"I want your abs!".
I get this comment a lot. While I know it's meant as a compliment, some of the people who say this are seriously trying to get abs just like mine. They will write me telling me they've eaten what I eat, exercised like I exercise, and done their level best to emulate me. And still they don't have my abs. They want to know what they are doing wrong.
And here is my answer: Nothing. They are doing nothing wrong.
See, other people doing what I do to get my abs is the equivalent of me doing what Figure Pro Erin Stern does to get her legs. Try as I might, I'll never have Erin's legs, because I am not Erin.
My lower half will always be my weak point, the place where I will always wish I could improve. There are broken veins and even at 10% body fat, when they are looking the best they can, there is always at least a little cellulite. To add insult to injury, at body fat that low there's also saggy skin right under my glutes.
So what's a bottom-heavy girl to do? I capitalize on my abs, arms, shoulders, and back (I have awesome back muscles!). I show these parts off. I hide my legs as much as I need to so that they don't take away from the beauty of my upper body.
This doesn't mean I don't work on my lower body, because I do. I work REALLY hard on it, because not only do I want to see improvement there, but also because those big muscles burn the most fat. And I need to keep my fat levels low for the sake of my health. So for me, it's about more way more than appearance- It's about being healthy and balanced.
But I have accepted that my legs and glutes will never be my strong suit. And you may need to accept that your abs will never be yours. Or whatever body part makes you crazy.
There are parts of your physique you can reshape: My shoulders are naturally very slight. I have worked to build muscle on them to help balance my wide hips. I've built up my back for the same reason. I've added muscle, and therefore definition, to my arms.
But some things (like wide waists, big calves, and bubble butts) can't be changed with diet and exercise. You might be very lean and still have a waist measurement almost the same as your hips, a bust line that is more than generous, or muscular calves that will never fit into a pair of skinny jeans. Like me, you might have to get down to an unsustainable and unhealthy body fat level to get true symmetry to your physique. The sooner you accept that the healthiest thing may for you may not be the most asthetically pleasing, the sooner you will be content with your body.
Change what you can, accept what you can't, aim for health over all, and celebrate the uniqueness of YOU!
Showing posts with label fat storage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fat storage. Show all posts
Friday, December 28, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Binge Recovery
Okay, so you've done it- You ate way too much of the wrong stuff. And in the middle of kicking yourself and wishing you could go back in time, you are wondering "Is there anything I can do to help reduce the negative effects of this?' I have an answer for you, and that answer is "YES"! (And no, it does not involve the porcelain god and sticking a finger down your throat!)
This isn't going to be easy, no magic pill, but it will get most, if not all, of the garbage you just ate out of your system. There are basically three steps you will employ for the next 3 days:
1. Drink water like it's going out of style! This is NOT the time to shy away from water because you are afraid it will make you weigh even more in the morning. It's time to guzzle. It will give your cleansing organs a vehicle to carry all of that bad stuff (carbs, sodium, fat, chemicals) out of your body as fast as possible. The sooner they leave the body, the harder it is for your body to store them as fat. I'm not talking water toxicity levels, here, but make a concerted effort to drink more water than you normally would. And water- not diet soda or any other kind of beverage you would rather drink. Water. Water doesn't give your body one MORE factor to process and deal with.
2. Cardio like a mad person! If you have any extra time for additional cardio over the next 72 hours, just do it, no questions asked. I had a trainer friend of mine say that it takes the body 72 hours to turn unaccounted for carbs into fat. You are trying to get 'em accounted for with cardio! I have no idea if what he said was right or not, but putting as much time into cardio as possible for three days after a binge has helped me to keep the damage at bay. Cardio uses glycogen, which is what the body turns carbs into, for fuel. If glycogen doesn't get used for fuel, the body stores it as fat (future fuel). You want to try to stop that from happening
As an aside- Don't abandon your weight lifting routine, though! Lifting also uses glycogen, although not as much. Keep up the lifting routine the same, but raise your cardio level. Two or three 30 or 40-minute cardio sessions a day is not too much right now, if you can squeeze that much in!
