Is Your Workout Helping You to Store Fat?

There is a kind of fat that you don't see and it's toxic and it's deadly!

Visceral fat is internal fat. It wraps around organs like your heart, liver, and kidneys. It fills up all the space in your abdominal cavity, so there's no room left for your organs, nerves, and vessels to function properly.

It's far more dangerous to your health than subcutaneous fat, which lies right beneath your skin. Subcutaneous fat is what you poke at and pinch. Like the "spare tire" you get around your middle.

Visceral fat is a storehouse for toxins that pump directly into your body. When you have too much visceral fat, you can almost guarantee you'll develop heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Too much of it produces excess secretion of a substance called adipokine. This causes body-wide inflammation that leads to these diseases.

You don't have to be overweight to have it. Over 30 million normal-weight Americans have high levels of visceral fat. You can be perfectly thin on the outside and fat on the inside.

You see, your body gets to choose the type of fuel it burns during exercise. And any time you exercise at a medium pace for a long time, your body chooses fat as its fuel.

While that may sound like a good thing, it's really the worst thing you can do. You don't want to use fat during exercise, because it's telling your body that you need fat for fuel. Your body hears, "Make more fat!" and it delivers. So, once you're done exercising, your body continues to make fat and tuck it around your organs. Now you have even more fat to use as an energy source the next time you jump on the treadmill.

A much better way to get rid of deadly visceral fat is short-bursts of intense exercise. I use this principle in all of my exercise programs for my clients and I've been using it on myself for the last 4 years.
Here's the point you need to know …

Real fat burning doesn't take place during exercise. It takes place after you exercise, as you recover. We call this "the afterburn," and it's one of the key components to staying lean and youthful. Short bursts of close to maximum exertion, stimulate HGH (Human Growth Hormone) who's production slows down significantly as you move into your 20's and keeps going down from there. The good news is, is that you can increase it's production by exercising and eating correctly.

Short-burst intense exercise is simply short periods of exertion followed by rest. You start at the intensity and speed that's right for you and gradually increase it until you're breathing heavily. Then you stop and recover.

Short-burst exercise tells your body that you don't have to make more fat and squirrel it away for the next time. You're not going to exercise long enough to use it for fuel, so why make more fat? And it stimulates HGH production.

Instead, when you keep your sessions brief, you use carbs for fuel during exercise and then use fat long afterward. Ten to 20 minutes is all you need to rev up your metabolism. Then, during times of rest, your metabolism burns up your visceral fat.

Visceral fat disappears very quickly when you exercise this way. When you follow this plan instead of doing hours of cardio, you burn up to 9 times the fat for every calorie burned.

You can choose any form of exercise you like. It can be treadmill, bike, running outside, calisthenics or as simple as walking. The key is to start where you're comfortable and build from there. Here's a routine you can try at home:

• Begin walking for a few minutes at a comfortable pace to warm up.
• Increase the pace for 60 sec. and recover for approx. 60 sec. or as long as it takes.
• Repeat the 60 sec. of exertion going a little harder and then recover.
• Repeat the 60 sec. of exertion and recovery - by the 3rd cycle you want to feel like you can't go any more by the time you get to the end of the 60 seconds of exertion. You should gasp a little as you come into recovery and if you are wearing a heart rate monitor it will bump up a couple of notches as you start your recovery.
• Repeat the exertion and recovery cycles 5 to 8 times depending on your level of fitness and how you feel.
• Recover by walking for at least 3 minutes.

When you are done you should by sweating profusely and feel like you got in a really intense workout but you should feel energized not beat-up.

You need to pay attention to your body and work at your own personal fitness level. If you are just starting out you might just walk as fast as you can during exertion. If you are very fit you should be sprinting as fast as you can from the 4th through 8th exertion cycle.

Combine your short-burst exercise program with a high-protein, low-glycemic diet that includes lots of fresh vegetables. You'll get the best results this way.

I have been exercising this way for the last four years and I just love how it makes me feel and look! The added bonus is it takes so little time to get a really great work-out! - Bonnie

Why Reduce Grains and Sugar?

Should You Reduce Grains and Sugar?

This article was originally published by Dr. Joseph Mercola http://mercola.com

For several million years, humans existed on a diet of animals and vegetation. It was only with the advent of agriculture a mere 10,000 years ago - a fraction of a second in evolutionary time - that humans began ingesting large amounts of sugar and starch in the form of grains (and potatoes) into their diets. Indeed, 99.99% of our genes were formed before the advent of agriculture; in biological terms, our bodies are still those of hunter-gatherers.

While the human shift to agriculture produced indisputable gains for man - modern civilization is based on this epoch - societies where the transition from a primarily meat/vegetation diet to one high in cereals show a reduced lifespan and stature, increases in infant mortality and infectious disease, and higher nutritional deficiencies.

Contemporary humans have not suddenly evolved mechanisms to incorporate the high carbohydrates from starch- and sugar-rich foods into their diet. In short, we are consuming far too much bread, cereal, pasta, corn (a grain, not a vegetable), rice, potatoes and Little Debbie snack cakes, with very grave consequences to our health. Making matters worse, most of these carbohydrates we consume come in the form of processed food.

That 65% of Americans are overweight, and 27% clinically obese, in a nation addicted to sesame seed buns for that hamburger, with a side of French fries and a Coke, is no coincidence. It is not the fat in the foods we eat but, far more, the excess carbohydrates from our starch- and sugar-loaded diet that is making people fat and unhealthy, and leading to epidemic levels of a host of diseases such as diabetes.

If you are experiencing any of the following symptoms, chances are very good that the excess carbohydrates in your body are, in part or whole, to blame:

• Excess weight
• Fatigue and frequent sleepiness
• Depression
• Brain fogginess
• Bloating
• Allergies
• Low blood sugar
• Persistent Headaches
• High blood pressure
• High triglycerides

We all need a certain amount of carbohydrates, of course, but, through our addiction to grains, potatoes, sweets and other starchy and sugary foods, we are consuming far too many. The body's storage capacity for carbohydrates is quite limited, though, so here's what happens to all the excess: they are converted, via insulin, into fat and stored in the adipose, or fatty, tissue.

Any meal or snack high in carbohydrates generates a rapid rise in blood glucose. To adjust for this rise, the pancreas secretes the hormone insulin into the bloodstream, which lowers the glucose. Insulin is, though, essentially a storage hormone, evolved over those millions of years of humans prior to the agricultural age, to store the excess calories from carbohydrates in the form of fat in case of famine.

Insulin, stimulated by the excess carbohydrates in our overabundant consumption of grains, starches and sweets, is responsible for all those bulging stomachs and fat rolls in thighs and chins.

Even worse, high insulin levels suppress two other important hormones - glucagons and growth hormones - that are responsible for burning fat and sugar and promoting muscle development, respectively. So insulin from excess carbohydrates promotes fat, and then wards off the body's ability to lose that fat.

Excess weight and obesity lead to heart disease and a wide variety of other diseases. But the ill effect of grains and sugars does not end there. They suppress the immune system, contributing to allergies, and they are responsible for a host of digestive disorders. They contribute to depression, and their excess consumption is, in fact, associated with many of the chronic diseases in our nation, such as cancer and diabetes.

For a great way to get started eating a diet that includes less grains, download my free copy of “The 30 Day Detox Diet” - Bonnie