Learn How to Interpret Your Blood Work for Fat Loss

Carrie was forty-eight years old when she started my plan because she wanted to lose about 20 pounds. Although she had once been very active, jogging and going to weekly yoga and dance classes, she had become fairly sedentary in the last seven years. Carrie was especially concerned about the amount of fat she had gained in her abdominal area because she had read about the health risks associated with abdominal fat. She wanted to halt the trend of her fat gain before it became a serious problem.

Carrie was in for some unpleasant surprises. While no one would have considered a 5-foot 8-inch-tall woman to be obese at 158 pounds, Carrie discovered that she had a body fat percentage of 34.5, which put her into a high-risk classification. She thought she knew a lot about good nutrition, but when we evaluated what she was eating, we saw that she was trying to eat mostly vegetarian meals and not doing a very good job of balancing out the three food groups. Her diet consisted mainly of salads mixed with small amounts of tuna, cheese, breads, too many desserts, and pasta, with an occasional chicken breast or omelet thrown in for good measure. When I explained to her why she should be eating 30 percent acceptable fats, 40 percent low-glycemic carbohydrates, and 30 percent lean protein, it was a revelation. She had been suffering from frequent colds and flu and didn’t realize how she was compromising her immune system by eating only small amounts of protein.

Since Carrie had stopped jogging to save her joints and had moved away from the city where her dance classes were located, she had stopped exercising except for walking about four times per week. She had read enough to know that if she continued on her present path, her health would deteriorate when she entered menopause, so she was determined to change her lifestyle, eating habits, and approach to exercise.

Carrie’s lipid profile was actually pretty good. Her total cholesterol was 193, her LDL was 102, her HDL was 70, her triglycerides were 96, and her glucose was 99. But everything is relative. I have noticed several things over the last two decades. People who are approaching middle life and rapidly gaining fat in the abdominal area, especially women, are not going to have a good lipid profile for long. Carrie’s high body fat and her low metabolism from poor nutrition and little exercise were about to tip the scales toward higher cholesterol and triglycerides. With the gain in fat around her waist, she was definitely headed for a reverse fat pattern. I have also noticed that people like Carrie who have acceptable cholesterol and triglycerides even though they carry a large amount of body fat should really have superior lipid values, not just good or borderline values. In Carrie’s case, we saw how true this was because her values dropped signif­icantly with weight loss.

As soon as Carrie began to follow a nutritionally balanced, low­glycemic food plan and my program of resistive exercise and interval training, she began to lose fat dramatically. After four weeks on my Fat-Burning tips, her scale weight was 149 pounds, her body fat was 27.8, her total cholesterol had dropped to 174, her LDL was 114, her HDL was 48, her triglycerides were 60, and her glucose was 103. After twelve weeks on my program, she saw even more dramatic changes. Her weight dropped to 136 pounds and her body fat to 20.5 percent. This represents a loss of 22 scale pounds but actually works out to a loss of 26.7 pounds of fat and a gain of 5.8 pounds of lean muscle. So in just twelve weeks Carrie exceeded her original goal.

When she had her blood work redone, she was astonished to see that her total cholesterol had dropped further to 137, her LDL to 61, her HDL had risen to 66, her triglycerides had dropped to 52, and her glucose to 84. Few people can brag of having an LDL lower than their HDL. Her num­bers were as good as those of any Olympic athlete.

With a body fat percentage of 20.5, Carrie had dropped from a size 12 dress to a size 6. She told me, “I had no idea that eating and exercising right would make such a dramatic difference.” Whenever someone in her family comes back from their yearly physical with high cholesterol and triglycerides, she tells them about my program. Recently she told me, “My brother in Pennsylvania called and said that he had been to his doctor. He had gained 30 pounds, his triglycerides were 300, and his cholesterol was 323. I read him the riot act! Then I went right down the list with him, coaching him with everything you had taught me and promising to send him a copy of your books Lose Your Love Handles and Maximum Energy for Life. Yesterday he called me back and told me that he had lost 16 pounds, his triglycerides had dropped to 156, and his cholesterol was now 232, just from following your program. Thank you, Mackie.”

