Are You Skinny Fat?

Fitness professionals in Malaysia (or in Asia generally) get bombarded with negativity in women and weight training.

Here’s what I think:

Ladies -Unless whomever you’re talking to has education in how the body works, why are you listening to them? Those little 4KG dumbells are NOT going to make you look like Mr Olympia! You don’t take medical advice from the cashier at McDonalds now do you?

Dudes – Stop contradicting yourself and push your insecurities aside. Encourage your women and lady friends that being strong is important and don’t be intimidated by their tougher-than-yours body! In a country like Malaysia, it is extremely important the ladies are capable of protecting themselves

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I am not the skinny fat type so I can only imagine how that must feel. Cool thing is I found this article by Pauline who can shed some light on this.

Have a read below:

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What’s Your Bodytype?
Whether you carry around a little extra weight or not enough, you can succeed … with time
by Pauline Nordin

Fat people have one good thing going for them provided they have not been sitting on a chair for their whole lives: decent amount of muscle mass. You see, to carry around extra lard you need to be strong. Think about all those stairs, all the squatting down onto the toilet seat, side-lunging into the car etc. When you’re skinny fat you don’t have that burden on your bones. You are LIGHT. With clothes you look good and particularly thick spandex material or “shape wear” items are your curves best friends. What you don’t have is muscle. There is no reason for it! You have not worked out, your job is not physical and you have not really thought about it cause when you’re 20 everything is still quite firm and perky, but after that gravity hits you hard.

Sometimes you almost wish you were heavy and all you needed to do was diet strictly and do tons of cardio. Now, skinny fat means you cannot follow the same protocol. Why? You have no muscle to “de-fatten”! Under your layer of fat there is more layers of fat, but no real muscle. On your to-do list is serious weight training. You will not be strong initially and even the tiniest dumbbells will challenge you. It’s ok, you’ll get there soon. It’s important you work on getting stronger cause stronger muscles means more muscle mass.

Skinny fat chicks have a tendency to believe too much about themselves when it comes to their ability and capacity to build muscle. They are convinced lifting heavy will turn them into bodybuilders within a month. This completely idiotic perception is usually the reason skinny fat chicks don’t get results. Since the fear of getting huge like a man is so great the skinny fat chicks prefer to do cardio and only tone with butt blaster machine.

So, you got it right, you do need weight training. Over to the diet segment. Naturally when you have fat to lose you want to go on a strict fat loss diet, right? The problem with those super strict diets is they burn off both muscle and fat. You will not have energy to train and how on earth are you going to build muscle if you’re weak and lethargic from eating too few calories? Exactly, it doesn’t work! Scenario: skinny fat goes on low calorie diet. Skinny fat’s body gets worried and refuses to build muscle to prevent increased calorie expenditure. Skinny fat keeps on training with weights. Skinny Fat’s Body doesn’t respond and won’t grow stronger. Conclusion: Skinny Fat keeps her skinny fat body.

Solution: You must have patience.  You must adopt a lifestyle which builds muscle and burns fat for you DAILY. It’s no three months program, missy! It’s for the long run. I’m sorry to break it to you but the results you want take some effort and cannot be done within two weeks. A diet plan you enjoy and that has plenty of good food for you to be healthy on, that your muscles can build from and melts off your fat, that’s what you need.

And then, the third segment is cardio. Of course you will be inclined to do tons of cardio to burn your fat, but with excess cardio there is no time for muscle growth. Muscle grows when you rest, not when you’re spinning your wheels. You need to build those muscles so they can take care of the fat FOR you. Also, if you just lose weight you’ll burn fewer calories too, which is not a good solution for the long haul. Skinny fat chicks should do no more than equal amounts of weight training to cardio, and in no way put cardio training first hand! Remember you can not shape fat, just muscle.

Skinny fat people, yes you want it all yesterday, but it doesn’t work. You will need to have tons of patience just like someone who is dieting down from 500 lbs needs to have to reach a normal weight. Being skinny fat is a sign your body is

1) Good at storing fat

2) Bad at putting in nutrients to muscle cells and instead put them into fat cells

3) Not physically strong genetically

So, of course it’s gonna take a lot of work to get it where you want!

You WILL succeed as long as you remember it will take time. It will be worth it. And you will need to do it 100%.”

Check out Pauline’s site: www.fighterdiet.com