5 Facts Every Woman MUST know to lose fat, change body shape and have great long lasting health
Why women have a harder time than men getting in shape and what you can do about it.
From the Desk of: Howard Standring (advanced level personal trainer)
We all know that changing your body and improving your fitness is never simple.
However did you know that women tend to be at a disadvantage when it comes to losing fat, changing body shape and improving health and performance?
This is because the vast majority of advice available is based on research done on men.
This is a big problem with untold consequences for women.
As you will find out below there are differences in women and men´s bodies that make the whole process of body transformation so much more difficult for women to achieve.
These are important factors why so many women fail to reach their goals but are not known by the vast majority of women.
If you are woman struggling with fat loss, building muscle or just trying to improve your health and appearance then learning the next 5 facts will show you how to break out of this rut and start getting real and lasting results.
5 facts every women needs to understand if they want to lose fat, reclaim their health and get their ultimate body for life.
At rest, women burn more glucose (carbs) and less fat for energy than men do
Alternatively women burn more fat as fuel when exercising than men.
This makes exercise absolutely essential for women to lose fat because of the unfortunate fact that women burn much less fat at rest.
This explains why just dieting alone or doing very little exercise in general is stopping women from seeing significant results.
What You Can Do About It.
Obviously more exercise is the answer but not just any type. Studies have shown that weight training and high intensity activities such as sprinting are best at not only creating massive calorie burns during your workout when women are more inclined to burn fat but also for elevating your metabolism for long periods after the workout has finished.
This means when you are resting you are burning more calorieswhich will force your body to keep burning fat for longer.
Fact 2 Women store body fat differently than men
Nature dictates that in general women need more body fat because this is needed during pregnancy.
Once a woman is able to reproduce their bodies begin to store fat especially around the hips and thighs in preparation for them getting pregnant. You may have noticed this over the years.
The fat around the hips and thighs (called gluteofemoral fat) has a particularly high concentration of DHA, one of the three omega-3 fats. The theory is that gluteofemoral DHA fat is used to make breast milk, and that it is for the development of a baby’s brain.
Research suggests that U.S. women tend to have a low percentage of DHA in their gluteofemoral fat due to low intake of omega-3s.
When DHA is low this leads to excessive hunger cues, causing women to eat more, in the quest to store as much DHA as possible for nurturing an infant brain.
In contrast, Japanese women have a much higher percentage of DHA in their fat due to high fish intake and are correspondingly leaner.
If that wasn´t enough this lower body fat in women has a greater number of what are called alpha receptors in this region than men. These alpha receptors and high levels of estrogen make it harder to burn fat off in this area.
This is why you may have seen or experienced losing upper body fat first quite easily then having a lot harder time shifting the lower body fat.
What You Can Do About it
To get rid of stubborn lower body fat, research shows women must perform anaerobic training. This means workouts focusing on multi-joint exercises, with and total body lifts such as squats, deadlifts, step ups, and lunges.
Do high-intensity interval training using various activities to target the alpha receptors and enhance fat loss from the lower body.
For example, a recent study found that by adding such a program to an aerobic exercise protocol produced superior fat loss.
Women who did concurrent training lost 12.2 percent of fat mass from the legs, decreased hip circumference by 4 percent, and lost 9.7 percent of the original body fat.
In contrast, the women who just did aerobic training lost 5.7 percent fat mass from the legs, decreased hip circumference by 4 percent, and lost 5 percent of their original body fat.
Scientists suggest that the higher intensity of resistance exercise helps to stimulate the release of body fat from fat cells so that it can be burned for energy.
From a nutrition perspective get adequate DHA in your diet. Shoot for a balanced ratio of omega-3 fats to omega-6 fats by limiting your intake of vegetable fats and oils.
Fact 3 Stress affects women’s metabolism, inhibiting fat loss.
This is not just a female problem because stress can be damaging to fat loss for everybody. But it is possible then certain types of stress cause bigger problems for women than men.
When you get stressed the body secrete the hormone cortisol. The main function of cortisol is increasing blood sugar (via an insulin spike) to provide the body with enough energy to deal with the stressful situation it faces.
If the stress is chronic and prolonged the, the body turns the hormone pregnenolone, which is a precursor to estrogen and testosterone, into progesterone, which is then used to make cortisol and aldosterone. Together these hormones lead to greater fat storage and more fluid retention.
