What is my Body Type? Most people have combinations of the three body types. For example, some have an upper body that is ectomorphic and a lower body that is endomorphic, resulting in a slim upper body and a more fat- prone lower body, creating a pear shape. Sometimes the variation is not as clear- cut as having one body type for the upper body and another for the lower. Height has little to do with body type, despite the fact that people tend to think of skinny people (ectomorphs) as tall and heavy- set people (endomorphs) as short. Ectomorph. Mesomorph. Endomorph. Skinny, linear/ ruler appearance. Naturally lean. Smooth, round body. Lightly muscled. Naturally muscular. Gains muscle easily, but tends to be underdeveloped. Small joints/ boned. Medium to large size joints/ bones. Medium to large joints/ bones. ![]()
Low body fat (without exercising or following low calorie diets)Naturally strong. High levels of body fat (may be overweight)Small shoulders, chest and buttocks. Broad/ square shoulders. Small shoulders, high waist and large hips creating a pear- shaped physique. Long arms and legs. Body fat evenly distributed. Difficult to keep lost body fat off. Difficulty gaining weight. Losing fat is easy. Slow metabolic rate. Fast & efficient metabolism. Efficient metabolism. Attacks of tiredness/ fatigue. Hyperactive. Gaining muscle easy. Train For Your Body Type. Just as when you were younger, your body type will determine how easily - and just how much - muscle you can add. Granted, most of us over. Endomorphs have very little issue building muscle, but they also gain fat rapidly as well. Learn how to work with this body type to pack on mass with very little fat. ![]() Lose weight slowly. Difficulty gaining muscle. Responds quickly to exercise. Perhaps it was immediately obvious which body group you fell into. But, if it wasn’t think about how you react to food and exercise. If you lose this weight rapidly after a change in diet or some exercise, you are probably a mesomorph. ![]() If you struggle to lose these extra pounds, then you exhibit endomorphic features. If you don’t put on any weight, you most likely are an ectomorph. If you consume a large amount of calories and are still thin, you are probably an ectomorph. If you eat a small number of calories and still appear thin and healthy you are probably a mesomorph. If you consume few calories and still appears heavy you are probably an endomorph. If your middle finger overlaps your thumb, then you are small boned/ jointed (ectomorph). If your middle finger and thumb just touch, you have medium sized bones/ joints (mesomorph). If your finger and thumb do not touch then you are larger boned/ jointed (endomorph). Losing inches, especially off your problem areas, can be accomplished through proper exercise and eating habits. If you are a large- framed person, though you will never be willowy, you can be slender and fit, wear a size 8 with room to spare and look super sexy in a bikini. However, it is futile for a person with strong mesomorph or endomorph characteristics to aim to be willowy like an ectomorph, this will only lead to disappointment and ill health. Even if this target thinness were reached, it probably would not look good, could be difficult in the extreme to maintain and would continue to have adverse effects on the body. ![]() Do the right cardiovascular exercise for your body type to improve your body and get the results you want. Also, ectomorph workouts, mesomorph and endomorphs need to train differently when it comes to resistance training. ![]() ![]() Shattering the Myth of Fasting for Women: A Review of Female- Specific Responses to Fasting in the Literature. One of the more esoteric but much beloved tools in the paleo dieter’s tool- kit is intermittent fasting. What is intermittent fasting? IF is the practice of maintaining overall caloric intake while consuming those calories in fewer meals or in reduced time windows throughout the day. The goal is to create conditions of fasting in the body, but not for extreme lengths of time. Some examples of intermittent fast strategies include 1. The evolutionary premise — the argument that proponents of intermittent fasting make — is that humans evolved to optimize their health under less- than- optimal conditions. Fasting, they say, is a natural and perhaps even necessary part of being human. The modern- day scientific correlate appears promising, too: Most people are nowadays aware that a calorie- restricted diet has the ability not just to decrease body weight but also to lengthen a human life. Amazingly enough, this happens without any of the psychological crippling side effects of cravings and food obsession that practictioners of calorie- restriction often experience. Intermittent fasting, proponents say, also may benefit the fight against cancer, diabetes, and autoimmunity. Here is an excellent, up- to- date review of the “benefits” of fasting. It is wholly understandable that fasting is all the rage these days. Sort of. I have a specific interest in intermittent fasting because of what I have witnessed both in myself and in working with literally thousands of women in the Pf. W community. Many women report to me (read more about that in this awesome book) that intermittent fasting causes sleeplessness, anxiety, and irregular periods, among many other symptoms hormone imbalance, such as cystic acne. I have also personally experienced metabolic distress as a result of fasting, which is evidenced by my interest in hypocretin neurons. Hypocretin neurons have the ability to incite energetic wakefulness, and to prevent a person from falling asleep, in reaction to the body detecting a “starved” state. Hypocretin neurons are one way in which intermittent fasting may dysregulate a woman’s normal hormonal function. After my own bad experience with IF, I decided to investigate intermittent fasting. I looked into both a) the fasting literature that paleo fasting advocates refer to, and b) the literature that exists out in the metabolic and reproductive research archives. Intermittent fasting and women: problems in paleo. What I found is that the research articles cited by Mark’s Daily Apple (and others), focus on health benefits such as cancer- fighting properties, insulin sensitivity, and immune function. However. I was struck by what seemed like an egregious sex- based oversight in that MDA post I linked to above. This startled me because the article MDA cited was for me one of the strongest proponents of sex- specific differences in response to fasting. Sex differences were relevant in two striking areas: 1) women in studies covered by the review did not experience increased insulin sensitivity with IF regimes and. These two phenomena mean that women’s metabolisms suffered