Oh! And expect the next day to have kick-butt cardio and lifting sessions. With all of that glycogen now stored in your muscles you will be able to push harder than normal in your workouts. (Proving that every cloud truly does have a silver lining!)
3. Focus your diet for the next day on protein, with only veggies for carbs. It's Okay to have nonfat milk products. My guess is that after the binge you aren't going to be wanting too many carbs, anyhow. The next two days after that, go for small servings of things like oatmeal with breakfast and whole grains like 100% whole wheat or Ezekial breads and brown rice with lunch and dinner.
Why am I focusing on carbs? Because I am almost certain you didn't binge on turkey breast. You either binged on sweet carbs (cookies, ice cream, brownies), salty carbs (potato chips, crackers), or a combo (peanut butter, kettle corn). None of these combinations is scale-friendly when done in excess, and the only way to get rid of the weight gain is to get rid of the carbs floatin' around in your body.
And the next time, if you can think about it before you immerse your head into that vat of peanut butter again, remind yourself that a binge is 3 days of hard work to (hopefully) undo the damage. I've done this enough times that the thought of both the un-do process and the intestinal distress that is certain to arrive shortly after the binge has ended is almost always enough to stop me in my tracks. It's taken a couple of years to learn my lesson, but now I can almost always say to myself "Ugh! It's just not worth it!" and step away from the temptation.
Depending on your personality, when you get on the scale is up to you. I make myself get on the scale the next morning because I can't stay in denial if I'm looking at the (temporary) damage I've caused. Seeing a big jump motivates me to get right back on track! I also like watching the numbers come down over the next couple of days- It's interesting to me. But if you are the type it is just going to discouraged and want to dive into a bag of BBQ chips when the number is up, I'd advise waiting until after your 3-day recovery process is over.
This isn't going to be easy, no magic pill, but it will get most, if not all, of the garbage you just ate out of your system. There are basically three steps you will employ for the next 3 days:
1. Drink water like it's going out of style! This is NOT the time to shy away from water because you are afraid it will make you weigh even more in the morning. It's time to guzzle. It will give your cleansing organs a vehicle to carry all of that bad stuff (carbs, sodium, fat, chemicals) out of your body as fast as possible. The sooner they leave the body, the harder it is for your body to store them as fat. I'm not talking water toxicity levels, here, but make a concerted effort to drink more water than you normally would. And water- not diet soda or any other kind of beverage you would rather drink. Water. Water doesn't give your body one MORE factor to process and deal with.
2. Cardio like a mad person! If you have any extra time for additional cardio over the next 72 hours, just do it, no questions asked. I had a trainer friend of mine say that it takes the body 72 hours to turn unaccounted for carbs into fat. You are trying to get 'em accounted for with cardio! I have no idea if what he said was right or not, but putting as much time into cardio as possible for three days after a binge has helped me to keep the damage at bay. Cardio uses glycogen, which is what the body turns carbs into, for fuel. If glycogen doesn't get used for fuel, the body stores it as fat (future fuel). You want to try to stop that from happening
As an aside- Don't abandon your weight lifting routine, though! Lifting also uses glycogen, although not as much. Keep up the lifting routine the same, but raise your cardio level. Two or three 30 or 40-minute cardio sessions a day is not too much right now, if you can squeeze that much in!
Oh! And expect the next day to have kick-butt cardio and lifting sessions. With all of that glycogen now stored in your muscles you will be able to push harder than normal in your workouts. (Proving that every cloud truly does have a silver lining!)
3. Focus your diet for the next day on protein, with only veggies for carbs. It's Okay to have nonfat milk products. My guess is that after the binge you aren't going to be wanting too many carbs, anyhow. The next two days after that, go for small servings of things like oatmeal with breakfast and whole grains like 100% whole wheat or Ezekial breads and brown rice with lunch and dinner.
Why am I focusing on carbs? Because I am almost certain you didn't binge on turkey breast. You either binged on sweet carbs (cookies, ice cream, brownies), salty carbs (potato chips, crackers), or a combo (peanut butter, kettle corn). None of these combinations is scale-friendly when done in excess, and the only way to get rid of the weight gain is to get rid of the carbs floatin' around in your body.
