Beating The Cellulite Blues

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They’re every woman’s nightmare; those dreaded little dimples that somehow magically appear when you least expect them.  Whether you’re 15 or 50, these little buggers are tough to get rid of. 

Yep you guessed it, I’m talking about cellulite.  Also known as adiposis edematosa, dermopanniculosis deformans, status protrusus cutis, gynoid lipodystrophy, and orange peel syndrome, (yuk) cellulite is simply stored little fat pockets within the  fibrous connective tissue just below the surface of the skin that get caught between the collagen fibres.

More prevalent in women than men (that must give you a hint as to one of their causes) cellulite also has a tendency to favour the hips, thighs and butt areas.

Today I’m going to explain what causes cellulite, why women get it more than men, why it tends to attach to the hips, thighs and butt area, how to get rid of it and how keep it off for good. 

So, cellulite what is it?

As I’ve already alluded to, cellulite are little wee fat deposits situated just under the skin and seen as how we already know that hormones play a huge part in where we store fat, it makes perfect sense then that the female hormones oestrogen & progesterone both play a huge role in their creation.

We’ve been led to believe that eating fat is what creates excess body fat but the truth couldn’t be further from this.  Since the 1950’s, when Ansel Keys told us that saturated fat caused heart disease, our rates of obesity have skyrocketed, yet our rates of saturated fat consumption have plummeted.  Clearly saturated fat hasn’t been the cause of our growing obesity rate as we were led to believe.  So what is?

There’s plenty of research and evidence nowadays to clearly suggest that the enemy is in fact sugar, and I’m not talking about the stuff you get from eating fruit, although cutting back may not necessarily be a bad thing.

The excessively large amounts of processed carbohydrates being consumed nowadays in the form of soft drinks, energy drinks, fruit juices, flavoured milks, fruit smoothies, cakes, biscuits, cookies, sweets, cereals, confectionery, ice cream, packets of chips, fast foods, takeaways, breads and low fat anything (have I left anything out?) are THE NUMBER ONE reason why not only do we have an obesity epidemic, but cellulite on our hips, thighs and butts is forming at a rapid rate.

Every time you eat or drink one of those things mentioned above, the fructose component (remember sugar in any of its various forms is simply half glucose and half fructose) gets converted by the liver into free fatty acids.  Any excess (and trust me there’s plenty) is subsequently stored as body fat. And here’s why? 

When you eat real food derived from real meat, fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds, your body has a number of self protection mechanisms built in to prevent you from over eating (so long as you listen to them).

Fructose (when eaten in the quantities that it’s eaten from all those foods I’ve just listed) bypasses those self protection mechanisms, hence the reason why you can keep drinking and eating those things without feeling full. 

OK, so here’s where this article takes a turn towards the downright geeky.

While female hormones play a huge part why women seem to get cellulite more than men, there’s actually another reason.  All cells of the human body receive information from hormones through receptors, a little bit like how households receive snail mail, through their letter boxes.  One such group of hormones are called Catecholamine’s and when they bind to alpha receptors, they slow down the body’s ability to burn fat as an energy source and when they bind to beta receptors, they speed up this process.  It’s a bit like the mailman only putting bills in even numbered letter boxes and cheques in the odd numbered ones. 

Now here’s the kicker!  The female anatomy has 9 times more alpha receptors (even numbered letter boxes) located in the lower body (hips, thighs & backsides) than males so when the postie comes a calling, you ladies get all the bills while we men get all the money.  NOT FAIR is it?  

So the strategies that you need to implement to A minimise the risk of getting cellulite and B reducing it if you’ve already got it now takes on a twofold look and feel. You want to down regulate the alpha receptors and up regulate the beta receptors so I’ve broken down the strategies into three categories: exercise, nutrition & recovery

EXERCISE

The obvious goal for any exercise regime if reducing cellulite is your goal is fat loss, not weight loss, but fat loss.  (Remember cellulite is the build up of fat pockets)  Weight loss tends to focus on the number on a scale and adopts strategies that reduce water & muscle, two of the heavier components of the human body, whereas fat loss is focussed solely on reducing body fat stores.  The two are completely different.

