Live better and longer with the fitness show hosted by fitness expert author and tv personality fitz kohler she'll tell you why diets are dumb supplements or snake oil and the truth about how you can earn a lean hard pain-free and athletic body now for our favorite bossy blonde fitz kohler. Music. It's a fitzy mini it's so cute, Well, hi team. I'm Fitz Kohler, your very noisy fitness pro from Fitzness.com and welcome to the Fitzness show. This is the second ever Fitzy Mini.
That's right. I'm going to keep it short and sweet. Short, short, super sweet like me, right? And I'm not short. I am kind of sweet. I don't know. That's up to you. I'm going to leave that up to you. I've got a few great questions. They all come from one great lady. That's right. Debbie Marks from Milwaukee. That's right. She's a Wisconsinite and I like her very much. And she's got some great questions. So I'm going to answer them. And if you have great questions, send them my way too.
Let's get on with it. So Debbie wants to talk about weight loss and sweat and fat. So her first question is, is it required to sweat when working out? For it to be considered a good workout, does a person need to sweat? So I'm going to tell you, absolutely not. That is not a criteria for whether your workout was good or not. I mean, let's say you're doing yoga in the North Pole. Do you need to sweat? No.
Sweat is beneficial. Sweat is detoxifying. Sweat is a cooling mechanism for your body, most importantly. But some of us just aren't big sweaters. In fact, I'm one of those weird people who doesn't sweat much and it drives people absolutely batty. In fact, when I do ballroom dance, my instructor, Michael will be dancing for 60 minutes and towards the end, he's drenched. And he always says, why don't you sweat? And I said, just don't.
Even when I ran the Boston marathon, I didn't sweat. I got a little rosy and I was definitely working hard. But I didn't sweat. You know, I do a ton of strength training and I work hard. I don't sweat. The only time I really sweat is that if I'm out in the hot sun, like if I go to a Florida Gator baseball game and it's 95 and I'm just sitting there, I get that sweat, you know, the kind like that in right between your boobs, sweat, that's what I'm going to get some sweat. That's probably TMI.
Anywho, you do not need to sweat to get a great workout. However, if you are a person who does sweat when you do cardio and you're not, maybe that might put a question over your head that says, ah, maybe I'm not working hard enough. Most importantly, when you're doing cardio, the gauge for whether you're working hard enough should be whether you are huffing and puffing.
If you are breathless to an extent, that means you're working hard and you're challenging your respiratory system and your heart as you should. And so that's your gauge. If you're strength training, your gauge should be whether you are grunting, right? If you're lifting so much and all of a sudden you go like that, you don't have to be the gym weirdo. You don't have to wear the big tank top with the strange armpit holes that come down and show your rib cage.
You don't have to do that. But if you're lifting an appropriate amount of weight or doing the appropriate amount of pushups or pull-ups, when you are forced to that grunt, that tells me you're working hard enough. When you're stretching or doing mobility exercises, it's that wince, right? You reach to a certain degree and you squint a little bit. That tells me you are stretching with purpose and you're making progress.
And then of course, when you're balance training, the gauge there should be whether you are wobbling. If you can stand straight up while you're doing your balance training exercise and you're not wobbling at all, you don't feel your feet, your ankles, your knees, your hips, your core engaged, that means your balance training exercise isn't challenging enough and you need to do something extra. But yeah, sweat isn't necessarily a gauge that I look for. As a fitness pro.
I don't think I've ever looked around a sports or fitness environment and thought, oh, that person's not sweating. They're not doing enough. So don't worry about that. If you're not a sweaty lady, good for you. Good for you. And sometimes even if you're not a sweaty lady, you have to get the wipes at the gym and wipe the equipment because people think, ah, she's not cleaning it. even if you didn't leave some nasty sweat on the seat.
So that's the sweat question. And then she says, why is it not possible to target a certain area for fat loss? So fat loss comes as a result, or weight loss comes as a result of burning more calories than you consume. And so when you're eating a banana, for example, you can't be like, okay, banana, take the weight off of my hips. You can't do that. You can't do that. It's a mathematical equation. It's a ratio. And you just can't.
Eat less, exercise more off the fat on your neck or on your chest or on your butt. You just can't do it. So spot reduction is a myth. Now you can spot train. Yeah, you can definitely say, hey, glutes, I want you to be way stronger and way harder. And you can hit that up with strength training and really change the feeling, the firmness, the shape of your can. Absolutely. You can do the same for your shoulders and your biceps and your calves and your abs, right?