Not only will you have more cortisol, but you’ll have less estrogen and testosterone.
The less testosterone in your body the less chance you will be able to lose body fat.
Increased cortisol and low testosterone together is a recipe for disaster when trying to lose weight and build muscle.
What To Do About It:
First off is to find strategies that can limit or manage your stress levels better.
Activities such as meditation, yoga, are great for coping with stress. Also reducing caffeine and alcohol intake will also help reduce the potential for stress arising.
But one of the best things you can do is get more and better sleep. Not only that you want to focus on sleeping to optimize your circadian rhythms.
Consider that the body operates around a 24-hour circadian clock.
Each person’s clock is slightly different, a trait known as chronotype which denotes that we are either perform best in the morning or the evening.
When you stick with your chronotype, you will have better health and feel more balanced to cope with everyday life, plus your body functions will be working at a much higher level.
When you go against your own natural clock, the innate rhythms are disrupted. This increases the chance for you to get stressed and create that hormonal environment that makes fat loss much more difficult.
From an exercise perspective keep workouts between 30-60 minutes because after an hour cortisol levels are known to rise to assist the body with extra energy.
The good news is that training a certain way also produces other hormones which offset or counteract the effects of cortisol. Among those is Growth Hormone (GH) which is known to blunt the effects of cortisol while helping you burn fat and build muscle.
When we train we will produce cortisol and we can´t stop this but what we can do is make sure that we train and recover properly to counteract any negative effects that cortisol can cause.
Fact 4 Calorie restriction tends to be harmful for women but beneficial for men.
Following low calorie diets or restricting calories completely as promoted with intermittent fasting may actually be damaging to women´s metabolism.
For men both these activities are beneficial resulting in fat loss, reduced inflammation and improved resistance against disease.
However for women research is reporting that fasting or low calorie diets are having an adverse affect with many women reporting that fasting has caused weight gain, blood sugar imbalance, sleeplessness, missed periods, and infertility.
The mechanism behind this discrepancy has to do with how the female body responds to lack of calories.
Scientists believe that calorie restriction, even sporadic restriction, causes hormonal dysregulation, and excess cortisol secretion with the body holding onto its fat stores.
It’s a “protective response” as the body stores the fat for future survival when calories will be scarce.
What To Do About It:
Stop cutting calories especially when you are performing higher intensity workouts on a regular basis. This may work in the short term but over time you will find that results will slow and in fact stop completely.
I know that the thought of actually eating more to lose weight is counter intuitive but if you give your body enough energy, with balanced fat, carbs and protein, your hormones will be in happy balance, stress will be lower, and your body will be more willing to give up your fat stores.
Fact #5: As women get older they appear to be at a disadvantage when it comes to building muscle.
A common belief you will hear in the fitness world is that women can’t build as much muscle as men because they don’t have as much testosterone.
Technically this isn’t true. Recent studies show that protein synthesis and gene signalling that leads to muscle gains are nearly equal between young men and women.
However, women start out with less muscle and their bodies tend to be lighter and smaller than men’s. So for example if a woman was to experience a 10 percent increase in muscle it would be a much smaller amount compared to a man’s in absolute terms.
The problem is that as women age they have a reduced muscle building response to resistance exercise. They have lower protein synthesis than men of the same age in response to training.
What To Do About It:
The main thing here is to make sure you do enough resistance training so that you do have the chance to build and maintain as much muscle as possible.
Remember you won’t look like a man, but you having more muscle will help you stay healthy look younger and make it easier to manage your weight. Any increases in muscle mass will boost your metabolism significantly so you burn exponentially more calories at rest.
For the best results follow a periodized muscle building training program that favours moderate reps (8 to 12) and moderate load (65 to 85 percent of the 1RM) for a high volume.
Use a training program that changes every 3 to 6 weeks to continually shock your body into adapting.
However make sure to use heavy enough weights—one of the most common reason women don’t get results from training is that they use weights that are too light.
Now you can see why women have such a harder time when it comes to transforming their bodies.
So what are you going to do now?
Keep on dieting and looking for the magic pill that only work in the short term , never last and are damaging your health and appearance.
Or
Use a proven system that shows you how to overcome all these obstacles and let you finally have your ultimate body and health at any age.
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WARNING: This Isn’t For Everyone
I’m not going to lie to you: the program I have put together is isn’t for everyone. For example:
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However you must be prepared to push yourself and be fine with short more intense style workouts.
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