Personal Training

One day I was having a discussion with a slightly overweight potential client (woman), who had recently allowed herself to get a little out of shape. As we discussed different views on nutrition and exercise, the conversation drifted to the subject of big muscles and hunger. She wondered, aloud, why she always craved more food an hour or so after a meal. She wondered why every time she tried lifting weights, even lightly, she'd get even hungrier and rapidly gain weight. "Isn't weight lifting supposed to curb your hunger and give you muscle definition?" She asked. On the occasion when she would do aerobic activity like walking or hiking, she described herself as "starving" afterwards, which caused her to over eat. She admitted that she pretty much always felt hungry. I wouldn't have described her as fat, per say, I'd say she was just big. She described how only a few years earlier she'd been athletic, lean, and active in several sports. In addition she had always worked out in some form, every other day.
Her current goals were to re establish her muscle definition and get rid of the offending fat she had gained the last three years. Her game plan was to eat only oatmeal and fruit for breakfast and then rice of pasta with vegetables for dinner; she would work out with me twice a week. Somewhere, several years ago, she had read that eating sugar and fat was bad, but eating as many carbohydrates as she wanted was fine because they were not considered fats or sugars. Plus, she felt she was already moderately active which should have been burning excess calories.
Although she considered herself to be an active individual, her current activities were not the same type that she did when she was an athlete. Realistically, all of her activities at this point in her life were anaerobic in nature, which didn't burn the kind of fat she needed to lose weight. (In her days as an athlete most of the activities she did were aerobic. Furthermore, the fact that she had given up all exercise for a few years had caused her body to change. It had changed to naturally metabolize food for storage, and not for fuel. I knew that her high carb diet, plus the kind of exercise she planned to do like light weight training and minimal aerobic activity, wouldn't get her to her goals of losing fat loss and increased muscle definition; her body would still store more fat than it was burning. By describing what was going on in her body in hormonal terms, I was able to explain why she was having trouble losing weight and always felt hunger. I explained how carbohydrates quickly turn into glucose which stimulates the secretion of increased insulin. In short, without the benefit of aerobic exercise, the insulin encouraged her body to store fat and sugar, and inhibited her body from using them for energy. Her ongoing battle with hunger was proof that her body was unabie to heighten its blood sugar level using its own storehouses because her pancreas was producing excess insulin. The irony of it all! "Insulin, produced to help lower her blood sugar, would actually lower it to the point that she always felt and had to eat more in order to get it higher." The higher levels produced more insulin, which decreased her glucose level and ended up increasing her hunger and defense to store fat, rather then burn it. Barry sears from The Zone says, "The craving that comes 90 minutes after a huge pasta meal means that the insulin has carried the glucose away and that it's preventing your body from getting at the glycogen that's stored in your liver. Your sugar starved brain is telling you to turn to external resources for more, you're entering carbohydrate hell.
The advice I gave this client: "First I convinced her that exercise consisting of sporadic anaerobic activities (light resistance training once or twice a week with minimal aerobic exertion,) combined with the type of food she was eating, would only serve to make her bigger and hungrier. Since she wasn't doing significant aerobic exercise, her body wasn't forced to burn major sugar and carbohydrate calories; instead, after becoming glucose, these only served to make more insulin and pack her fat cells. when she combined high carbohydrates with sporadic anaerobic activities like weightlifting, what she got were undefined muscles covered with fat, and constant hunger for more carbohydrates. I knew that buried beneath the surface, she had what were once strong, defined muscles with memory, and my intent was to wake them up and maintain them. The fact that she was strong led me to believe that her muscles were in fair shape, which meant we could concentrate our efforts on burning the fat around them as we redeveloped their definition. I designed her program aerobically to include power walking, riding a bike, or using the Nordic Track without stopping for at least four times a week. To bring back her definition, we incorporated medium to heavy free weights with lots of repetitions three times per week. One of her main complaints was that her muscles were already too big and they didn't even look like muscle. They were covered with just enough fat to make her look big, but not defined. Muscles covered and marbled with fat ten to look like fat muscles, for lack of a better term. She wanted lean muscles like her active days. She was afraid that by increasing her resistance training both in weights and duration, she'd get even bigger and hungrier. I explained that this program would do the exact opposite. By combining mostly aerobic exercise with three hard days of weight training, she would actually lose fat and increase definition without getting bigger. Although she might only drop five pounds of scale weight. The more muscles she developed, the more fat she would have to do to maintain them. Her hunger would subside because the aerobic training she agreed to do would put demands on her system to burn more glycogen for fuel, instead of having it produce more insulin to store fuel. When her blood sugar did spike, she'd need less insulin to lower it because more glucose would naturally be pulled out and used to rebuild the glycogen she had depleted while doing her aerobics.
Three months after beginning the program, this woman's body went through some profound visual changes. As predicted, she only lost eight pounds, but it was all fat. She went down one full waist size, and she looked like she had lost eighteen pounds, rather then just eight. Almost as an afterthought she realized she wasn't hungry twenty hours a day which made her feel like she had more control over her life. By changing these elements of her eating an workout habits, she was able to overcome her obstacles."