Carrie was smart enough to recognize that her fat was rapidly migrat­ing from below the belt up to her midsection. Even though her body fat was getting very high, she caught herself before she developed serious health problems. She is now on my maintenance plan and feels great. A few months ago she told me that she had just celebrated her fiftieth birth­day. “I may have hit the big five-oh, but I feel better now than I ever have in my life. What a great way to make my debut into middle age.”

Learn the Health Risks Associated with Excess Body Fat

Learn the Health Risks Associated with Excess Body Fat | Health tips img#wpstats{display:none}Health tips empower your best health and live longer!Home pageDiet & FitnessDietDiet tipsFitnessCardioStrengthYogaDiseasesAlphabeticalAids & HivAllergiesBack PainCancerBreast CancerCervical CancerColon CancerLung cancerProstate CancerCholesterolCold & FluDiabetesHeart DiseaseOsteoporosisFamily HealthChild’s healthMen’s healthWomen’s healthNutritionEat rightRecipesMind and BodyBeautySkin careMindAnxietyDepressionHeadachesPersonalityStressWellnessAgingChild’s healthOral careQuit SmokingMen’s healthSleepWomen’s healthMenopause Your Are Here: Health tips ? Diet & Fitness ? Diet ? Fat burn ? Learn the Health Risks Associated with Excess Body FatLearn the Health Risks Associated with Excess Body FatSeptember 25, 2013 - Jean-Paul Marat + - Fat burn - Tagged: Abdominal obesity, Adipose tissue, body fat percentage, body mass index, Metabolism, overweight, Physical exercise, Weight loss - no comments(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Learn the Difference between Male and Female Fat Patterns
Where you carry your weight has serious health ramifications. The most dangerous type of weight is core body fat (abdominal obesity). People who carry weight more evenly distributed over their entire bodies are less at risk for disease than those who follow the more classic fat distribution patterns. Unfortunately, most men and women store excess weight above and below the waistline where it hurts the body the most.
For a variety of reasons, including hormones and metabolic processes that affect fat storage in particular areas of the body, when men and women first begin to gain weight, they do not store it in the same place. A typical overweight man looks like an apple. He carries his weight above the waist, resulting in the classic bulging abdomen, also known as the beer belly. A typical overweight woman carries her fat below the waist in the hips and the buttocks, resulting in a pear-shaped silhouette.
When obesity sets in, people often develop a reverse fat pattern. A man will not only have a huge belly but will start putting on considerable weight below the waist in the hips and buttocks. Women will not only store fat below the waist but will carry a large amount of abdominal fat, turning them into an apple shape. While being overweight increases health risks, crossing over into a reverse fat pattern is a move toward serious health risks.
Where Do You Carry Your Weight?
Where do you carry your weight? Before you read any further, do a quick visual evaluation of your fat pattern. Put on a swimsuit, stand in front of a full-length mirror, and take a look at where your body stores fat. Be hon­est about what you see. Does your weight distribution follow the classic male or female pattern? Or have you already crossed over into a high-risk reverse fat pattern? Have someone take pictures of you from the front, back, and side. Put them up someplace where you can see them every day such as on your bathroom mirror or refrigerator door. These pictures will become your motivation to stick with this program, and you will use them to evaluate your amazing progress as you drop inches and lose body fat.

When I first started my Fat-Burning Metabolic Fitness Plan, I would have someone videotape a “before” of my clients as they made a 360-degree turn. Then, four, eight, and twelve weeks later we would make a video record of the “afters” and compare the results. You may wish to create some sort of visual record as well, since it really shows you how dramatically your body can change in a relatively short amount of time. Kim Cummins, my executive assistant whose incredible makeover appeared in a recent article of Let’s Live magazine, literally cried when she saw herself on film because she hadn’t realized how much weight she had really gained. “I never real­ized how fat my face had become. It really shocked me.”
Melinda Mabile, another participant in the Let’s Live makeover, was delighted to see the difference in her before and after pictures. Even though Melinda did not lose a great deal of scale weight, she lost a significant amount of inches over her entire body and 7.8 percent body fat. Her waist­line slimmed down noticeably. Her posture improved dramatically from month to month, along with her overall energy level. I watched her develop a vibrancy and sparkle—an attractiveness that comes from greater health and metabolic vitality. Mara told me that she has never felt better in her life.

