Fat burning

Best ways

Every day we are bombarded with adverts and e-mails telling us of the best way or the new way to reduce body fat. With so many conflicting views it can be hard to tell fact from fiction and even harder to guess which method will be best for you. So let’s look at some of the outlandish claims out there at the moment and see if we can point you in the right direction;

• Fat Burning Patches. Some of the claims are reduce body fat by 3kg (6.5lbs)  per week, no side effects or contra-indications, no need to change eating habits, and spot reduction you lose fat wherever you put the patch. Well where to start, if you put a patch on and if fat is reduced where the patch is at a rate of nearly a pound a day, then you would either be melting and leaving an oil slick behind you or you would be producing so much heat that you would catch fire. Both of which I would consider side effects.
• Diet Pills. The claims here are even more wild but it is possible that you could lose weight with pills, this could be by speeding up your body like amphetamines how would (this is how the slimming pills of the 70’s worked) and probably why illegal drug users are often skinny until their organs give out and they bloat up. The other way that they could work is to stop you digesting the food you eat (the obvious side effects here are not too appealing either).

Those were a bit extreme but they are out there on the market now, but let’s look at some less radical options to reduce body fat.

• Diets. I’ll treat this as one big topic. First the word diet, it implies that we will be eating something to lose weight. Eat something to reduce body fat. We have over the years become very accustomed to this notion, but how can eating something reduce your weight and reduce body fat, when basic maths should tell us that adding something will increase not decrease weight. That’s why I find the whole concept of diet foods or slimming foods bizarre. Surely you have to take something away to lose weight not add something, there’s no such thing as negative energy foods (I can imagine the copy writers thinking up some good lines for that one) “The more you eat the thinner you get” and I bet people would buy it.
• Well I’ve dismissed eating to lose fat, so what’s left? Exercise? It seems like a good idea, after all the fat we want to reduce is the excess energy we have stored as body fat.
• What kind of exercise should we be doing? A quick look through the health and fitness mags or a search on-line will soon have you confused. Some say exercise at a moderate aerobic heart rate for a long duration to get in to the “fat burning zone”, others say work harder to burn more energy in a shorter time and then there are what I call the “six pack guys” trainers who are telling you to weight train, build muscle so you can burn more energy. Not to mention the obvious gimmicks like” use this elastic band for 3 minutes twice a week and you will lose 10 lbs”. But let’s look at a few facts:
• Exercise does burn energy
• The harder you exercise the more energy you use in a given time.
• There is a “fat burning zone” but it’s not when you are using the most energy
• Some weight training activities will use more energy per second than aerobic exercise
• If you lose 10 lbs a week using an elastic band your arm has probably fallen off.

Looking at these facts it seems like weight training or at least working out really hard are going to burn more energy and reduce body fat faster. Our excess energy is stored as fat, so you would think this is the best way to reduce body fat. And wouldn’t it be great if this were true, after all it would take less time than all that running, walking and cycling. Sadly for some we can’t measure our fat reducing exercise in seconds, hours or even days, what we need to do is look at how much exercise we can do, or fat we can burn in a week or a month. Take this example; you go to the gym and work out doing near maximal lifts for an hour, obviously you are exhausted when you finish, but the key is when will you be training next? If you have any experience of heavy weight training you will know that it won’t be for about 3-4 days. So you only manage 2 sessions a week if you’re lucky. Also the energy systems you are using in the weight lifting don’t use fat, but you have still used energy, glycogen. The problem is that as soon as you eat after training your body is programmed to replace the glycogen stores first. The thinking of “the six pack guys” here is, you don’t eat enough to replace this glycogen from food so while you are at rest your body breaks down some stored fat to fill the glycogen stores back up. But if you don’t eat enough your body will start to slow down to conserve energy, meaning you use less energy and it takes longer to recover from the work out, and you reduce the amount of energy you burn in the long term.

So how about doing hard endurance exercise like fast running for example? Well if it is at the top end of your aerobic training zone you will burn more energy than at the bottom end, but if it’s any faster you are getting nearer the realms of the weight training. Though is it has been proven that at lower aerobic heart rates you burn the highest percentage of fat (50% of the energy you use can come from fat) at higher aerobic heart rates the total amount of fat you burn is greater even if the percentage of fat burned is lower. Still we have to consider how much we can reduce body fat in a month not a day and if you work out at the top aerobic heart rates you will be stiff afterwards, you’ll have some muscle soreness, so it might be that you can only work out every other day or every third day.

This only leaves the “fat Burning Zone” it’s exercising at the bottom end of the aerobic zone for a long duration, but it’s not a myth, it does work. I hear you asking “if it’s that simple why do so many people teach the other stuff?” But that’s a story for another day. I’ve told you the truth now, so here’s your training plan “Run Forest Run”.