Want to lose some holiday fat? Good news for women …..

Today's post: Thursday, 1-3-2008

I read a recent article about some research that was done into gender differences in weight & fat loss.

The good news is that many, if not most, women do make an effort to lose excess fat.

But the much more challenging bad news is that most women who do try to lose fat tend to not get the job done & few get permanent results. Eating better & exercise, particularly strength training, work if you keep doing them. But many women try to eat less of what they already eat until they get too hungry & give up. That never works to lose fat permanently.

According to this source, men are enough more used to doing things consistently by policy & to use self discipline in order to achieve things that they often actually do the things that result in long term fat loss.

The good news is that there are several strategies that can help women reverse this.

The one I’ve seen be most effective is at the end of this post.

That means that once a man knows that both regular & diet soft drinks will tend to make him fat, he’s much more likely to stop drinking them.

Most women find this more difficult. I’ve seen that many women switch to diet soft drinks & keep eating as they were before or return to it too often. Even if a woman is good about the food, studies show that switching to soft drinks simply doesn’t work. The studies show this consistently.

This may be because people add the calories they didn’t get or the sugar they didn’t get from their soft drinks to the other things they eat. I suspect it also may be because the foods like French fries & sandwiches, hot dogs, or hamburgers that tend to go with soft drinks even if they are diet soft drinks are made with potatoes stripped of their fiber-, containing peel & with refined grains. They are, or have been until recently, often cooked in transfats. These things are fat fertilizer.

Similarly, once he knows that today’s commercial baked goods tend to be made with transfats (though that will mercifully change soon we hope) & sugar & refined grain flour, most men can get themselves to simply stop eating that stuff 95 to 100 % of the time. (Each of these things tend to make those who eat them fat.)

Women often use such foods as treats or eat them in social situations. This makes it challenging for many women to give them up. (It’s not impossible though.)

And, when men learn that eating MORE green nonstarchy vegetables can help them lose fat & get more health protecting nutrients, men are more consistent in doing just that.

Women, however, do much better than most men in eating salads. But often they eat too little protein foods with their salads or add large amounts of bad fat containing salad dressings.

(Moderate amounts of healthy fats & proteins in a salad can solve that problem. Foods like walnuts, avocado slices, extra virgin olive oil, shrimp, chunks of lean chicken, or canned Alaska wild salmon work much better for fat loss than most commercial salad dressings. And, by adding them the salad prevents hunger longer. Even small bits of cheese can work well for this.)

Then, when it comes to exercise, unfortunately, women do too little of the most effective kind.

Even though the cardio or aerobic exercise & Pilates type exercises women tend to do, do have health benefits & help some to produce fat loss, strength training is much more effective.

As a recent post here suggests, fewer women do strength training than men. Fewer of the women who do strength training do the kind of focused & progressive strength training that does the most good for fat loss when compared with men. And, because of having much lower testosterone, the women who do focused & progressive strength training well, still don’t get quite the results that men do. But it’s still the most effective kind of exercise to lose fat even for women.

So, if you are a woman & want to lose any excess fat pounds you may have gained over the holidays & then some, if you do all these things, you have a good chance of losing that fat.

It may be more difficult at first than it is for a man, but you can substitute water, tea, coffee, or even real fruit juice or milk for soft drinks.

You can eat sandwiches Atkins style by eating the meat or cheese etc & the tomatoes & lettuce etc & get salad or an extra vegetable serving to replace the cheap refined grain bread as a food.

You can eat strawberries & pecans or cooked “Old Fashioned,” less refined, oatmeal instead of refined grain toast for breakfast.

You can do strength training well two or three days a week. Personal trainers & many gyms will gladly show you how. (It may not work as well for women as for men. But it will improve your health. It will improve your sex life. And, even though it may be less than it would do for a man, strength training will cut fat off your body.)

So, if you want to get rid of some holiday fat, try these steps. They do work.

Are you debating making the effort? Or, do you need some extra motivation?

Here are some considerations to consider that suggest doing it is wise.

Even more important, one of these tests can & has given women a huge amount of extra leverage in eating right & exercising enough for fat loss. I’ve seen it work.

Each of these steps makes type II diabetes much less likely. Each of the steps will make you healthier in other ways. And, each of them will tend lower your risk of cardiovascular disease which helps prevent heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, & mental decline -- & sexual dysfunction.

If you are still debating, get your fasting glucose; & the glucose moving average test, HBA1C; & HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, & triglycerides done. You may find readings bad enough to make it really important to follow this plan now.

Readings of over 110 on fasting glucose, over 5.9 on HBA1C, HDL of less than about
50, or triglycerides of much higher than 150 can really hurt you. And, this set of things will go a long, long way towards moving those indicators to where they should be. It’s been tested & found to work.

Here’s the fat loss secret weapon for women. You can also get the blood sugar measuring device that people who have type II diabetes use from your doctor even if you test OK. And, your doctor may insist on it if you test badly.

Why does that help you with fat loss? Because when you exercise right & eat right, it will give you normal & desirable readings. AND, when you eat foods with too much sugar, refined grains, starches, etc & too little vegetables, and OK protein & fat sources, it shows excessively high readings. In addition, you get instant feedback that the readings are better on the days you exercise.

There’s no waiting for the bad news on the scale until you eaten badly & not exercised for a week. You see the results soon enough to take action to prevent the bad news at the end of the week.

It still may not be fun at first until you find health OK foods you actually like & get used to eating them.

But, it’s a way that I’ve seen work that will give you a HUGE amount of extra leverage.

It may be enough to help you succeed when you never did before in losing fat that you keep off.

If you’d like to lose your extra fat & keep it off, why not try it?

(Separate note:

If your LDL is 130 or over, that’s a problem also. And, although exercise will bring LDL down & even better, will make it safer by making your LDL larger & less able to stick to your blood vessel walls, you might want to try niacin or beta sitosterol ( or other sterol) supplements since they reliably lower LDL. The food & drink changes suggested here also help do these things. Statin drugs also work; & if your LDL is way over 160, your doctor may prescribe them. But they cost more & have more side effects.)