What is Sustainable Weight Loss?
If you exercise for hours each week while restricting your caloric intake and have not achieved the body you desire, it’s not your fault. The weightloss techniques and practices propagated by the fitness and beauty industry have gone off the tracks when it comes to science based nutrition and exercise.
Although we now have the science that provides a road map to achieve sustainable weight management, peak fitness, and great athletic performances, the fitness industry has failed to bring it to the people.
My career in Physical Therapy began just as an exciting health and fitness trend began to change the culture in the US in the late 70’s. It seemed overnight people began to think more about what they ate and the importance of exercise. The connection between lifestyle and diet on our health became a national preoccupation. People began running, cycling, roller-blading, and swimming. Gyms began popping up in towns across the country as the fitness culture blossomed. To my disappointment, 40 years down the road, the acumen of the general public regarding the most effective ways to exercise and achieve ideal body weight has not changed since the dawn of this modern fitness movement.
The problem was that early fitness buffs had little scientific evidence to guide their workouts or their diets. There was not enough research at the time in regard to how best achieve ideal weight, fitness, and improved health. Instead, we looked to our sports heroes and celebrity beauties and their personal preferences for training and what to eat to perform better in life and sport, and hopefully, healthy.
This is faulty thinking; elite athletes, and beautiful celebrities are obviously different than the rest of us. They are, by definition, “genetic freaks” with different physiology than nearly all of the rest of us. But we have this in common: we are all subject to the same physics, and dominated by these natural laws of science.
As elite athletic performance has improved dramatically with the advent of science based training and nutrition, we now realize those early sports heroes were successful in spite of their now discredited personal preferences. Yet, still today those who coach, train, and create diets for recreational athletes and fitness enthusiasts are still following the unscientific methods of yesterday’s heroes.
For instance, science has proven that the high carb diet popularized by early endurance athletes was misguided.
Athletes get leaner and do better when they are fed and trained in a way that re-programs their bodies to burn more fat. Likewise, we now know when it comes to training, heart rate specific workouts are more productive than simply training more and more.
Likewise, science has also shown us that recovery is as critical to performance and weight management as the workouts, yet too many programs emphasize a steady diet of high intensity workouts for people to lose weight.
The Fit But Fat Syndrome is a result of these ill advised training programs dictated by whim and not science, reliance on processed and packaged foods, sports bars and drinks, exercising harder and harder, not smarter, with too many intense unnecessary workouts.
This kind of eating and exercising creates a metabolism dependent on carbohydrates not fats, and forces one’s metabolism to burn carbohydrate instead of fat. Calorie restriction causes your metabolism to idle. Which simply means it shifts its preference to carbohydrate; and for many of us, that means sugar.
At PHASE IV we teach you to achieve your ideal body weight, and we unlock the mysteries of your personal physiology through scientific testing.
We re-engineer your metabolism to burn fat. Your nutrition will start working for you not against you.
We optimize your fat burning potential with heart rate specific exercise intensities that optimize your fat burning potential. We do this through slow exercise, not high intensity exercise, athletes call this Base Training and Recovery. Most of us need to be taught to rethink exercise. Healthy doses of exercise aren’t hard nor do they produce pain. The “No pain, no gain” slogan for exercise has done more harm than good.
With the perfect balance of periods of metabolic exercise, recovery, and nutrition, your body will learn to burn fat all day long.
Finally, through metabolic testing: Resting Metabolic Rate we determine the exact calories needed to fuel your personalized exercise routine and lifestyle to manage your weight.
The calories you burn during exercise or training are inconsequential to your overall body weight or body fat content! Instead, it is how well you use your exercise time to reprogram your daily physiology to burn fat and not carbohydrate that matters.
The “Fit But Fat” Syndrome is attributable to improper training and exercise schedules at improper heart rate intensities and calorie restrictions resulting in hormonal havoc and an unsustainable counterproductive weight management effort. How hard you exercise, when you exercise, and how you fuel your exercise and life style, all effect the production of stress hormones.
Exercise is an important component of health and weight management. Let PHASE IV set up a truly personalized weight management and exercise program for you to make all of your weight loss efforts 100% effective toward your goals. To learn more about sustainable weight loss Call 310-582-8212 and set up a free health and fitness consultation.
