I Married A Fat Bitch

Archive for September, 2008

So last night I was watching late night infomercials as you sometimes do when you lose the remote and lack the energy to get up and change the channel yourself(yes I know I’m setting myself up for my own website here – Imarriedalazybastard dot com?).  Anyway, I watched an advert for some weight loss pills, then one for a wonderknife that can cut straight through metal cans, then another one for weightloss pills, then something that gives you electric shocks until you win Mr Universe, then another weigh loss pill add…..and even my limited intellect could pick up the pattern.

Everyone wants to sell weight loss pills.  Why?  Because they offer a convenient solution to a group of people who are, by their very nature lazy.  When you are overweight you don’t want to think about watching your diet or exercising or monitoring your calories etc etc.  But if there were some magic pill that you just had to take once a day and you could eat whatever you want…..wouldn’t that be amazing?  And people want it to be true so hard that they a prepared to convince themselves in the face of just about any evidence that this thing will work for them.

Then the remarkable thing happens – when they DON’T work, you manage to convince yourself that it was because THAT pill didn’t work for you – but THIS OTHER ONE will.  Meanwhile the guys who are selling them are taking so much of your money that they are able to buy out every second commercial spot.

Here’s a clue if you are thinking of going down the diet pill path.  Look at the fine print.  I can almost gaurantee you’ll find the words “results are not typical” in there.  Meaning all those models dancing around telling you how much weight they lost either aren’t actually people who used the pills or are not a typical example of what happens when you do.

Bear that in mind.

When you exercise a lot the body tends to sweat.  When this happens too much it is called hyperhidrosis – which is curable.  Sweating is just the bodies way of trying to keep it’s core temperature down and a frustration to many fit people is that the more they exercise the more they sweat.  The reason for this is that the body becomes accustomed to working out and knows when physical exercise begins that the core temperature is going to be raised significantly, so it begins sweating earlier.

Everyone is always saying that you should exercise to lose weight.  This has never really made a huge amount of sense to me – I always figured that if you ate a certain amount of food that was how much weight you gained, and what was released in waste product was what you lost.  So now I have another thing to thank Rachel at yayfoods for – this finally makes sense to me.

When you exercise at a gym you should talk to the staff about your target heart rate.  This is based on your bodyfat, age, weight and height.  Basically you need to get your heart up to it’s target heart rate to lose body fat.  When you are at this rate the heart sends a message to your brain that it needs more energy.  The body releases fat from the fat cells into the blood stream and then uses this as a store of energy.  So, the longer you exercise with an elevated heart rate the more fat-energy you will burn.

I’d always been under the impression that fat cells were something we gained and lost.  Apparently this is not so.  An average adult gains most of their fat cells in the third six months of their life(between the ages of 1 and 1 1/2) and again during puberty.  After that if we gain or lose weight our fat cells increase in size accordingly.  A fat cell can grow up to double it’s size, and an average person has between twwenty five and thirty five billion.

But new fat cells can grow too.  If your existing fat cells expand to their maximum size(ie if you double your weight since puberty) then new fat cells can be formed.  This is why yo-yo weight patterns are dangerous – they can leave the body with many more fat cells.

If you’ve been paying attention to your body you will know that as we get older our body mass shrinks and the rate we burn calories – our metabolic rate – slows down.  Age is a funny thing and it can mean that we can eat exactly the same as we did a decade ago, and exercise just the same too – but we will still put on fat.  In other words we need to work harder to stay at the same level.

Now because carrying more fat increases the chances of all those nasty things we don’t like – like arthritis, diabetes and dangerous blood pressure, we need to keep converting out body to muscle.  That’s where lifting weights come in.  You have to work the muscle to build them, and the food for increased muscle mass comes from…  your bodies fat cells.  So while your weight may stay consistent your muscle increases and your body fat is reduced.  End result – a healthier you!