Everyone knows women have a much, much harder time losing weight, compared to men.

Here are the three big reasons for that:

1. Physiology – women have whats known as “fat- sparring metabolism” which means your body prefers to hold on to fat, and use carbs as energy.

This has direct implications on your diet, weight loss and food composition.

2. Hormones – a man has 1 primary hormone (Testosterone) that stays somewhat constant not only over the weeks and months, but years.

Women’s hormones (at least until menopause) fluctuate week to week, every month.

The two main ones are Estrogen and Progresterone.

Which one of these is dominant, determines your:
– appetite
– mood
– food intake
– water retention
– strength
– concentration/balance

All this has major implications on your diet and exercise- and subsequent weight loss.

And thus, it should be closely tied to each woman’s monthly cycle.

3. Women are generally smaller than men, and have lower % of muscle and higher % of fat, which means:

– they can take smaller kcal deficit
– they have to diet longer to lose the same amount of fat (relative to a man)
– they likely have to take more frequent diet breaks( given that a woman’s body will fight harder against fat loss)

And here’s a bonus one since I am in a great mood today:

Women tend to be more pressed and judged by their looks, and thus the pressure of it causes more stress.

Cortisol (the stress hormone) binds to the same receptors as hormone Aldosterone, which is the main controller of water retention.

In plain English: the more stressed out you are = more water you will retain (which impacts your total body weight).

Dieting itself is stressful, and so if you are using a scale to measure progress, you can think you’re gaining “weight” when you’re actually doing good and losing fat.

But you’re just retaining a few more pounds of water so it seems like you’re gaining weight.

Hence- always track body fat %, NOT your total body weight.

To your health

– Father Fitness

Posted in Lose Weight