The South Beach Diet Supercharged: Faster Weight Loss and Better Health for Life by Arthur Agatston, Joseph Signorile Page B
Authors: Arthur Agatston, Joseph Signorile
Tags: Medical, Fitness, Cooking, Health, Health & Fitness, Health & Healing, Weight Control, Nutrition, recipes, Diet, Diets, Weight Loss, Diets - Weight Loss, Diets - General, Reducing diets, Diet Therapy, Reducing exercises, Exercise
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lean protein. These are the basic tenets of the South Beach Diet, and following them will reverse our accumulation of belly fat and its detrimental health consequences.
The other thing we must do is move more, the way our ancestors did. This means regularly doing aerobic (cardio) conditioning and functional core exercises. In fact, studies show that exercise is one of the most effective ways to get rid of visceral fat. In a 2005 study conducted at Duke University, 175 overweight men and women with mild to moderately bad blood fats (cholesterol and triglycerides) were randomly assigned to participate for 8 months in one of three exercise groups. The participants were instructed not to change their eating habits. One group exercised at a moderate intensity (40 to 55 percent of aerobic capacity) for approximately 3 hours per week. A second group exercised at a high intensity (65 to 80 percent of aerobic capacity) for 2 hours a week. The third group exercised at the same high intensity but for 3 hours per week. Both the 2-hour high-intensity group and the 3-hour moderate-intensity group showed no further accumulation of visceral fat. But the best news was that the high-intensity group that worked for 3 hours per week actually showed a significant decrease in visceral fat. And the bad news for couch potatoes: A control group that didn’t exercise showed a significant increase in visceral fat, which means that if you do nothing to stop it, visceral fat just keeps on growing.
Another study, published in 2006 in the International Journal of Obesity , found that a combination of diet and exercise—not diet alone—reduced the size of abdominal fat cells. This is an extremely important finding because swollen fat cells are the ones that become insulin resistant. Shrinking abdominal fat cells can help restore a normal insulin response, which will help prevent prediabetes.
What about Pears?
But what if you’re a pear—a person who carries fat mainly in the hips and thighs? Will you respond as well as an apple to a proper diet and exercise? The answer, unfortunately, is no. It will, in fact, be harder for you to lose weight than it is for your apple friends because, like most pears, you have a slower metabolism due to your genetic makeup, not your diet. That makes metabolism-revving exercise even more important for you.
But there’s good news, too. As a pear, you are much healthier than your apple friends who may weigh the same as you. It turns out that overweight pears don’t have the thrifty genes that lead to fat storage in the belly.
A Word about Metabolic Rate
While most of the epidemic of obesity has been due to activation of the fat-storage survival mechanisms discussed above, this is not the cause of all obesity or overweight. Even before we began this unintentional experiment of eating the wrong foods and avoiding exercise, there was still a percentage of Americans who were overweight. Many claimed that they didn’t overeat, and it turns out that many of them were telling the truth. In contrast were the food-guzzling types who never gained a pound. The fact is, we all have different metabolic rates, and these rates do affect whether we gain weight readily or not. This point was made quite clearly in a famous Canadian study of twins.
In the study, 12 sets of identical twins were overfed by 1,000 calories a day, 6 days a week, for 100 days. The amount of exercise was carefully monitored and exactly the same for all. In other words, all the participants had the same energy intake via food and the same energy output via exercise. By the end of the study, each set of twins had gained virtually the same amount of weight, but between different pairs, the weight gain varied from about 9 to 28 pounds. This study proved that a major contribution to weight gain is metabolic rate, which is largely genetically determined. It’s an important fact for dieters to understand, because your metabolic rate will affect how you
The other thing we must do is move more, the way our ancestors did. This means regularly doing aerobic (cardio) conditioning and functional core exercises. In fact, studies show that exercise is one of the most effective ways to get rid of visceral fat. In a 2005 study conducted at Duke University, 175 overweight men and women with mild to moderately bad blood fats (cholesterol and triglycerides) were randomly assigned to participate for 8 months in one of three exercise groups. The participants were instructed not to change their eating habits. One group exercised at a moderate intensity (40 to 55 percent of aerobic capacity) for approximately 3 hours per week. A second group exercised at a high intensity (65 to 80 percent of aerobic capacity) for 2 hours a week. The third group exercised at the same high intensity but for 3 hours per week. Both the 2-hour high-intensity group and the 3-hour moderate-intensity group showed no further accumulation of visceral fat. But the best news was that the high-intensity group that worked for 3 hours per week actually showed a significant decrease in visceral fat. And the bad news for couch potatoes: A control group that didn’t exercise showed a significant increase in visceral fat, which means that if you do nothing to stop it, visceral fat just keeps on growing.
Another study, published in 2006 in the International Journal of Obesity , found that a combination of diet and exercise—not diet alone—reduced the size of abdominal fat cells. This is an extremely important finding because swollen fat cells are the ones that become insulin resistant. Shrinking abdominal fat cells can help restore a normal insulin response, which will help prevent prediabetes.
What about Pears?
But what if you’re a pear—a person who carries fat mainly in the hips and thighs? Will you respond as well as an apple to a proper diet and exercise? The answer, unfortunately, is no. It will, in fact, be harder for you to lose weight than it is for your apple friends because, like most pears, you have a slower metabolism due to your genetic makeup, not your diet. That makes metabolism-revving exercise even more important for you.
But there’s good news, too. As a pear, you are much healthier than your apple friends who may weigh the same as you. It turns out that overweight pears don’t have the thrifty genes that lead to fat storage in the belly.
A Word about Metabolic Rate
While most of the epidemic of obesity has been due to activation of the fat-storage survival mechanisms discussed above, this is not the cause of all obesity or overweight. Even before we began this unintentional experiment of eating the wrong foods and avoiding exercise, there was still a percentage of Americans who were overweight. Many claimed that they didn’t overeat, and it turns out that many of them were telling the truth. In contrast were the food-guzzling types who never gained a pound. The fact is, we all have different metabolic rates, and these rates do affect whether we gain weight readily or not. This point was made quite clearly in a famous Canadian study of twins.
In the study, 12 sets of identical twins were overfed by 1,000 calories a day, 6 days a week, for 100 days. The amount of exercise was carefully monitored and exactly the same for all. In other words, all the participants had the same energy intake via food and the same energy output via exercise. By the end of the study, each set of twins had gained virtually the same amount of weight, but between different pairs, the weight gain varied from about 9 to 28 pounds. This study proved that a major contribution to weight gain is metabolic rate, which is largely genetically determined. It’s an important fact for dieters to understand, because your metabolic rate will affect how you
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