Fitness & Wellness

One of the biggest problems faced by many women who come into the gym is the accumulation of fat around the middle, especially on the belly. You can reduce belly fat and get those flat abs everyone wants, but it takes more than just exercise to do it. Belly fat is viscous fat, which is the unhealthiest type of fat that’s also the toughest to eliminate. Getting rid of it means making several lifestyle changes.

Start with a program of healthy eating.

Healthy eating isn’t dieting, but you’ll achieve your proper weight when you do it. It means eating more whole foods and eliminating processed foods that contain harmful substances, like preservatives and other additives, but very little fiber or nutrition. Healthy food, such as fresh vegetables and fruit, is high in fiber, which can help improve your digestive system and eliminate some of the bloating. Cutting out food high in sugar is also important. Don’t forget that what you drink makes a huge difference. Even diet soft drinks have been proven to add inches around the middle and accumulate belly fat.

Workout regularly.

While there’s no way to do spot exercises that just makes the fat disappear around the belly, exercising does take the weight off your entire body and tones your muscles to give you a slimmer appearance. Focus on complex exercises that get more muscles involved. Strength training is another way to burn huge amounts of calories, just as HIIT—high intensity interval training—is. While doing abdominal exercises will help tone your muscles, so will doing HIIT resistance workouts or using kettlebells. The key is losing weight. No matter how great your abs are, if they’re covered with a layer of fat, nobody will see them.

Cut out the stress.

One benefit of exercise that people often fail to acknowledge is that it burns off the hormones of stress. Stress can actually cause the accumulation of belly fat. That’s right! Cortisol, one of the hormones produced by stress has been associated with the accumulation of fat on the abdomen. Not only should you workout regularly to burn off stress, consider ways to deal with stress before it affects you, such as deep breathing or meditation.

• Eat more lean protein. Studies show that people who eat more lean protein tend to have less belly fat than those that don’t. Protein increases your metabolism and makes you feel full longer.
• Get plenty of sleep. Lack of sleep messes with the hormones that make you feel hungry or full. It increases the hunger hormones and reduces the ones that give a feeling of satiety.
• Drink plenty of water. Not only will extra water help flush your system, it can also satisfy hunger pangs. Often people mistake feeling thirsty for being hungry, which can cause an increase in caloric intake. Drinking cold water actually burns calories without adding any.
• Studies show that adding apple cider vinegar to your daily diet may actually reduce belly fat. In one study, men who drank a tablespoon in a glass of water daily reduced their waistline by a half inch in a twelve week period without any other changes.

There’s no way to do a spot exercise and expect fat to come off just that spot. It’s true whether you’re talking about belly fat, inner thigh fat or fat on your booty. When you lose weight, it comes off your entire body, no matter how many spot exercises you do. However, exercise can tone the muscle under the fat to give some of the results you’ve hoped to achieve. It won’t make you lose weight just on your inner thighs, but will help improve the appearance.

Start with a healthy diet.

A healthy diet isn’t dieting. Dieting means sticking with a strict regimen of food. You often feel hungry or deprived when you diet. However, when you eat healthy, you’re simply making smarter choices when it comes to food. Instead of using sour cream on your baked potato, you use Greek yogurt. It means eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and eliminating processed food. Processed food often means empty calories and additives that increase the calorie count, like high fructose corn syrup, which seems to be in almost all processed food. Foods you might consider healthy, like applesauce, salad dressing, canned fruit, protein bars and cocktail nuts even have it, so switch to whole foods to make life simpler and get rid of fat quicker.

Get more cardio throughout the week.

Set your sights to increasing your exercise. While you need strength training, which helps build muscle tissue as you burn calories, increasing your overall activity will help you slim, not only your thighs, but your whole body, too. Find ways to walk more. Park further from the grocery. Walk to lunch rather than drive. Take the steps and not the elevator. It will work your legs, while burning more calories to get rid of body fat.

Use specific exercises to strengthen the muscles of the inner thighs.

Ballet is a good way to strengthen the muscles of the inner thighs. Think a plie squat with a wide-legged position. Lunges, step-ups, squats and even squeezing an rubber ball between the knees can tone and tighten those inner thigh muscles. If you don’t have an exercise ball, you can do that exercise without one. Sitting on a chair with your knees apart, put the palm of your hands against the inside of each knee. Use your hands as an opposing force as you try to bring your knees together.

