The weekly column by the LTR offering diet and fitness tips. Read today's before you attack that jelly donut thinking you'll work it off at the gym!
A typical fallacy I see play out at the gym incessantly is the cute guy whose love handles, or belly, have grown to an unacceptable level and they’ve decided to do something about it. Now there’s nothing wrong with striving for self improvement, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to turn your “keg” into a six pack. But these guys are most often setting themselves up for failure.
The problem is the notion - and it seems almost universally practiced - that you can remove fat from a specific body part by doing exercises that concentrate on that body party. For example, I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked to guys at they gym who “have had it” with their guts and are dedicating their entire workout to every type of contorted stomach crunch imaginable. Backwards, forwards, sideways, upside down. Yoy!
In their minds, they’re working the fat off their stomachs. Unfortunately for most, they lose little if any measurable fat around their waists and soon give up altogether out of discouragement. They likely have much stronger abs, but those abs are still covered by inches of unsexy, unwanted, furry fat.
Fat is largely deposited universally across the body: in the face, in the arms, in the legs, and of course, around the waist. Now some people tend to deposit it in one place rather than another (for me it’s the love handles), and none of us are capable of depositing fat in that vital area that we wish we could enlarge….and that mandates a different way of thinking. So when you ride a bicycle, for example, you’re not just losing the fat on your legs, because that’s primarily what you’re working, you’re losing fat everywhere.
Bottom line: If you have fat to lose, you need to attack it in two ways. First, increase the amount of aerobic activity you do (read: cardio) and increase the amount of muscle mass you have (read: lift weights) and then – and this is where everyone drops the ball – figure out how many calories you burn in a day (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15321646) and start managing that end of the equation. Like it or not, in my opinion, diet is at least 75 percent of the battle. Sorry.
The other option – and I personally don’t consider it viable – is plastic surgery (sorry MD). Make sure you watch one being performed on the Discovery Channel before you select this option.
1 comment:
Very nice TK. And for the record, I must say that pastic surgery in this case (lipo) is not desirable. It's downright brutal what they do to suck the fat out.
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