# 2 Why you are not losing fat (Exercise)
Many people rely on working out several times a week to maintain their weight. A lot of those people really enjoy this lifestyle and find the gym or studio a sociable place to be.
The one thing we know for sure is you can NOT out train a poor diet
Everyone seems to be in denial about this fact. Its true that you can create a calorie deficit which means you can eat more day to day which is great but you cannot 'reverse' the detrimental health affects of crap food and drink, especially drink, lets just be VERY clear about that.
1 pound of body fat has roughly 3500 cals so in order to shift 1 pound of body fat a week we will need to create a deficit of 500 cals a day for a week. Now you can do this with diet or exercise or a combination of both.
If you get hooked into exercising 5 times a week you will have to maintain this basically forever and we all know that shit goes down and you can't always make the time to workout this much.
Then theres the plateu where your body adapts to everything you are doing. At this point its time to look at what you are doing to your body from every angle and that means everything:
Calories intake
How much you work
Sleep
Water intake
Vitamin supplements
Nutrition
If your body is constantly in a calorie deficit it probably needs a little break to repair and get everything firing up again. If you don't give your body a rest from calorie deficit it will have a knock on effect to your hormones and result in weight gain anyway.
Cardio:
The old classic, especially the ladies! I need to lose weight fast, I will go and do a ton of cardio yeh? Errr No ladies please hold them horses.
Overdo cardio and eat next to nothing
Over exercise and poor nutrition will make your body do anything it can to hang onto fat and cellulite. When your body lacks energy it stores fat because fat is energy and it needs that energy for other stuff like keeping you alive. Your body is a survival machine, bottom line, thats how it makes decisions based on survival, simple as that.
Cellulite and / or fat that you are storing is your body saying 'hey I need this stuff because you are working too hard and not feeding me enough' this physical state will very often impact on your emotional well being, most commonly making you feel anxious and angry or grumpy. You see your body knows your routine and tries to keep the energy there ready for when you need it.
The perfect body
Its very hard to accept but there are NO flawless bodies ok. Famous people do not disclose what they are doing but they are doing a lot of things including a lot of photoshop. So comparing yourself to them is setting yourself up for disappointment.
How to get it right?
Understand The Facts about Yourself
Fact #1:
Women burn more (carbohydrates) for energy at rest but burn more fat during exercise than men. In general, sedentary women are going to always favor the use of carbs for energy, making it harder to lose fat because we don't prioritise tapping into fat stores for energy.
Fortunately, during exercise, women actually get a greater amount of energy from body fat than men do. This means that exercise is a catalyst for women to improve their bodies’ overall ability to call on fat for fuel, and it makes them more metabolically flexible.
Do this:
If you are a woman who wants to lose body fat, exercise is essential to improve your body’s ability to use fat for energy.
Fact #2:
Body fat distribution is different in women from men & this has a large effect on how their bodies respond when they try to lose fat.
Women store more fat right below the skin, whereas men have more of the dangerous visceral (around organs) and belly fat.
Lower body fat:
Women also have more fat in the lower body, particularly in the hip and thigh region, which has a protective effect. Lower body fat is actually “good” for women’s health.
This doesn’t mean that women can’t lose excess body fat from the hip and thigh region, but they will have better results with targeted training and smart nutrition.
Interestingly, although hip-thigh fat cells tend to have more alpha receptors, beta receptors are also present, and the trick is to stimulate these cells with the hormone epinephrine, which has been shown to lead to fat loss.
Do this:
Lift weights and do interval training to increase muscle mass for a higher metabolism if you want to lose fat.
Don't:
Use weights that are too light, not increasing the weight progressively, or not doing enough work (too low of a volume). Being sedentary is also bad news.
Fact #3:
Women tend to have better metabolic health despite having less muscle mass so the more muscle you have, the better your metabolic health will be and the easier it will be to lose body fat.
Women have higher estrogen levels than men, which improve the body’s ability to burn carbs. For example, during the follicular phase of a woman’s cycle when estrogen levels peak, glucose clearance in muscle is at its highest.
Do this:
Carbs are your friend—just be smart about which ones and when you eat them. Go higher on carbs after workouts and especially on intense training days.
Do this:
Try increasing carbs to sync with your cycle: Go higher in carbs from the start of your period until ovulation—generally the first 14 days—because insulin sensitivity is higher. Eat more protein and low-carb foods for the two weeks before your period.
Fact #4:
Women respond differently to high-intensity training compared to men. Women rely more on aerobic pathways for energy production whereas men rely more on anaerobic pathways.
Recovery:
However, one area that women come out on top is in regards to recovery. Studies show that women don’t require as much rest between intense burst of exercise, and they don’t experience as much drop off in power and speed as a workout progresses.
In addition, a sprint interval study found that trained women had much higher heart rate maximum values than men, indicating that women may push themselves harder due to an accelerated recovery between work intervals.
Do this:
To achieve the optimal dose of overload, women will need shorter rest periods than men when weight training. An example from the research shows that for interval training with work intervals of 1 minute or longer, a 2:1 work-to-rest ratio should provide adequate recovery.
Hormones Fact #5:
Hormones play an important role in shaping body composition in women, but not in the way most people think.
Can women build as much muscle as men?
A common misunderstanding is that women can’t build as much muscle as men because they don’t have as much testosterone. In fact, women and men have equal ability to gain strength and muscle from training as men because the two most influential factors—protein synthesis and gene signaling—are nearly equal between the sexes.
Women start out with less muscle and their bodies tend to be lighter and smaller than men’s, so a 10 percent increase in muscle for a woman will be smaller in absolute terms.
Do this:
If you’re a woman who wants to put on muscle, you’re in luck! You won’t look like a man, but you will be able to build muscle in the same way men can if you train to maximize protein synthesis and related muscle building factors.
Fact #6:
The most important hormones for female body composition are growth hormone and estrogen.
It’s likely that one of the most important factors for body composition in women is their higher release of growth hormone (GH) in response to exercise.
In order to burn fat insulin needs to be low.
Now, if you add the right type of exercise into the mix, you create the perfect situation for fat loss.
Do this:
The deciding factor in how women’s bodies respond to exercise is in how you program your workouts. Make sure your work intervals are hard and that your rest intervals are long enough to allow you to sustain intensity for all your interval repeats, but not too long so that you waste time.
Stress Fact #7:
Women experience stress differently from men, which influences fat loss & workout recovery. Anytime the human body is stressed, we experience an increase in the hormone cortisol. This happens to both men and women after exercise and when life gets rough.
Studies show that women experience stress differently from men in a couple of ways.
First, a series of studies show that in response to traditional weight training workouts women tend to have a lower cortisol response than men. However, after a high-intensity “extreme” weight workout women and men had similar sky high cortisol levels.
The scientists expressed concern because women already have higher resting cortisol (stress hormone) levels.
This has negative metabolic implications and could lead to a catabolic (muscle break down) environment for women. You might lose muscle, cause persistent inflammation, and have a hard time recovering from workouts.
Don't do this:
Doing crazy intense or extra long workouts will only defeat your purpose and lead to poor body composition.
Conclusion:
HIIT and weight training will make you burn fat more effectively than cardio alone. Book yourself onto INSANITY and weight training with TeamYo right now and see the change for yourself.
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reference: http://main.poliquingroup.com/articlesmultimedia/articles/article/1055/five_facts_women_must_know_to_lose_fat_build_muscl.asp
