Best Fat Burner For Women: Metabolic Fitness: The New Approach to Health and Longevity
Best Fat Burner For Women Wanda’s focus on blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood cholesterol levels is in response to a different concept of fitness, which only now is beginning to be recognized. Fitness is not integrally related to weight,
nor should it be limited to measures of cardiorespiratory capacity and endurance, which have for decades dominated our notion of fitness and turned millions of people into pulse-takers. The measurements in
which Wanda is interested constitute the basic parameters of a new definition of fitness, which I call “metabolic fitness.” They are what I was talking about above when I referred to the “real indicators of improved health and longevity.” Achieving metabolic fitness is probably the most important thing you can do for your physical health, and is thus the underlying theme of this entire book, as well as the explicit goal of the final three chapters. The physical activity and nutrition guidelines presented in those chapters, which constitute what I call the Twenty/Twenty Program for Metabolic Fitness, will help you achieve
that goal, regardless of whether you lose weight.
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Best Fat Burner For Women |
Weight loss, however, remains a major health goal of the medical establishment, even when all the “overweight” person’s vital statistics indicate good health. Consider Tess, for example, who at forty-eight years of age, five feet five inches tall and 160 pounds, is considered overweight by the relatively new body mass index criteria (which is defined and discussed in chapter 2). Tess eats a low-fat, high -fiber diet, exercises regularly, and has normal blood pressure; her blood cholesterol and blood sugar levels fall well within healthy ranges. Tess is an active, vibrant, energetic person who feels good almost all the time—except when she has to go for a medical checkup. She dreads seeing her doctor, because he always harangues her about her weight. Switching doctors doesn’t help, either. The message is always the same: Lose weight. Sh e’s tried, but never with any lasting success. She now states emphatically that “I can ’t lose weight, and I’m not going to try anymore.” Her constant efforts to lose, which always ended in defeat, made her feel “less of a person every day.” Now she feels comfortable with herself, accepting that she is probably at her “natural” body weight—the weight her now m iddle-aged body prefers. Each person ’s natural weight is unique to him or her and will not be found on any height-weight table. Like Tess, who may have inadvertently upped her “natural” weight by years of dieting or as a result of periods of very sedentary living and/or overeating, some people have relatively heavy weights.
Best Fat Burner For Women Others, like my friend Charlotte, seem naturally to fall at the lighter end ofthe weight continuum. Charlotte is five feet five inches tall, weighs 128 pounds, has excellent blood pressure readings and a terrific blood fat profile (which assesses cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood). Is her doctor pleased? No. For whatever reason, perhaps because she is employing some personal standard that is even stricter than those in the heigh t-weight tables, the doctor has told Charlotte that she is “mildly overweight.” But if Charlotte were to lose weight, wh at purpose would it serve? Certainly not to improve her vital sign s, which are all excellent. Actually a while ago Charlotte did have a slightly elevated cholesterol level. At 220 mg/dl (milligrams of cholesterol per deciliter of blood), she was 20 milligrams above the upper lim it recommended as healthy by the National Cholesterol Education Program . She was not, however, overweight, by any standard. By cutting out most of the high -fat dairy products she’d been eating, she reduced her cholesterol to a very desirably low 170 mg/dl in almost no time. Because she had cut her fat intake con siderably, she also eventually lost a couple ofpounds, but the cholesterol level plummeted long before the weight dropped—provin g, as I’ve seen time and again and as numerous studies confirm, that weight has nothing to do with cholesterol levels. And this underscores another major theme of my book: lt’s primarily the fat (particularly saturated fat) in the diet, not on the body, that poses the real threat to health.
Best Fat Burner For Women: Metabolic Fitness: The New Approach to Health and Longevity