The Answer: Metabolic Fitness
If you find that you are overfat and suffering from a sluggish metabolism or that you have developed a reverse fat pattern, don’t despair. Over the years I have helped thousands of men and women to lose fat, get in shape, balance their hormones, improve their blood chemistry, and increase their energy level. The four-week program in this website is guaranteed to help you not only lose unwanted fat but to dramatically improve your internal body chemistry—your cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, hormonal balance, and thyroid function. And it will prolong the quality and length of your life. I also offer two additional four-week Fat-Burning Metabolic Fit­ness Exercise Modules and a Maintenance Plan. After four weeks on the basic program, I have found that most people have lost so much fat and increased their metabolism so dramatically that they wish to cash in on their newfound gains and go even further.
In over twenty-five years of work with thousands of top athletes, as well as nonathletic men and women, I have discovered that increasing metabolic fitness is the secret to losing body fat and lowering disease risk factors. Our Fat-Burning Metabolic Fitness Plan is based on three tiers:
Fat-Burning Metabolic Fitness Self-Evaluation: an evaluation to learn how to honestly assess where you are on the fitness scale by measuring factors such as Body Mass Index, body measurements (including the all-important waist measurement), percent of body fat, and blood work, hormonal balance, and stress levelsFat-Burning Metabolic Fitness Nutritional Plan: a low-glycemic meal plan to increase metabolism, reduce body fat, and boost energy levelsFat-Burning Metabolic Fitness Exercise Plan: a gender-specific (intensity management) exercise system designed to trim inches of unwanted fat
Many fat-loss websites give nutritional guidelines but do not feature the kind of high-powered exercise program that I offer on this website. But stud­ies clearly show that eating right must be coupled with exercising right to really pay off. A recent study done by the Human Nutrition Program and published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry clearly proves that while dieting is more effective in causing weight loss, exercise is more effective in reducing fat and building metabolically active lean body mass.
Remember, the choices you make in the area of lifestyle, nutrition, and exercise count toward 75 percent of your health profile. And it is never too late to start improving your health. If you are willing to follow the Fat-Burning Metabolic Fitness Plan set forth on this website, I can guarantee that you will soon be feeling and looking better than you ever have in your life.
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Learn Why Exercising Increases Fat Loss

We’ve seen the many health risks associated with abdominal fat. Now for the good news: abdominal fat is the easiest type of body fat to lose.

Fat is stored in cells in the form of triglycerides. You’ve heard that exercise increases the body’s ability to burn fat, but probably you’ve never really understood why that happens—or, for that matter, why you should even bother to exercise if you’re already on a good food program. Shouldn’t just eating correctly be enough? In reality, appropriate exercise greatly enhances your body’s ability to burn stored fat.

Epinephrine is a fat-mobilizing hormone released by your sympathetic nervous system. Studies have shown that during exercise there is a signifi­cantly greater concentration of this hormone in your body. When epineph­rine binds to specific receptors on fat cells, it stimulates hormone-sensitive lipase, also known as HSL, to break apart triglycerides within the cells and release them into the bloodstream where they can be used as energy. And that’s precisely what you want to happen. You don’t want that fat to just sit around in your body; you want to get it mobilized.

When you engage in aerobic exercise, HSL becomes even more sensi­tive to epinephrine since your body temperature is rising. The greater your aerobic endurance, the less concentration of epinephrine it will take to activate HSL and release stored fat. If you are obese, however, it will take significantly higher amounts of this hormone to stimulate the breakdown of triglycerides.

Another hormone affected by exercise is leptin, a peptide hormone produced by the adipose (fatty) tissue that plays a role in the storing of body fat and in overall energy balance. A recent study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry states that exercise combined with dieting is the most effective combination to reduce levels of leptin in the body, with a resulting loss of body fat.

A cell receptor can be thought of as the parking space in which a hormone sits and does its work of turning cell function off and on. The two main types of cell receptors where epinephrine, a fat-mobilizing hormone, can “park” and act on the cell are called alpha receptors, which inhibit the breakdown of triglycerides (a.k.a. the storing of fat), and beta receptors, which stimulate the burning of fat.