from IF. The men’s metabolisms on the other hand improved with IF across the board. Still, the mere fact of being more sensitive to fasting simply by being a woman is, I would assert, pretty important for a woman who is contemplating or already practicing IF. This goes nearly unmentioned in the blogosphere. Intermittent fasting and women: problems in the literature. Beyond reporting biases in the blogosphere, there remains an even greater problem of a significant testing bias in the fasting literature. Searching “men” + “intermittent fasting” in a Harvard article database yields 7. ![]() ![]() Searching “women” yields 1. The animal studies are more equitable, but also a bit less applicable to human studies. It is well- known in both the research and the nutritional communities that caloric restriction is horrible for female reproductive health. This is not news. There is an infertility condition – called hypothalamic amenorrhea – that millions of women suffer from due to being overly restrictive. But what of fasting? Intermittent fasting and women: should women fast? The few studies that exist point towards no. It is not definitive, since the literature is so sparse, and it necessarily differs for women who are overweight versus normal weight (and who have different genetic makeups), but when it comes to hormones, women of reproductive age may do well to err on the side of caution with fasting. What follows first is a brief review of what can be gleaned in sex- specific responses to fasting in animal studies. Afterwards I talk about what has been concluded by the few relevant human studies.——————————————————————- Mice and Rats. First up is a study that demonstrates the hippocampal changes of calorie restriction and intermittent fasting for both male and female rats. Comparatively, the males’ genetic response was less specific, suggesting that the males respond to a general stressor but they seem to lack the ability to discriminate between a high energy and low energy stressor.”Moreover, “IF down- regulated many gene pathways in males including those involved in protein degradation and apoptosis, but up- regulated many gene pathways in females including those involved in cellular energy metabolism (glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, pentose phosphate pathway, electron transport and PGC1- . Female reproductivity down- regulates. In the researchers’ own words: “our data show that at the level of gonadal gene responses, the male rats on the IF regime adapt to their environment in a manner that is expected to increase the probability of eventual fertilization of females that the males predict are likely to be sub- fertile due to their perception of a food deficient environment.”——————————————————- In the final relevant IF rat study I could find, researchers subjected rats to the same diets– to 2. Calorie- Restricted (CR) diets, as well as to alternate- day fasting diets, and monitored them over the long term for hormonal responses. To elucidate the physiological basis of sex differences in responses to energy intake, we maintained groups of male and female rats for 6 months on diets with usual, reduced . In response to 4. CR, females became emaciated, ceased cycling, underwent endocrine masculinization, exhibited a heightened stress response, increased their spontaneous activity, improved their learning and memory, and maintained elevated levels of circulating brain- derived neurotrophic factor. In contrast, males on 4. CR maintained a higher body weight than the 4. CR females and did not change their activity levels as significantly as the 4. CR females. Additionally, there was no significant change in the cognitive ability of the males on the 4. CR diet. Males and females exhibited similar responses of circulating lipids (cholesterols/triglycerides) and energy- regulating hormones (insulin, leptin, adiponectin, ghrelin) to energy restriction, with the changes being quantitatively greater in males. The high- fat/high- glucose diet had no significant effects on most variables measured but adversely affected the reproductive cycle in females. Heightened cognition and motor activity, combined with reproductive shutdown, in females may maximize the probability of their survival during periods of energy scarcity and may be an evolutionary basis for the vulnerability of women to anorexia nervosa. They also found this: The weight of the adrenal gland was similar in rats on all diets; however, when normalized to body weight CR and IF diets caused a relative increase in adrenal size, the magnitude of which was greater in females, compared with males. And this: The testicular weight was unaffected by any of the diets. In contrast, both CR diets and the IF diet caused a decrease in the size of the ovaries. And this, bearing in mind that “daytime” for nocturnal rats is “nighttime” for humans: The daytime activity of females was doubled in response to IF, whereas the IF diet did not affect the activity level of males. Nighttime activity levels of males and females were unaffected by dietary energy restriction. And this: Uterine activity was monitored daily with vaginal smear tests; cyclicity was scored as regular, irregular, or absent. The mild energy- restriction diets (2. CR and IF) significantly increased the proportion of animals displaying irregular cycling patterns, whereas the 4. CR animals displayed an almost complete loss of estrous cyclicity. And this: In males, corticosterone levels were elevated only in response to the 4. CR diet, whereas in females corticosterone levels were significantly elevated in response to all three energy- restriction diets, suggesting a relative hyperactivation in females of the adrenal stress response to reduced energy availability. For lipids, all the rats did well: “Collectively, these data suggest that atherogenic profiles of both males and females are improved by dietary energy restriction.” Interestingly, too, as they pointed out in the abstract, human females also perform cognitively much “better” (memory and alertness) on CR and IF diets than on normal feeding schedules. There are of course some caveats to this study: A) They are rats. Women experienced no significant change. After 3 weeks of ADF, women but not men had an increase in the area under the glucose curve. This unfavorable effect on glucose tolerance in women, accompanied by an apparent lack of an effect on insulin sensitivity, suggests that short- term ADF may be more beneficial in men than in women in reducing type 2 diabetes risk. Feelings of fullness were significantly (P = 0. Body weight dropped only four pounds after several months. That’s all that exists! Women don’t have much to go on. There are a few rodent studies.
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