AB-SOLUTION WITHOUT AB EXERCISES

This is perhaps one of the most controversial topics I have discussed in my career as a consultant. For some, it takes the hard way to find out, some believe you outright, but most do not even bother to find out, and give up exercise without reaching any where. For those who wish to know only the gist of what I am going to say and cannot be bothered to read the entire article, I sum it all up in just a few words. DOING ABDOMINAL EXERCISE DOES NOT HELP LOSE FAT FROM THE ABDOMEN. That is a fact. Yes, you have wasted a lot of time doing all those silly exercises.

I found out the hard way. Those days, in the early eighties, when I started out in the gym where I used to work out, a word such as diet was unheard of. You were supposed to workout like crazy and eat big. And if you had a big belly, you worked it off with just exercise. Yes, putting in about two and a half hours of hard work for more than fifteen repetitions did take away a big chunk from the belly. It flattened out and nobody knew you had some fat around the lower tummy until they saw you without your shirt. But that little bit around the lower abs just refused to vanish. There were those who had excellent eight pack, the lucky ones who would not pack on some fat around the waist no matter what they ate.

I was not one of them, though I was not big, I had a bit of lard that defied the toughest of abdomen exercises. I was around 51 kg when I started out, added about a kilo of muscle per month and in two years weighed a little over 70kg, but the same amount of fat stuck to my abs and I could not stomach that anymore. My exercise routine was basically built around Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Education of a body builder”, in which he mentions diet but never bothered to read it.

At 70-plus kg of body weight, I decided enough was enough and had to bring some quality to my physique by flattening the tummy and showing all eight pieces of abs. And I thought it was the easiest thing I could do. I used to do a three day on, one day off exercise routine as suggested by Arnold Schwarzenegger, which I did in the morning and devoted one hour in the evening to my abs, doing crunches, leg raises.

My abs got stronger and stronger, but the fat refused to budge. And then I started looking around for help. I consulted everyone who had perfect abs and tried every single one of the suggestions I got from them to no avail. Then it dawned on me that may there was something that I missed and checked with all the guys one more time and they furnished the missing piece in the jigsaw. CUT DOWN ON EATING!

I ate four times a day, and ate heavy and I thought I could burn it all off with just ab exercises. Now I was starting to feel a little desperate. By how much should I bring down and I had to find out the hard way. I immediately proceeded to cut and avoid all fatty foods [maintained the carbohydrate intake the same] and realised that all I could eat safely were egg whites and fish as everything else had hidden fats. I followed this pattern for about two months with absolutely no visible change and so went back to my previous eating habits. This brought about immediate results on my belly. It increased in size by about half an inch. Now I was hopping mad. And my friends were a great help. They would say “Look at Venu, he lifts heavy, eats heavy, drinks heavy and is heavy. Bet you can’t see the reading on a weighing machine which is right under your feet.”

I was 26 years old, weighed around 75 kg. Apart from weight training, I boxed three days a week and that was good aerobic exercise and still had a belly to sport. Then a chance comment by a friend brought about a sea of change in my eating habits. I wasn’t what you called someone with a sweet tooth, but occasionally I would gorge on all the goodies I could lay my hands on. Especially after a drink or two of rum, I could sit down to eat and polish off whatever there was on the dining table. And on one occasion, for a birthday party, I ate about half a kilo of cake and about four drinks to warm up and then proceeded to polish off twelve parattas and four plates of chicken, which made my friend comment thus, “no wonder you have so much lard around your waist, you eat so much sweets and chemically alcohol is also a sugar.”

I did not know how close to the solution I was then, until I checked with my mother, who is a chemistry professor in a college. She confirmed what my friend said, that alcohol was indeed a sugar. And I drank at least four pegs once every two or three days and never gave it a second thought. I also realised I had to give up all kinds of sweets. If alcohol which does not taste sweet in your mouth qualified as a sugar, there must be a lot of other stuff which was sugar and I was gorging on them all.

Cutting down on sugar and going off booze brought about some changes and my waist measurement came down by one and a half inches in two months. I was eating only just enough and sometimes, even, going hungry. I had to get the cuts on abs and was willing to do whatever it took me to get there. I also spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, checking out belly and my mother would sometimes say thus, “Venu, I wish you would do something more constructive than spend so much time in front of the mirror, even your sister takes only half the time”.

I knew the answer was within reach, only just out of sight. “May be you should read a bit of nutritional biochemistry” was what a doctor asked of me and I bought my first book on bio chemistry. And boy! Was the subject vast? It took me weeks to decipher and pinpoint just that little amount of “wisdom” required to change my eating habits forever.

Here is what I came up with and this makes boring reading, not to mention what you have gone through so far.

When you eat a meal, the presence of glucose, amino acids or fatty acids in the intestine stimulates the pancreas to secrete a hormone called insulin. Insulin acts on many cells in your body, especially those in the liver, muscle and fat tissue. Insulin tells the cells to do the following:

• Absorb glucose, fatty acids and amino acids
• Stop breaking down glucose, fatty acids and amino acids, glycogen into glucose, fats into fatty acids and glycerol, proteins into amino acids
• Start building: Glycogen from glucose, Fats (triglycerides) from glycerol and fatty acids, Proteins from amino acids.

The activity of lipoprotein lipases depends upon the levels of insulin in the body. If insulin is high, then the lipases are highly active; if insulin is low, the lipases are inactive. The fatty acids are then absorbed from the blood into fat cells, muscle cells and liver cells. In these cells, under stimulation by insulin, fatty acids are made into fat molecules and stored as fat droplets. It is also possible for fat cells to take up glucose and amino acids, which have been absorbed into the bloodstream after a meal, and convert those into fat molecules.

When you are not eating, your body is not absorbing food. If your body is not absorbing food, there is little insulin in the blood. However, your body is always using energy; and if you’re not absorbing food, this energy must come from internal stores of complex carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Under these conditions, various organs in your body secrete hormones:

• pancreas – glucagon
• pituitary gland – growth hormone
• pituitary gland – ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone)
• adrenal gland – epinephrine (adrenaline)
• thyroid gland – thyroid hormone

These hormones act on cells of the liver, muscle and fat tissue, and have the opposite effects of insulin.

When you are not eating, or you are exercising, your body must draw on its internal energy stores. Your body’s prime source of energy is glucose. In fact, some cells in your body, such as brain cells, can get energy only from glucose. The first line of defense in maintaining energy is to break down carbohydrates, or glycogen, into simple glucose molecules — this process is called glycogenolysis. Next, your body breaks down fats into glycerol and fatty acids in the process of lipolysis. The fatty acids can then be broken down directly to get energy, or can be used to make glucose through a multi-step process called gluconeogenesis.

So far, so good. From what I have read, I inferred that the culprit was the hormone, INSULIN, and insulin management was all it required to have your fat stores used up. Any food product that stimulated an increased production of insulin was decreed bad. I even started to note down the list of foods that caused an insulin spike. For this purpose, I had to be in touch with so many people, put my students through torturous dieting sessions and finally designed a diet programme that worked for everyone. Now coming back to the point, I realised how stupid it was to offer weight loss without diet. I also realise that it is not required to exercise the abdomen directly at all to lose fat from that area.

There are lots of people who still can’t “stomach” this idea and is still “belly full” of the old theory that you have to do abdominal exercises to lose fat from there. It is high time that they realised that they are wasting a lot of time on the waist line and incorporated a diet replete with all nutritional content and started on an aerobic exercise programme.