Research has shown that both men and women have more beta recep­tors in the abdominal area, meaning that fat is easier to lose in that part of the body. But women have more alpha receptors in the hip and thigh areas than men, which explains why they tend to store more fat in those areas.

The core body exercises on this website are specifically designed to enable your body to mobilize its fat-burning capacity to reduce the abdom­inal area of your body.

The most unhealthy areas in which a man can gain fat are in the hips and buttocks. This is known as the reverse fat pattern, because it mimics the classic areas where women most often gain weight. By the time a man has crossed over into a reverse fat pattern, his waistline usually measures 50 inches or more and he is considered to be morbidly obese. As already stated, it is much more difficult for a man to mobilize fat in this part of the body than it is in the abdominal region.

I work with many men who have a reverse fat pattern. Many of them suffer from significant hormonal imbalances. They exhibit low testos­terone, higher than normal levels of estradiol (which is the primary hor­mone in females), lower sex drive, erectile dysfunction, and low thyroid. The lowered testosterone and higher estradiol levels often result in gynecomastia, in which a man’s breasts become soft and prominent like a woman’s. As a man’s body becomes “feminized” by excess fat, he has a much lower than average percentage of lean muscle and suffers from decreased strength, irritability, and chronic exhaustion.

Douglas Daniels, a forty-one-year-old New Orleans French Quarter night­club performer, was a classic example of the reverse fat pattern. When Douglas first entered my Fat-Burning tips Plan to be evalu­ated, he was so morbidly obese that our doctors gave him five years maxi­mum to live. Here are his health statistics before beginning my plan:

Height                                      5’8?

Weight                                     368 lb.

Cholesterol                             201

Triglycerides                           567

Glucose                                   283

Waist                                       61 in.

Hips                                         66 in.

BMI                                         57.88

Notice that Douglas’s hips are 5 inches larger than his waist, indicat­ing a reverse fat pattern where he not only carries fat in his abdomen but in his hips and buttocks.

Douglas was a two-pack-a-day smoker, increasing his potential risk of heart disease and cancer, and he suffered from sleep apnea, a disease that can damage the heart if left untreated. He had to take an oral medication called glucophage for type 2 diabetes. He suffered from low testosterone and hypothyroidism. He was a walking time bomb, and I knew that I had to motivate him to save his own life—fast.

Our doctor immediately put him on thyroid medication and enrolled him in our Ochsner Cardiac Rehabilitation Program, where he worked to increase his aerobic fitness. During that time he did resistance exercises with light dumbbells and exercises to strengthen and stabilize the core area of his body. One of the most important steps was to dramatically overhaul his nutritional regimen, which then consisted of large amounts of fatty fried foods and rich, high-calorie pasta dishes that his mother and his fiancée cooked for him. Douglas and his girlfriend learned how to make delicious low-fat Italian dishes and healthier “N’awlins”-style meals and to enjoy the low-glycemic, low-saturated-fat Mackie Meals that nutrition­ist Molly Kimball and I have developed for my clients.

After six weeks, Douglas continued with the food program and gradu­ated to performing an exercise program that contained added cardio and interval training to his resistance and core exercises. I also gave him tools for reducing stress and staying motivated.

By the end of the twelve-week makeover for the Discovery Health Channel show, Health Cops New Orleans, Douglas’s statistics had changed dramatically:

Weight                                       310 lb. (a loss of 58 lb.)

Cholesterol                               142 (a loss of 59 points)

Triglycerides                             95 (a loss of 472 points!)

Glucose                                     107 (a loss of 176 points)

Waist                                         52 in. (a loss of 9 in.)

Hips                                           54.5 in. (a loss of 11.5 in.)

BMI                                           48.75 (a drop of 9.13 points)

Douglas has quit smoking, no longer snores, and no longer has to take his medication for diabetes. He has faithfully followed the program and continues to lose weight and build lean muscle mass. Twenty weeks after he started, he had lost an additional 33 pounds, bringing him to a grand total of 91 pounds of scale weight lost!

If my Fat-Burning tips plan can work on someone who was as far gone as Douglas, you know it can work for you. If he and liter­ally hundreds of other overfat men and women with significant health risks can turn themselves around using the plan presented on this website, what are you waiting for? There’s really no excuse not to begin today.