to argue with my mom, but her lack of a career doesn’t stop her from being skinny. As a Sports Dietitian with a Master of Nutrition, I know that the key to ensuring my client’s weight loss is to speed up her metabolism. In fact, I called the program I created “Metabolic Boost.”

So yes, I care what you eat and when you eat it. However, nutrition is not the only factor in weight loss. While nutrition plays a bigger role than most of us would like to admit, exercise will dramatically speed up weight loss. The right exercise, that is. Not those hours on the treadmill.

In this article, I’ll explain how fat burning workouts work, and then show you where you can find specific fat burning workouts to follow in your gym or at home.

How These Workouts Burn Stubborn Fat

Unfortunately, your body is designed to store fat. Back in the days of hunters and gatherers, our ancestors didn’t have a constant supply of self-service McDonalds. His next meal was never assured. When there was food, they eat in abundance. Anything not immediately used by the body was stored as fat. And that was a good thing.

But now we have too much of a good thing and we need to reduce it. When you reduce your calorie intake, your body compensates by lowering the production of hormones related to thyroid function and metabolic rate. Your body makes more than one enzyme called lipoprotein lipase that conserves energy by storing calories as fat. If you cut your calorie intake too low, you actually encourage your body to store food as fat instead of using it for functions like hair and nail growth.

This does not happen immediately; in the short term, you lose weight when you cut calories. But eventually you hit that plateau. To your body, fat is golden. Fat is key to survival. Your body is not going to let go very easily. You have to make holding on to that fat more painful than letting it go. And that’s where our fat burning workouts come in.

What these workouts do is convince your body to shed fat by overcoming your body’s lipolytic resistance (in layman’s terms, fat storage mode). Studies have shown that the more intense the workout, the more likely the body’s physiological response is to override its lipolytic resistance and release fat.

Your body’s lipolytic resistance has to do with how different hormones bind to alpha or beta receptors. Fat cells have B1 (beta 1) and A2 (alpha 2) adrenergic receptors. In simple terms, B1 receptors release fat: they activate lipase, which causes the fat cell to break down from a triglyceride to a free fatty acid (which can then be used for energy).

Norepinephrine is a stress hormone and is used to “activate” B1 receptors. For example, when you perform high-intensity exercise (a stress on the body), norepinephrine is released and seeks out B1 receptors to break down fat.

Don’t be fooled by what you’ve heard about “fat burning zones.” To burn persistent fat, you must engage in high-intensity exercise, striding on the treadmill is not stressful.

So if high-intensity exercise is the answer, does that mean all my exercise should consist of all-out sprinting?

Well no, it’s not that simple. Mainly because you can’t run long enough to trigger the response you want. That’s where interval training comes in. Interval training means that you switch between high and low intensity exercises several times DURING EACH training session. Switching between high and low intensity creates that magic wand.

Here are two reasons why you want to do interval training:

  1. High intensity exercise doesn’t burn fat for fuel, it burns carbohydrates. (That’s the basis of the “fat burning zone” myth.) To overcome this, use interval training. The high-intensity section stresses the body to trigger the release of fat hormones, and the lower-intensity section allows you to rest enough to tackle the next high-intensity rep.
  2. If you run as fast as you can, maybe you can run for 5 minutes. It’s 5 minutes of high intensity workouts. If you do intervals of 2 minutes intense, then 3 minutes easy, you will complete more than 5 minutes of intense exercise in each session.

There you go. A scientific explanation for why that stubborn fat is hanging around and an exercise to get rid of stubborn fat.

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