Exercise And The Fat Loss Connection
By Dr. Bruce Miller DDS, CNS
A Re-look at Your Lifestyle
Americans have the most number of health clubs, gyms, weight loss centers, and countless books on diet and weight loss, yet obesity is on the rise in America. Many clinical trials have shown that obese people are insensitive to insulin in their muscle tissues. Exercise promotes blood flow to the muscle tissues and this helps the muscles to be more sensitive to insulin. High levels of insulin prohibit fats to be used as a fuel source, making it difficult for you to burn fat.
A clinical trial on sedentary overweight people who did brisk walking for 15 to 90 minutes weekly after 16 weeks, resulted in a major improvement in their insulin sensitivity (nearly 50 percent). The average weight loss was about 13 pounds (Dr. A.S. Leon et al.).
What Happens When You Exercise
Exercise of any kind will help lower insulin levels, as insulin prevents stored fat from being released from your adipose tissue. However, you can benefit more from exercise if you also eat right as you spend more time eating. The out-dated idea of starving and over-exercising has actually reversed the way our bodies make energy, causing millions of people to gain weight.
If you want to gain maximum hormonal benefits from your exercise, the food you take before, during and after exercise should not spike your insulin. Exercising and eating this way, will keep your glucagon and insulin in balance as energy is used immediately and insulin is not needed to store the excess fat. However for optimum fat loss glucagon levels must be, most of the time, higher than insulin levels.
What You Need To Know About Exercise
Firstly, for any exercise regime to work, you must learn to differentiate between weight loss and fat loss. Weight loss, I repeat, refers to the loss of water, muscle and fat but fat loss refers to losing fat only, the hazardous and ugly fats that surround your abdomen and organs, deep within your belly.
Secondly, your weighing scale is not the answer to losing fat. Even if you exercise regularly and consistently, the reading on your scale may not go down or it may even show a gain or may even stay the same.
The reason: Exercise increase muscle mass and muscle weighs five times more than fat. If you want to know whether you are losing fat, you can use a measuring tape to measure your waist circumference or if your pants that you usually wear becomes loose. These are signs that you are beginning to lose fat. Or better still, stand on a more accurate machine that could actually measure your actual muscle and fat weight separately so that you will know exactly what is happening to your body.
Thirdly, you need to understand how your hormones store fat and how they burn fat when you are exercising.