• Remember, you may be able to become the best you, but that doesn’t mean you’ll change your basic body shape. You can tone your body and make your entire body slimmer.
• Find ways to make simple exercises give better results. If you’re doing squats, make it tougher. Use a child’s rubber ball to help. Put it between your legs, right above the knee and keep it in place as you squat.
• Roll up a thick beach towel or use a rubber ball. Lay on your back with your feet flat on the floor. Put the towel or ball between your knees and squeeze. Hold for thirty seconds, relax, repeat four times.
• Raise up on your toes and lower yourself to squatting position without letting your heels touch the ground. It’s hard. Use a table or chair for balance if you need to do it.

Most of our clients in Irvine, CA, use their trainer and our expertise to find the right diet, if you’re working on your own, it’s not nearly as easy. Before you begin, you need to know what a healthy diet consists of and what your personal goals are. We consider food sensitivities, so should you. No matter how great a specific food is, if it doesn’t agree with you, it shouldn’t be part of your diet. There are some basics for any healthy diet.

Ditch the processed and embrace whole foods.

Processed foods have most of the nutrients removed while processing. They also contain chemicals to add to the shelf life of the food. The first change to make is to eliminate processed foods and focus more on whole food. It takes more creativity because you have to prepare the food, but you’ll find there are easy to find recipes online. Make your selection a rainbow of colors. Fruits and vegetables have different nutrients and benefits based on their color, so varying it each meal can help you get them all.

Identify the number of calories you need.

Each person’s calorie needs will be different, based on their present body weight, age, activity levels and goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, eating 3500 calories fewer will shed one pound. The easiest way to calculate your calorie needs is to eat for the weight you want to achieve. For building muscle tissue, make sure you include one gram of protein for every pound of body weight, a half gram of fat and the balance of your calories in carbs. People on a ketogenic diet to lose weight will need to keep carbs under 50 grams a day.

Don’t make your diet so strict or starve yourself.

One of the biggest reasons diets fail is that they’re too strict and have rules that make it impossible to follow. That’s why we focus more on eating healthy, than dieting. Actual dieting doesn’t work. The term, dieting, indicates a short term process and eating “special” food. Eating healthy is how we prefer to help our clients with their dietary needs. Healthy eating doesn’t require a lot of fuss. Choosing to fill your plate with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and cutting out sugar and processed food is a huge start to controlling calorie intake. You never fall off the diet wagon when you eat healthy, because you’re allowed some “otherwise forbidden” foods occasionally.

• When you want to get the healthiest fresh fruit and vegetables, free from chemicals and pesticides, use the Clean Fifteen list to purchase those grown traditionally and the Dirty Dozen list for those that should be organic.
• While calorie counting isn’t necessary if you’re eating healthy, portion control is. You’re allowed some cake once in a while, but that means a small piece of cake, not the whole cake.
• If your protein source is meat, the way you make it is important. You should grill, broil, bake or boil it, never fry or deep fry it.
• While exercise is very important, you can’t out-exercise a poor diet. Not only will you feel better, it helps you maintain your proper weight and boosts muscle building effort.

Client in our facility in Irvine, CA come here to make changes in their life that boost their health, slow the aging process and build their strength, endurance and flexibility. The pattern of healthy eating and exercising regularly positively impacts many different systems. One of those is the DNA and has to do with lengthening telomeres. If you don’t know what telomeres are, they act like aglets on shoelaces—those little plastic tips that prevent the shoelaces from unraveling. Only in the case of telomeres, they’re preventing the gene damage.

The chromosomes shorten every replication.

If there were no telomeres, cells would only be able to replicate a few times before there was DNA damage or the cells would die. However, instead of the chromosomes shortening, damaging the DNA, the telomeres shortens, so the rest of the chromosome remains intact. Luckily, the telomeres are the disposable part whose whole job is to protect the rest of the chromosome, allowing it to continually replicate without damage to maintain youth and good health.

Telomeres don’t just get shorter and then disappear.

