Best Fat Burner For Women: Health at Every Size

Best Fat Burner For Women

      If we can accept the fact that healthy bodies come in many sh apes and sizes and begin to view exercise and diet as more than just means to an end (weight loss), then the public health message becomes much more clear: People should be physically active, eat healthy foods, and not obsess about the numbers on the scale. The “health at every size” paradigm allows for a compassionate and open-minded view of body weight and may have a positive impact on public health. Millions of Americans stigmatized as “too fat” need to be reassured that the roads to good health are wide enough for everyone.

Best Fat Burner For Women

     This book was written in an effort to provide that reassurance, and with the hope of discrediting the myths that obesity is a “killer disease,”that weight loss is inherently good, that thinner is necessarily healthier, and th at the heigh t-weight tables measure som eth ing meaningful. Given that these myth s have proved Teflon-like in their ability to repel facts in the past, I know that even the myriad ofdata I will be h urling again st them may not do the job immediately. But I also know that if you subject it to sufficient abrasion for long enough, even Teflon eventually wears away.

Best Fat Burner For Women: Health at Every Size

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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.

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

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Best Fat Burner For Women: Dieting: The False Way to Fitness and to Health

Best Fat Burner For Women

    One of the first inklings that weight might not be a key factor in health came to me a num ber ofyears ago via a student. As part ofone of my classes in exercise physiology, I asked the students to agree to be weigh ed, measured for body fat, and given an exercise stress test. At five feet ten inches tall, Mike weigh ed 230 pounds and had 32 percent body fat—by medical standards obese. However, he exercised regularly and, as I discovered when he took the stress test, had an impressive oxygen uptake capacity. In fact, he outperform ed more than 95 percent ofhis peers, whom he also outweigh ed. Seventy-four pounds of body fat not-with standing, Mike had an aerobic fitness level that was, by anyone’s standards, superb. No fitness expert in America would have classified a man with that much body fat as fit, however, because “fat” has been defined as the opposite of “fit.” The truth is that weight has little, if anything, to do with either fitness or health. But th at’s not the story that has been drummed into us over the years.

   Americans have been deceived. The overwhelming evidence again st this deception has largely been ignored, not just by those with a stake in the more than $30 billion a year weight-loss industry, which was founded on our belief that fat is unhealthy, but by a scientific community similarly biased again st fat and mired in conservatism and inertia. The results of this deception are very serious indeed—not just in wasted money, but in damage to health and even loss of life. Conservative estimates say that 90 percent of dieters ultimately regain the pounds they lose. (Many of them eventually go on another diet as part of an endless cycle of weight lost and regained.) In Chapter 7, I will describe the results of many studies that suggest that the consequences of perpetual dieting and constant weight fluctuation may ultimately be fatal. However, few of the vast numbers of repeat dieters are aware of the risks they are running.

Best Fat Burner For Women

      Let’s face it: Millions ofheavier-th an -average men and women have been victimized, and their health jeopardized, by the attack on wh at a distinguished physician once described as one of our body’s “most peaceful, useful, and law-abiding...tissues.”
      Take Wanda, for example. Wanda went on her first diet when she was fifteen years old, because at five feet six inches tall and 145 pounds, she thought she was fat. By age forty-two she had gone through fifty-some diets and weighed over 240 pounds. She can ’t remember how many times she was told, “You really should do something about your weight.” And she always did—by dieting. That, alas, was unfortunate because, contrary to what we are led to believe, dieting almost always promotes the very thing it is supposed to cure: obesity. Countless studies show that yo-yo dieting, or what one expert called the “rhythm method of girth control,” is the kind of dieting that most people do, and that it usually culminates not just in weight regained but also in additional weight being put on. Wanda, like Betty and millions of others, has learned this the hard way.
    Wan da’s plight represents the essence of this book. I will provide a wealth of scientific data to debunk the dogma that our body fat is killing us and that dieting is a panacea. Body fat is not intrinsically unhealthy. Dieting, on the other hand, can be. Chances are, dieting is never going to make us either healthier or better looking (at least not for long). One reason for this is that, contrary to the calorie equation that is presented to us in every diet book, whereby 3,500 calories equal one pound of body fat, and if you eat 3,500 calories fewer per week, you will lose one pound, the human body is not infinitely malleable. It’s not a simple input and output machine but a complex, living organism. Thus you cannot redesign your body via a simple calorie-consumption and burn -off equation. All kinds of factors, ranging from gen es to body chemistry to the irreversibility of fat-cell increases, render such an equation meaningless. The proof of this lies in the fact that, despite decades of increasingly intense efforts at weight loss through dieting, the average American is about 15 pounds heavier today than a mere 20 years ago.

Best Fat Burner For Women

      However, what I referred to above as Wanda’s plight is only half of her story; the other half is also part of the essence ofthis book. At sixty-four, Wanda decided to make physical activity a part ofher life. She also has moved from ceaseless dieting to an acceptance ofher weigh t, which she estimates to be something over 200 pounds. She doesn’t know exactly what it is because she doesn ’t care. “What matters is m y health ,” she says. “I try to exercise regularly, cut out fatty foods, and focus only on things I can do something about—like my blood sugar and choles-terol levels, and blood pressure. I’m sorry that I wasted nearly fifty years of my life trying to do something about what others told me I should do something about.”

Best Fat Burner For Women: Dieting: The False Way to Fitness and to Health

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