But you can't target fat loss. So sorry. That would be nice. That would be really nice. You know who can do that is a plastic surgeon. But we don't need them, right? We don't need a plastic surgeon. Debbie, you're beautiful. And you know how to exercise and you know how to eat, right? Come on. Okay, she also asks, when you burn fat, the fat cells stay, right? Do they just deflate or do they go away? And the more fat cells you have, do you have the more propensity to gain the fat back?
Okay, so that's a big complicated question, but know this. Most adults maintain the same exact number of fat cells throughout their adult life. So when you gain weight, you're not gaining extra fat cells. Your fat cells that you already have are just becoming larger. They're becoming inflated. And then when you lose weight, those fat cells shrink. So what I'm wondering right now, it's a question Debbie didn't ask is how large can a fat cell be? I mean, I have X amount, right?
So let's say I gained 400 pounds. Do my fat cells become the size of a baseball or a soccer ball? I don't know. It's fascinating. I do not know the answer to that. But what I can tell you is you always have the same amount of fat cells. They either get bigger or they get smaller. And if you are someone who is heavy on fat cells, does that make you more likely to be overweight? I don't think so. No, I just imagine your fat cells will be super tiny when you're lean, right?
I'm a pretty lean girl right now. I probably have the same amount of fat cells as you do and the same amount of fat cells that most gals have. I don't know what the range is, right? I don't know what the range of the amount of fat cells is, but I imagine my fat cells right now are pretty small. I don't know what small looks like. Cells. Cells, one would think they're teeny tiny, but if they grow so big when our bodies grow, I don't know.
I'm going to have to call a scientist who deals with fat cells to find out exactly how large they get, or we can all just Google it, or AI can tell us. I'm going to call Elon Musk and see what he's up to and if he has a solution for this question. Now, here's the deal with fat cells. I just said a generic thing where we mostly keep the same amount of fat cells throughout our adult life. However, if you have liposuction, that can really change.
So we're going to do liposuction in your rear end, right? You got a lot of junk in your trunk. You want to slim down that area. So you go in, have surgery. The doctor puts the little suction device in, sucks out your fat. That's fat cell removal. That is actually removing your fat cells. So, okay, we've done that. Maybe you have zero fat cells left in your bum and it's just going to be the way it's going to be for the rest of your life. Okay.
Well, when you had that surgery, you didn't change your eating habits and you certainly didn't exercise the weight off. So know that if you didn't make those habitual changes, your current eating habits will bring back whatever weight you lost during surgery. Perhaps you lost 20 pounds of fat during your surgery. Okay, well, when you're eating habits, do what they do because that's the way you eat. 20 pounds of weight will come back to your body, but they won't be going to your butt.
They're going to go somewhere else. And you may not like where it goes. Now, Debbie, I'm not talking directly to you about this. I'm talking to everybody who's listening, but your fat cells somewhere are going to grow. And I've heard of fat cells coming back post-lipo in very weird way. Some people have had very large necks, right?
They've gained extra weight in their neck or in their armpit or, I don't know, wherever you don't want to gain weight, you might gain it there because without its old go-to, and I say the old go-to, most people have a section of their body where they believe this is where I gain weight the fastest. This is where I lose weight the slowest. Our quote unquote problem areas, right? So where do you gain weight the fastest? You're probably saying that out loud to me right now.
Okay. If we remove that, the fat cells there, a surgeon does and you gain the weight, it's going to go elsewhere. By your beware, you could end up with a big fat nose, right? Or I don't know, double the size of your boobs or your thighs or your, I mean, you know what? I used to be 40 pounds heavier than I am today when I was in college, like early college, I was, I was much larger and my feet were bigger. I used to wear an eight and a half shoe and now my feet measure an eight.
I lost weight in my feet when I lost weight. So I don't know if you have liposuction from your bum and you gain the weight back, you might end up growing out of your shoes. And that would be very weird as an adult, but yeah, These are fantastic questions, Debbie Marks, perfect for a Fitzy Mini. So I hope I've answered your questions appropriately. And I love you all the way from Florida to Wisconsin. And I love everybody else. Thanks for listening. If you have a Fitzy Mini question,
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