You know the commonly understood formula for weight loss. What is it? Eat less + increase activity=weight loss.  This is not true.

Why?

Here is the answer: Your body is not a calorie checkbook!  When you cut calories and up cardio to get into that little black dress, 3 things are sure to happen:

• Over exercising can lead to weight loss: but the bad kind!  Muscle wasting and dehydration!

• Spending hours on the treadmill may result in some initial fat loss, but you can expect a weight loss plateau after 2-3 weeks due to your body developing a tolerance to what you are doing.

• You get frustrated, bored and gain all the weight back plus more once you quit due to a depressed metabolism.

This is the typical outcome of any calorie restriction diet and cardio scenario.   Why and what else can we do to look good, feel fabulous and spend less  not more time working on it!?

Your body has a fat burning engine that we can compare to a campfire. To turn the engine on you will need the proper mix of wood (nutrition) and air (exercise) to keep the flames (metabolism) burning fat.  The hormones of your body ignites the flames of your fat burning engine.

As most women are keenly aware, hormone levels fluctuate over time so the ideal timing and ratio of wood and air to keep the fire burning does vary over the day, the week, or the month. To avoid weight loss plateaus, we need to account for this. Weight loss plateaus are the body’s hormonal (and enzymatic) tolerance to what you are doing.

So what happens when we chose to cardio ourselves to death for 1 hour or more a day while cutting our food intake in half? Well let’s compare it to the campfire scenario. What happens to the flames of the campfire when you take half the wood out and point a strong gust of wind at the campfire? That’s right you got it. Without fuel to sustain the fire, and a strong wind blowing on the flames, the fire will burn out. Bye bye, fat burn, hello slow metabolism.

Excessive cardio, like a hurricane wind, blows out the fat burning flame because it causes the body’s hormones to “bottom out.”  This response is even more severe if you “go on a diet” and the same time. Some exercise (air) is necessary to burn fat; that’s why we recommend weight training accompanied by cardio to accomplish this. Most people fail because they focus on burning calories. Who cares about burning calories? We want to burn fat, not just calories.

This preoccupation with the calorie checkbook idea and endless cardio + hardly eating to “bring down the balance” continues to be accepted despite the fact it fails miserably to deliver.  All too often we keep exercising despite feeling feel tired- despite the fact that we’re not getting anywhere. We intensify your workouts or add more days to our routine chasing these promised results and what happens?   We still feel tired, or worse, we get injured. Instead of doing more of the same when we reach a plateau we need to mix up our routine to move to the next level….

“Rest” is not a dirty word! Take a complete day off once a week. And remember to take a vacation, sleep late once in a while, walk on the beach, or go out shopping for a day instead of doing time on the StairMaster. Anything to break the cycle. It will recharge you and get you back in the swing of things.

Your bodily reserves are just like the batteries in your Walkman – after continued use, they are going to run out and you have to replace or recharge them if you want to keep hearing your favorite song.

The bottom line:  eat a balance of protein and complex carbohydrates like fruits and vegetables to fuel your strength and cardio workouts.  Balance is the key- not over training and over attention to calories.   Listen to your body… it may want a glass of water and a day off.  Better yet, come take a Strength based cardio workout at Pilates1901.  29 minutes and done!

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