Diet and weightlifting article

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Interesting article on diet, excersice and weightloss, with weightlifting!

Diet

Have you ever seen a bodybuilder drink Slim-Fast? I didn’t think so. Whenever I see a women drinking Slim-Fast or any other commercial diet product I know her diet is doomed to failure. Drinking products high in sugar and low in protein such as in Slim-Fast is a sure-fire way to destroy any dieting program.

Many top bodybuilder writers and gurus were kicking themselves after the success of Barry Sears and his "Zone" diet. While this diet is indeed effective, there was nothing new about it. Low carb, high protein diets have been advocated in bodybuilding magazines for decades before this latest low-carb diet fad.

Many women make the huge mistake of dropping protein from their diets since they don’t want to become muscle bound. In truth, women should make a special effort to maintain or even increase their consumption of protein when they are dieting to maintain or increase their muscle mass. The combination of low total calories, aerobic exercise, and decreased protein intake will cause the body to literally strip muscle off of your body – a mistake no bodybuilder would make.

In addition to preserving lean mass, protein offers numerous other benefits to dieters. The biggest one is reduced appetite. This is the main reason why low-carb/high protein diets work. Protein foods such as lean meat, fish, and egg whites are extremely filling, whereas starchy and sugary "diet" foods such as fat-free potato chips or Slim-Fast shakes will only cause you to become hungrier by spiking your insulin and causing swings in blood sugar levels. Increasing protein intake at the expense of carbohydrates almost always means lower total calories. Women wishing to lose weight should throw away most of their "diet" foods they purchased at the grocery store, and start stocking up on egg whites, chicken breasts, fat-free cottage cheese, and other lean sources of protein.

Hormones

This is the most controversial part of this article. Of all the articles I have written for different health and fitness magazines, the one that I have received that greatest response from is my "Testosterone for Women" article in the Mesomorphosis on-line magazine. I hope this is a sign that my views on testosterone are becoming more and more mainstream.

I am not suggesting that women inject themselves with massive doses of testosterone. However, I do believe women can learn quite a bit from bodybuilders by understanding the importance of maintaining a proper testosterone/estrogen balance. Far too often, women unintentionally sabotage their diet by taking birth control or estrogen hormone replacement pills. These pills will lower testosterone levels to barely detectable levels, while causing estrogen levels to soar. Any bodybuilder will tell you that this is a quick way to make yourself fat and bloated. Burning fat becomes difficult to impossible when you have no testosterone to preserve muscle mass and mobilize fat, but plenty of estrogen to increase fat storage. No bodybuilder in his or her right mind would take estrogen while dieting for a contest. Estrogen is even used by farmers to fatten up their livestock.

Almost all post-menopausal women wishing to lose weight can benefit from testosterone replacement therapy. While I have been prescribing testosterone to women for years as part of my overall anti-aging programs, the pharmaceutical company Unimed will soon be coming out with a testosterone gel for women call Relibra. I am excited about this development and I believe that this new gel will change many women’s lives for the better. In the meant time older women show benefits from taking DHEA or 4-androstenediol, both of which can act as testosterone precursors.

Exercise

It is extremely difficult to convince women to incorporate weight - training into their workout routines. Bodybuilders never remove weight - training from their workout routines, no matter how desperate they are to burn fat. Weight training is perhaps the single best way to preserve muscle while dieting, and can also increase your metabolic rate for many hours after your workout is over (and can raise your metabolic rate even more by increasing muscle mass). However, there seems to be an irrational fear in women’s minds that lifting weights a few times a week may make them look like an unfeminine professional bodybuilder overnight.

My message has always been this: women do not have to fear lifting weights. Most women lack the genetics to look like a professional female bodybuilder even if they wanted to. The often manly looking female bodybuilders are genetically prone to growing large muscle and take large doses of anabolic steroids. Even with more muscle, a woman won’t look muscular unless she has very low bodyfat levels. Women naturally have more bodyfat than men, which is what gives them their feminine curves. To get the masculine physique seen by some female bodybuilders, you must diet down to extremely low body fat levels and take diuretics to remove unwanted water from your body. In other words, adding weight training into your workout routine will not make you look more masculine and is essential for long-term fat loss. Even if a women does somehow put on more muscle mass than she wants, it will come off very easily. It is very easy to bulk down - bulking up is what’s difficult.

Conclusion

I would suggest that any women serious about losing unwanted fat should throw away their copy of Fit and read some informative and unbiased bodybuilding magazines such as Muscle Monthly or Mesomorphosis. I am concerned that the diet programs advocated by the medical establishment and by most nutrition professors lead to anorexia and/or actually increases in obesity. It is truly scandalous that the very simple and obvious concept that it is fat loss rather than weight loss is lost among most dieticians and health-care professionals. Only a program that includes weight-training, adequate protein intake, and proper hormone balancing will result in effective and permanent fat loss without significant loss of muscle or bone mass.

About the Authors

Karlis Ullis, MD, is the Medical Director of the Sports Medicine and Anti-Aging Medical Group in Santa , California and a faculty member of the UCLA School of Medicine. He is an internationally recognized authority on anti-aging medicine and sports medicine. Dr. Ullis has recently completed two books published by Simon & Schuster: Age Right : Turn Back the Clock With a Proven, Personalized Antiaging Program and Super-"T", The Complete Guide to Creating an Effective, Safe, and Natural Testosterone Enhancement Program for Men and Women (Fireside Division of Simon & Schuster).

Josh Shackman, M.A., is the Research Administrative Director at the Sports Medicine and Anti-Aging Medical Group and a co-author of Super-"T", The Complete Guide to Creating an Effective, Safe, and Natural Testosterone Enhancement Program for Men and Women.