Female Fat Loss Study - Shocking Results!

Leigh Peele is NASM certified trainer and nutritional consultant. Leigh has been published in national magazines and is currently in the process of releasing a 2nd edition of The Fat Loss Troubleshoot, a guide that help fix the common problems of fat loss.

CB: We get lots of questions about how female hormones mess with female fat loss. What do you know about this and have you had any case studies you can share? I could talk about this for a while.

LP:
I just finished a study based on metabolic repair for overtrained and undereating women. What I found is really no surprise, but says everything about what why working out harder especially for women, isn't the answer.

In the field right now there is this stubborn attitude sometimes that fat loss is just negative energy, that if these women were truly starving themselves they would lose weight, period. It just isn't that simple.

Once you take yourself out of the category of "the average healthy woman" the rules change.

I took and studied 10 different women who on a daily basis were consuming 800 calories or less while involving themselves in heavy aerobic training.

All these women complained of a plateau in weight loss that stretched over a period of 6 months or more. I proceeded to train all 10 of then while keeping their caloric intake at the same level. The idea being to see if just a change in training methods and routines would inspire a "shock" effect.

After 6 weeks for 9 of them no budge in fat, no movement in weight, nothing on either side of the scale. It was if time stood still.

The overall goal of this experiment was to try to increase their caloric intake enough to charge their hormones to start to oxidize some fat cells while at the same time minimizing weight re-gain from a too fast of caloric increase.

The importance was basically allowing the metabolism enough time to play catch up, minimizing fat gain in such a easy set up to do so physiologically speaking.

We did RMR readings, heart monitoring, hormones tests, the works. I separated them into two groups. The first group worked on a moderate paced rise in caloric intake while the 2nd group had a slower paced raise of caloric intake.

Both had a high focus of hypertrophy programs to make any temporary surpluses work towards increasing lean muscle mass. The idea here being that if you are going to gain anything, might as well be lean muscle mass.

Click HERE to read the EYE-OPENING results of Leigh's study