Focus all of your training sessions around both high intensity interval training and high intensity resistance training.

An example of a high intensity interval training session could be something like a 40 second sprint, followed by a 20 second rest, repeated 8-10 times. 

An example of a high intensity resistance training session could be something like 8 x compound exercises, each performed consecutively for an 8 rep max load with 30 secs between each exercise.  Repeat the circuit 6-8 times.

All of these sessions should be performed on an empty stomach.  If you train in the morning, don’t have anything to eat before hand and if you train in the evenings, leave a 4-5 hr window after a meal before training.

Because both types of workouts are of a high intensity, make sure you include a complete and thorough warm up and cool down.

NUTRITION

The obvious nutritional strategy is to simply cut out all of those processed sugary foods and drinks I’ve hammered on about already in this article.  But in actual fact there’s a ton of sneak tricks you can do from a nutritional point of view that can really get rid of cellulite.

The ABC meal is a great way to get the right nutritional program. 

•  A stands for a palm sized piece of protein.
• B stands for 2 palm sized handfuls of cruciferous vegetables steamed in organic butter.
• C stands for 2 tablespoons of fat in the form of organic butter, almond oil, coconut oil or macadamia oil.

So a typical 2 day workout day could start with short HIIT followed by a good protein shake (10-15 grams of protein + 1 teaspoon of MCT oil) and then have 3  x ABC meals a day timed around 9-10 am, 12-1pm and another HIRT session at 5.30pm followed by another protein shake with at least 30 grams of protein post workout and the last ABC meal for dinner at 7-8pm.

Note the lack of calorie dense carbs in this meal plan.  It’s done on purpose to down regulate the alpha receptors and keep your insulin levels at a constant state.  (In other words avoid spiking them and driving your body into body fat storage mode)

However, this meal plan has one drawback.  It lowers your Leptin levels (which leads to constant hunger pains) so to counteract this, every 7 days (Sunday night?) you’re going to reset your Leptin levels with a cheat meal.  (Note cheat meal, not cheat day)  It can take 4-6 days to lower your Leptin levels but only 24 hours to reset them. 

About 15-20 mins before you tuck into your cheat meal, you will need to open up your glycogen creation pathway so that those extra calories you’re about to consume get converted to glycogen (2 x glucose molecules joined together) and stored in the liver and your muscles as energy and not converted into free fatty acids and stored on your arse as fat. 

To do this you’ll have to do some really high intensity training for about 4-7 minutes.  100 burpees should do the trick.

This cheat meal can be anything you want, (and I mean anything) just make sure you eat it slowly, while sitting down relaxing without any distractions. (No TV, no reading and definitely not while driving or standing)

You need to listen to your body while enjoying your extra large scoff so when your body tells you you’ve had enough (and believe me, it will) STOP.

Another sneaky little trick is to take a hit of caffeine 30 mins prior to exercise to stimulate catecholamine activity and stimulate beta receptor activity.

RECOVERY

The last category for beating the cellulite blues has to do with what you do when you’re not eating and you’re not training.  Recovery is important especially if you’re trying to break down cellulite deposits. 

Remember way back at the beginning when I mentioned that the fat deposits that create cellulite are the ones that get trapped in between the collagen fibres?  Well some of the recovery strategies you can implement are specifically designed to strengthen those fibres.  Typical recovery techniques like hot/cold showers, wearing compression wear and foam rolling also strengthen the collagen fibres, so now you have another reason to implement recovery strategies

Reducing your stress levels is also a vital component in reducing cellulite.  Cortisol, the main stress hormone is up-regulated during a woman’s first 14 days of her menstrual cycle and so it is vitally important that you minimise your stress levels as much as possible, especially during the 1^st 14 days of your cycle.  This is why you also need to avoid unnecessary bouts of long cardio sessions.  Contrary to what you’ve been told, cardio is stressful on the body and as a result cortisol levels rise and if your cortisol is being down regulated, your body will produce more, leading to more body fat storage.

SUMMARY

So there you have it.  3 simple steps to get rid of cellulite.  Train like a demon, eat clean with the removal of all sugary processed foods and recover well with plenty of de-stress strategies.