By Dr. Becky Gillaspy
Because of all the hype that comes with low carb diets, carbohydrates have turned into the villains of the dieting world. This is unfortunate because, especially as you age, your body relies on carbs for energy and carbohydrate foods are satisfying foods. By learning how to time your intake of your favorite carbohydrates, you can have your cake and lose weight too.
By the time a woman reaches 50 weight loss hormones become important players in the success of a diet. The
hormone that takes center stage is estrogen. It is true that estrogen secretions diminish after menopause and this can cause a change in the way fat is metabolized and stored by the body. However, estrogen is not the only important hormone for fat loss.
When it comes to dieting the key hormone that controls your ability to burn fat is leptin. This is a hormone that is secreted mostly by your fat cells. In a study conducted on mice the manipulation of this hormone caused the mice to eat voraciously and become obese.
In humans, high levels of this hormone are what open the door for fat burning. However, when a person of any age goes on a diet, leptin levels plummet. This can be dramatic with a drop of as much as 50% in the first week of a diet.
What brings leptin levels up to normal? Eating more, especially eating more carbs. Seems like a Catch-22 doesn't it? You want to drop a few pounds so you reduce your calorie and carbohydrate intake to try to get the weight off. However, this causes your body to produce less leptin. Without leptin your body burns fat slowly... to speed it up you need to eat more calories and carbs.
It is no wonder so many people have trouble losing weight on traditional diets, but add to that the additional hormone issue for women over 50 and the problem seems to grow.
For instances, as mentioned earlier, changes in hormones such as estrogen cause women over 50 to experience changes in the way fat is stored. What this means specifically is that fat is deposited more easily in the belly. This is true for just about all women after menopause, even women who had previously had problems with weight gain in their butt and thighs.
An effective way for women over 50 to gain the upper hand on belly fat is to strategically time the intake of carbohydrates during the day. By doing this you get eat satisfying carbohydrates, which makes it easier to stick with a diet. Carbohydrate timing also allows your body to keep producing leptin, without storing it as belly fat.
Here is how to best time your carbohydrate intake to prevent the storage of belly fat.
1. Eat the majority of your carbohydrates early in the day. At this time of the day your metabolism is naturally high and this helps you utilize the carbs for energy, as opposed to fat storage. This also gives your body the carbs it needs to keep leptin levels elevated.
2. Eat carbs after a workout. If you are a woman over 50 you can help your body control hormone levels through regular exercise and the best exercise includes some resistance training (i.e. weight lifting). By eating carbohydrates after resistance training your body is able to shuttle the carbs you eat into your liver and muscle for storage. This reduces storage of carbs as fat around your waist.
3. Set up a Cheat Day one day a week. Some women notice that eating carbohydrates gives them a bloated belly. So many of these women like the idea of keeping carbohydrates low. However, this drops leptin levels making the body a poor fat burner.
The solution is to eat a lower carbohydrate diet during the week (start with 50 grams per day and adjust up or down to meet your needs), and then take one day over the weekend to add an additional high carb meal. This meal should stay around 1,000 carb calories. This one meal can reset leptin levels.
If you are a woman over 50 who is having trouble losing belly fat, then it is important to consider the role your fat-burning hormones play in your success. By manipulating the times you eat carbs during the day and week, you will find that those stubborn pounds start to melt away.
There is no question that these strategies take a fair amount of planning, but what if I told you there was an easier way to keep leptin levels high and increase your fat burning potential?
Is that something you might be interested in?
You see, if you could do that, you could essentially keep your body in a fat-burning state 24/7... high leptin levels = high levels of fat burning.
Fortunately there is a drop-dead simple way to get your fat burning hormones working for you. Discover these Powerful Fat-Burning Tricks by clicking the link.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dr._Becky_Gillaspy
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