If you want to live a long life, you definitely want long telomeres. However, the body is changing every day with new cells. We’re actually regenerating. While there’s a lot of estimates about getting a whole new body in a certain number of years, many scientists believe that some cells, like the heart cells, don’t replicate quickly, only about one percent per year. Aside from those slowly regenerating cells, there’s an estimate that it takes between 11 and 15 years to regenerate all the cells in the body. If you have longer telomeres, that regeneration takes place and you remain young and healthy. If they’re shorter, you either have damage at the cellular level and get disease or show signs of aging. You can do something to keep them longer.

You can lengthen your telomeres or prevent them from shortening.

If you had a car and the manufacturer said that all you had to do was put a certain type of oil in it and drive it over fifty miles an hour at least three times a week and it would last five, ten or twenty years longer, you’d do it wouldn’t you. That’s the same for your body and telomeres. Studies show you can do several things to lengthen the telomeres you have or slow the shortening process. Chronic stress, for instance, shortens telomeres, so eliminating the effects of stress helps keep them longer. Working out is the real stress buster as many of you know. Making sure you have exercise on a regular basis can help in other ways, too. In fact, studies show that people workout have longer telomeres and the more time spent exercising, the longer the telomeres were.

Scientists identify telomere growth by the amount of telomerase, an enzyme that lengthens telomeres. However, it lengthens the telomeres in both cancerous and healthy cells, so increasing it by chemical means could play havoc. Only by boosting all the systems, including the immune system, through lifestyle changes, can you have the best and healthiest outcome.

Learning meditation, yoga or some other relaxation technique can boost your telomere growth.

Eating healthy is also a way to encourage healthy telomere growth. One study showed a vegan diet and other lifestyle changes actually helped reverse the shortening of telomeres.

Foods that are high in nutrition and antioxidants are important. While you might take a supplement, it won’t provide all the phytonutrients that whole foods provide.

Some people exercise to shed pounds and look better, while others may just love the boost of energy they get and feeling good. No matter what the reason you workout, you get the same results, exercise improves your health. It builds your energy and makes changes to your body that can add years to your life. Your body has five systems that when functioning properly, keep you healthy. They’re microbiome, angiogenesis, stem cells, immune system and DNA protection. Exercise helps all those areas.

What’s your microbiome system?

The simple answer is gut bacteria. Your body has more microbes than cells. In fact, there is an estimate that they outnumber human cells by ten to one, but they’re far smaller than human cells, so they are only five pounds or less of our body weight. The microbiome live in the gut with most of them in the large intestine. They aid in digestion, boosting immunity, keeping bad bacteria at bay and producing nutrients, such as B and K vitamins. Diseases as different as inflammatory bowel syndrome, diabetes and mental health issues come from an imbalance. Exercise can boost the health of gut bacteria and that after just six weeks of working out, the composition of microbes changed to a healthier grouping.

Your body continues to make stem cells after you’ve reached adult age.

Exercise boosts how stem cells behave. Exercise encourages stem cells to produce muscle tissue rather than revert to fat. That means even age related muscle loss can be reversed. Orthopedic specialists often encourage patients to exercise to increase the number of stem cells in the body. The more active you are, the more stem cells are produced. Stem cells can become any type of cell in the body, so there’s a potential for reversing aging. More research is necessary to see the extent of change.

Exercise increases DNA protection.

DNA protection comes from the telomeres on the chromosomes. Telomeres act like the tips of shoelaces, preventing the chromosomes from unraveling and destroying the DNA. When your cells replicate, some of the chromosome is lost. The telomere is the dispensable part of that’s shortened, to protect the DNA. When you workout, you lengthen the telomeres so cells can continue to replicate without damage or cell death

• Angiogenesis is the process of maintaining just the right amount of blood vessels. An excess or insufficiency is bad and can cause cancer, diabetes, heart disease and other maladies. Exercise promotes normalization of the process.
• Exercise also boosts your immune system. It helps boost antibodies and normalizes white blood cells, improve gut bacteria, burns off the hormones of stress and increases the production of antioxidants.
• While exercise is important, you can’t ignore the importance of the role food plays in your health. There’s a whole new area in the medical field studying the potential for food to be medicine to fight disease and keep people healthier.
• You’ll have improved circulation, a stronger fitter body and more energy when you workout, but you’ll also boost your feeling of well being. When you feel happier, studies show you live longer.