By: Dr. Jeff Grosskopf – Owner and founder of Epic Life Chiropractic in Wauwatosa WI.
Have you ever felt like all your diet and exercise efforts don’t make a significant difference or produce the results you want?
Or, maybe you do some results but quickly plateau.
You’re not alone. I’d estimate millions of Americans face the same issues. Over 40% of our country is now obese. (https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html)
Let’s dig into exactly why your body isn’t changing despite your efforts in the gym.
Let me start with an analogy:
Say you want to get a tan. You’d have to expose yourself to sunlight. You need the right dose and intensity of the sun for your skin to adapt.
If the intensity is too low, your skin won’t tan.
Here’s my point: You must give your body the proper stimulus to force it to change and adapt.
Now, let’s apply that to the gym.
If you are completely untrained and out of shape, then merely adding any exercise will get you results. That’s why it’s often easy to see good weight loss early on in your efforts.
But, let me warn you, that will not last forever. Your body will adapt, and you will stop losing weight.
It is prevalent for people to do exercise such as: running, walking, or a class at the gym to see little or no change in their body.
You can quickly build up the endurance to run a marathon or do 10 Zumba classes a day and still be overweight.
Unless you continually work your muscles harder, they have no reason to adapt and burn more fat.
You can work out harder or longer, but you can’t do both.
Working your body harder is the key.
Let me give you another important rule: The harder you workout and the more experience you get working out, you must exercise less!!!
Yes, this is precisely the opposite of what you’ll learn from the fitness industry.
The harder you, the better results you get, BUT you need more time to recover.
All my clients saw amazing and sustainable results, and they never plateaued. I consistently worked them harder and saw them less and less as we kept training together.
Here are a couple more key points to burning fat and keeping it off:
1. Fat loss SHOULD be fast. Your body can gain and burn fat very quickly with the right condition. My clients all lost 2-5 pounds a week and kept it off.
2. Long workouts (think cardio classes or boot camps) will stall weight loss. However, if your goal is to be active or you love run then have at it. BUT, if your goal is to lose weight, then you need to stop these type of workouts.
3. One of the best ways to burn a lot of fat and sustain your muscle is FASTING. It’s better to eat nothing at all than a reduced-calorie diet. Fasting helps keep muscle, whereas a low calorie, high meal frequency diet does very little to burn fat.
