GYM101- Intro to working out. Part 4: Fat Loss and Cardio

No fooling around, straight into the topic..
Your body has a lot of water in it and also a lot of fat stored. There are a lot of stuff like belts, steam baths, pills,... All of them are supposed to reduce body weight. What they actually do is, they reduce the water content in your body and hence fake a loss of body weight. Water content is really necessary and it is not good to reduce body weight by losing water.

Best tips for fat loss:

1. Control your diet.
2. Workout
If you want the best, there are really only two things. There are other minor tips, like drinking a lot of water and all.....

1. Control your diet. I don't think I need to speak a lot about this, you've been hearing this since you were a kid. Eat little, more often. Eating light in intervals of 3 hours or so is really good. The traditional 3-times-a-day is really not good if you want to loose body fat. When you eat up a lot, only three times a day, your body has to store all the energy you ate, and most of it is stored as fat. Genetics come into play and the amount of food stored into fat depends on the person. Similarly, the efficiency with which you convert fat into glucose for conversion into energy also differs.
The best thing to do is to eat more protein food and cut down on calories and to eat as often as you can. If you don't enough, your body would probably fear it may not get food later and ends up storing more food than required.

2. Working out: When you workout, you use the glucose present in your body. If there isn't enough glucose, you look for other sources- protein and fat. It would definitely be a disaster for your muscle growth if you end up using protein whenever you need extra energy.
When you have consumed all blood glucose, fat and protein have to be converted into glucose. When you do heavy exercises in gym for a long time, you've run out of glucose and you need to produce more, at a quick rate. Hence, you end up burning both fat and protein.Hence, it is advised not to work for too long in the gym.

Some people have a natural tendancy to convert their fat into glucose whenever needed, these guys are slim, obviously. Others have to increase the rate of this conversion. Cardio is one good way to do this. Cardio refers to exercises like jogging, walking, swimming, high rep pushups or actually anything that pumps your heart and increases blood circulation.
To know more about how these work and how actually fat is burnt when you do some exercise, read this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise

If you don't want all the details, here's what you should/shouldn't do:
1. Eat less, more often. Take light food in intervals of  2-3 hours. Avoid oily foods and junk, take more proteins. 
2. Workout regularly. If you don't want to gain extra fat and want to slowly lose fat, you may go for High intensity workouts- heavy workouts ( heavy is a relative term and its meaning changes from person to person) and do a little jogging or cycling or swimming twice a week or so. Never workout on an empty stomach.
              If you want to lose a lot of fat, you need to do a lot of jogging or cycling or swimming. Swimming is the best. Eat very little before you start. Do very high intensity for a while, if you're planning jogging, do a 500m sprint (or something like a lot of pushups or a lot of very light bench presses. lot= 30-50 reps) and then get to normal pace jogging for 20-30 minutes. For better results, vary the intensity. First, a 500m sprint, as before, then 5 min of slow jogging and a little quick for the next 5 min, 5 min slow again, 5 min faster and so on for say 30 minutes.
Lose all that fat before you start working out in the gym. If you workout with all the fat on, most of what you gain from the workout will be fat and not muscle.

Why cardio? Why lose fat?
Most important reason, good for health. Another I've already mentioned, you can't gain a lot of muscle if you have a lot of fat on you. If you do a lot of cardio, your anaeroboic capacity increases, i.e. you can use more energy than you previously did. You start recovering quicker. The rate at which you burn fat also increases. The most appealing, you look better.

Would abs exercises like crunches help in losing fat?
A biiiig NO. When it comes to fat loss, their contribution is similar to any other exercise. When you work your abs, you strengthen the abs muscle, not reduce the fat there. The abs are very important since they support your body in a variety of movements.  Actually, if you work your abs very often, abs grow. If you didn't lose your fat, your tummy would look bigger since your abs have grown.

How do I get a 6-pack? What abs exercises?
Abs workout has very little to do with 'getting' a 6 pack. Everyone has this muscle group called abs. To make them visible, you should lose all the fat above it. Abs workouts help in building more muscle. Even if you have great abs, if you don't burn the fat that covers them, no one can see those marvelous abs. If you don't have a lot of fat, you can make your abs visible through them by building your abs. But the best way to get a 6-pack is to lose all that fat. Once you've lost all the fat, the size of your abs becomes important. You should know that abs are really important muscles that support many movements. Having strong abs helps in all sports.

Why is it so difficult to get a 6-pack?
The lower abdomen is the first place where fat is stored. So, that's the last place where you burn fat. It means, if you want to lose fat over your abs, you need to lose fat everywhere else in your body. So it is a very long process to build a 6-pack, not some overnight thingy as advertised by some programs or products. As already mentinoed, the other alternative is there- losing water, which is not a good thing to do. 

I want to lose fat and build muscle.
You can't do both at the same time. You have to do one or the other. Bodybuilders have two phases in their training- a bulking phase where they put on body mass and a diet phase where they lose the fat. If building muscle and losing fat at the same time was possible, they would have a single phase.When you're building muscle, you have to go on a few extra calories and that would put on some fat unless you are extremely careful with your diet and your workout.

I want to convert my fat into muscle.
Not possible. You build muscle from protein, not fat.

I want to lose fat at a particular part of my body.
Fat loss is not an isolated phenomenon. You cannot lose fat at one particular part of the body, it occurs through out. But as I mentioned, fat is stored more easily at some places than others and it is harder to lose fat from those places.

Other tips for fat loss: (I haven't attached an explanation)
1. Drink a lot of water.
2. Sleep properly, with proper ventilation.
3. Take deep and long breaths- breath to your stomach, not lungs
4. Again, control your diet- cut down on oily stuff, eat more proteins. For Indians, avoid rice, eat more rotis or pulkas. Eat your vegetables. Try to eat a lot of fruits. It'd be great if you have fruits for dinner.


Nothing else like belts or baths or pills can work. Refer to the wiki link I've posted. Here it is again
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobic_exercise
It talks of biological facts.
Don't think to lose fat the easier way and get tempted to try arbit things that are no good. It's always good to sweat it out.

Good Luck