And the next time, if you can think about it before you immerse your head into that vat of peanut butter again, remind yourself that a binge is 3 days of hard work to (hopefully) undo the damage. I've done this enough times that the thought of both the un-do process and the intestinal distress that is certain to arrive shortly after the binge has ended is almost always enough to stop me in my tracks. It's taken a couple of years to learn my lesson, but now I can almost always say to myself "Ugh! It's just not worth it!" and step away from the temptation.
Depending on your personality, when you get on the scale is up to you. I make myself get on the scale the next morning because I can't stay in denial if I'm looking at the (temporary) damage I've caused. Seeing a big jump motivates me to get right back on track! I also like watching the numbers come down over the next couple of days- It's interesting to me. But if you are the type it is just going to discouraged and want to dive into a bag of BBQ chips when the number is up, I'd advise waiting until after your 3-day recovery process is over.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
If You Are Confused About Insulin and Fat Storage, Read This!!!
The past few years there has been quite a lot of hype about insulin and how it affects fat storage. It's super-confusing, but I think I've managed to whittle it down to something both understandable and practical for the every day person.
Here goes...... (Er, this isn't going to be real technical, so if you are into splitting hairs or are going to suggest I should have included more information, you may just want to skip this blog.)
Anyhow......
Carbohydrates make your blood sugar go up. Your body doesn't like this (high blood sugar is dangerous), so it sends out a storage hormone we call insulin to bring it back down. (BTW- the pancreas is what produces insulin, so that's why you hear so much about the pancreas when people talk about blood sugar.)
Insulin turns the carbs into glycogen and stores the glycogen in different parts of the body, namely the muscles and liver. BUT it also turns any excess glycogen that doesn't fit into the muscles and liver into fat and stores them in your fat cells. If there aren't enough fat cells to hold the fat that has been made, the body has to do something with it, so it makes more fat cells to store it in. And who wants more fat cells?
Okay, now lets add in one more thing Insulin does: It keeps another chemical, called hormone-sensitive lipase, from doing it's job properly. And that job is releasing fat from your fat tissues to be used as energy.
Sooooo..... when you eat a ton of fast-burning carbs (generally the kind that don't have much fiber in them), not only are you promoting fat storage because the muscles and liver can only hold so much, but you are also KEEPING the fat you do have from being burned off as energy. This is the main reason why low-carb diets work so well for weight loss.
Having said all of this, you don't need to run from carbs like they are the enemy. Slow-digesting carbs- like oatmeal, whole-grain breads (the real whole-grain stuff, not the kind that has white flour in it, too) and starchy vegetables- are just that: Slow digesting. They release the carbs slowly into your body so that you don't have an excess all at one time to be stored as fat.
Also, when you exercise heavily the body uses up the glycogen in your muscles very quickly. So you need to eat carbs to replace them so that you have power to not only get through your workout, but also through your day.
If you are anything like me, you are asking "So why do people go low-carb when they are exercising heavily?" The reason for that is another big, long technical explanation, but I'm gonna give the very-condensed-but-not-very-scientific answer: The body will turn fat into glycogen and burn it when your muscles and liver run out of it. And the process of turning the fat into glycogen burns calories in and of itself, so it's kinda like you are getting a little calorie-burning bonus when this happens.
The thing with this is that you want to be very careful: When I have gone too low-carb I have wound up with all sorts of not-so pleasant side effects, the scariest of which is that I started to lose my long-distance vision. It was to a point where I was beginning to question whether I should drive at night because depth perception was thrown off. Other interesting side effects for me were running out of steam very quickly, getting confused easily, feeling mentally "fuzzy", headaches, becoming incredibly irritable (my daughter thought this was the worst side effect- She'd of rather I be blind than a wench), tripping over things, falling down frequently when doing cardio (Once I fell off a bench when doing step-ups, making quite a racket. People were rushing from all of the gym to help me- embarrassing!), and general lack of coordination. Clearly, super-low carb (under about 100g a day) for me is not healthy. I think different people have different thresholds, but if you are experiencing things like this while on a low-carb eating plan, I'd suggest adding a little whole-grain, fruit, or starchy veggie into every meal. Non-starchy veggies ARE a carb source, but they are not a very condensed form of carbs and would take so much of them that you would no longer be practicing portion control, which I believe to be a key factor in losing weight and getting fit.
