Our glutinous Western lifestyles have left most people with dysfunctional hormone profiles, impaired internal biochemistry and therefore a suppressed metabolism. Fat gain and obesity soon follow.

Unfortunately, most people (unaware of how the human body really works) attempt to shed the weight by starving themselves and doing lots more cardio based exercise (i.e. jogging, spin classes, aerobics classes). Sadly, this only serves to make the problem much worse because this sort of approach does nothing to address the underlying issues; the person has dysfunctional hormone profiles, impaired internal biochemistry and a suppressed metabolism.

Adding excessive cardio exercise as well as a low calorie restrictive diet only adds extra physiological stress on a body that’s already highly stressed and close to breaking point.

For safe, effective and long lasting fat loss, health and body shaping results, we must take a more holistic approach and look inwards. We need to create a plan that helps us to release more of the good hormones while reducing the amount of bad hormones, teach our bodies to digest and respond to food accordingly and get our metabolism working for us not against us.

To do this, most folks need to actually eat more food than they currently are (but the correct food of course). Eating frequent meals that are high in fibre, vitamins, minerals, proteins and essential fats each and every day is an important first step overweight folks need to take.

There is nothing more important than your nutrition because you simply can’t out-train a bad diet. Again, most folks believe that the only way to lose excess fat is to ‘burn it off’ during frequent bouts of cardio exercise. This is a common but costly mistake which leaves most overweight people frustrated, defeated, injured and usually even fatter.

THE only way to improve your internal health and physiology so that you actually achieve sustainable fat-loss results is traditional, structured and progressive resistance training.

Lifting weights has been around for centuries but is sadly not widely accepted by the masses as an effective fat loss method. Maybe the images of huge-steroid-induced bodybuilders has turned the general public away from the weights room, but studies show time and time again; if you want to improve your hormone profiles, reset your internal biochemistry and boost your metabolism, you need to be preforming frequent, sensible and structured resistance training regardless of how much fat you have to lose.

So put those running shoes away and go grab your gym gloves.