925.830.8382 Fat Loss: Part 1 - Burning Calories or Workout Intensity?
Have you ever found that it seems impossible to lose the last few pounds, no matter how low your caloric intake or how much activity you do?
"Why Can't I Lose Those last 10 pounds?"
This is a question most people have asked themselves at some point in their lives. To help answer that question, let's look at a segment of the population where fat loss seems nearly impossible.
The Metabolic Syndrome
In the last article, we talked about a couple of studies involving middle-aged women with the metabolic syndrome. But what exactly is the metabolic syndrome?
The American Heart Association characterizes the metabolic syndrome as a group of metabolic risk factors in one person. Those risk factors include:
Abdominal obesity (excessive fat tissue in and around the abdomen)
Atherogenic dyslipidemia (blood fat disorders that foster plaque buildups in artery walls - high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol and high LDL cholesterol)
- Elevated blood pressure
- Insulin resistance or glucose intolerance (the body can't properly use insulin or blood sugar)
- Prothrombotic state (e.g., high fibrinogen or plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 in the blood - high susceptibility for blood clots)
- Systemic Proinflammatory state (e.g., elevated C-reactive protein in the blood)
People with the metabolic syndrome are at increased risk of coronary heart disease and other diseases related to plaque buildups in artery walls (e.g., stroke and peripheral vascular disease) and type 2 diabetes. The metabolic syndrome has become increasingly common in the United States. It's estimated that over 50 million Americans have it.Globally, the incidence of the metabolic syndrome and its associated increase in cardiometabolic risk have reached pandemic proportions.
The dominant underlying risk factors for this syndrome appear to be abdominal obesity and insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is a generalized metabolic disorder, in which the body can't use insulin efficiently. This is why the metabolic syndrome is also called the insulin resistance syndrome.
Eating a properly constructed diet is a giant first step in correcting the whole metabolic syndrome. But what constitutes a proper diet? The options seem overwhelming. With so many choices and so many voices, whom do you trust?
Fortunately, we no longer have to guess. A simple genetic test can help you determine exactly the right nutritional eating program for you. Once your genome is assessed and subsequent diet is created and undertaken based on this genetic assessment, there will be a profound effect on all of the parameters of the metabolic syndrome. This effect derives from favoring glucagon over insulin.
Yet diet alone is not sufficient. Glucagon works on a one-to-one ratio with glucose. As we saw from the studies in the previous article, only high-intensity exercise has a significant effect on insulin sensitivity. High-intensity exercise aggressively empties glucose out of the muscles, creating a situation where insulin sensitivity becomes a necessity. Workout intensity must be high enough to prompt the glycolytic cells to empty their stores of glycogen. You are not going to accomplish this amplification cascade by diet alone, by walking on a treadmill, or by any steady-state activity.
So if high-intensity training combined with a personalized DNA-based nutrition program can stimulate fat mobilization and insulin sensitivity in those with the metabolic syndrome, imagine how it could obliterate those last stubborn 10 pounds!
In our next article, we'll talk more about this "amplification cascade" that is induced only by high-intensity exercise. This amplification cascade is the turbocharger for the fat lossmechanism, and is a dividend of high-intensity exercise itself, irrespective of calorie balance.