And as a final and fairly unrelated note, if you are working with a coach who is helping you with your eating and experience any of these symptoms, TELL THEM! Any responsible coach will alter your diet and get you out of the too-low-danger-zone. If they don't, dump them immediately and find someone else to help you. Your health is not worth having a super-svelte appearance.
Here goes...... (Er, this isn't going to be real technical, so if you are into splitting hairs or are going to suggest I should have included more information, you may just want to skip this blog.)
Anyhow......
Carbohydrates make your blood sugar go up. Your body doesn't like this (high blood sugar is dangerous), so it sends out a storage hormone we call insulin to bring it back down. (BTW- the pancreas is what produces insulin, so that's why you hear so much about the pancreas when people talk about blood sugar.)
Insulin turns the carbs into glycogen and stores the glycogen in different parts of the body, namely the muscles and liver. BUT it also turns any excess glycogen that doesn't fit into the muscles and liver into fat and stores them in your fat cells. If there aren't enough fat cells to hold the fat that has been made, the body has to do something with it, so it makes more fat cells to store it in. And who wants more fat cells?
Okay, now lets add in one more thing Insulin does: It keeps another chemical, called hormone-sensitive lipase, from doing it's job properly. And that job is releasing fat from your fat tissues to be used as energy.
Sooooo..... when you eat a ton of fast-burning carbs (generally the kind that don't have much fiber in them), not only are you promoting fat storage because the muscles and liver can only hold so much, but you are also KEEPING the fat you do have from being burned off as energy. This is the main reason why low-carb diets work so well for weight loss.
Having said all of this, you don't need to run from carbs like they are the enemy. Slow-digesting carbs- like oatmeal, whole-grain breads (the real whole-grain stuff, not the kind that has white flour in it, too) and starchy vegetables- are just that: Slow digesting. They release the carbs slowly into your body so that you don't have an excess all at one time to be stored as fat.
Also, when you exercise heavily the body uses up the glycogen in your muscles very quickly. So you need to eat carbs to replace them so that you have power to not only get through your workout, but also through your day.
If you are anything like me, you are asking "So why do people go low-carb when they are exercising heavily?" The reason for that is another big, long technical explanation, but I'm gonna give the very-condensed-but-not-very-scientific answer: The body will turn fat into glycogen and burn it when your muscles and liver run out of it. And the process of turning the fat into glycogen burns calories in and of itself, so it's kinda like you are getting a little calorie-burning bonus when this happens.
The thing with this is that you want to be very careful: When I have gone too low-carb I have wound up with all sorts of not-so pleasant side effects, the scariest of which is that I started to lose my long-distance vision. It was to a point where I was beginning to question whether I should drive at night because depth perception was thrown off. Other interesting side effects for me were running out of steam very quickly, getting confused easily, feeling mentally "fuzzy", headaches, becoming incredibly irritable (my daughter thought this was the worst side effect- She'd of rather I be blind than a wench), tripping over things, falling down frequently when doing cardio (Once I fell off a bench when doing step-ups, making quite a racket. People were rushing from all of the gym to help me- embarrassing!), and general lack of coordination. Clearly, super-low carb (under about 100g a day) for me is not healthy. I think different people have different thresholds, but if you are experiencing things like this while on a low-carb eating plan, I'd suggest adding a little whole-grain, fruit, or starchy veggie into every meal. Non-starchy veggies ARE a carb source, but they are not a very condensed form of carbs and would take so much of them that you would no longer be practicing portion control, which I believe to be a key factor in losing weight and getting fit.
And as a final and fairly unrelated note, if you are working with a coach who is helping you with your eating and experience any of these symptoms, TELL THEM! Any responsible coach will alter your diet and get you out of the too-low-danger-zone. If they don't, dump them immediately and find someone else to help you. Your health is not worth having a super-svelte appearance.
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