Women's Health Articles

The way to get rid of cellulite is basically to reduce the fat under the skin and to strengthen and tone up the muscles. However, before you consider that, it will be necessary to understand what cellulite is.

Cellulite forms from the excess fat lying just under the skin. The more fast and sugary stuff you eat, the more chance you have of developing cellulite. We blame it on everything from our mums, to our age, to the man in the moon, but rarely on ourselves. To get rid of cellulite we have to accept who, not what, allows it to happen.

Cellulite is, in simple terms, a change in the nature of this excess fat which turns it fibrous and lumpy, giving your skin an orange peel effect, often described as ?cottage cheesy?. If you are going to get rid of cellulite, the two essential tortures you are going to have to suffer are exercise and diet! That?s it. Exercise and diet.

There are basically two types of exercise: aerobic, which involves using a lot of oxygen, and anaerobic, which involves very little oxygen. An example of aerobic exercise is step training or circuit training, and of anaerobic is weight and strength training. Anaerobic exercise tends to be explosive. There are also basically three purposes of exercise: to make one fitter or increase stamina, to increase muscle bulk, or to reduce weight. The type of exercise you carry out is dependent on what you want to achieve from it.

Anaerobic Exercise To Get Rid Of Cellulite

To get rid of cellulite you need to reduce excess subcutaneous fat, and to improve muscle tone. This will involve both aerobic and anaerobic exercise, and they should be carried out at the same time. There is a simple calculation for fat reduction: If you use up more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. If you do this while exercising, this weight loss will also be fat loss (otherwise, it could also be muscle loss). To get rid of cellulite you need fat loss.

You need to find a form of exercise that you like, and that makes you breath heavier and your heart beat faster. You need oxygen to burn fat. It?s a fact of body chemistry. Such exercises are jogging, circuit training, cycling, and even walking. Anything that makes you breath faster and increases your heart rate will help get rid of cellulite. You choose.

Strength Training

You don?t need a gym for strength training. You can purchase cheap weights from mail order or your local sports shop, or you can use heavy stones, rocks or even, to start with, heavy food tins. Improvise. If you really want to get rid of cellulite you should be able to find something in the house, which is heavy. Or use some other form of resistance training: pull-ups on the door for example. The purpose of this article is to show you how to get rid of cellulite, not how to do the training. There are plenty books and internet sites which can help you with this.

The muscles you build, or tone up, may not get rid of cellulite, but will make it seem smoother, and will also increase your metabolism so that you burn more fat naturally when you are at rest. This just has to help!

Diet

The purpose here is not to tell you what to eat, though most dieticians would agree that a diet containing 55 ? 65% carbohydrate, 30 ? 40% protein and a maximum of 15% fat, with as little trans and saturated fats as possible, would constitute an acceptable diet. However, all this is basically irrelevant to how you get rid of cellulite. The fact is that if you eat fewer calories than you burn through exercise, you will lose weight. If you exercise to lose these calories, the lost weight will not come from the muscles being exercised, so will come either from fat or from muscles not being exercised. It is a simple formula, which is behind the whole theory of diet and weigh reduction/weight increase. It has yet to be disproved, and it will help you to get rid of cellulite if you use it.

I have read that while two cookies are fine, ten are not. Nonsense. Ten cookies are fine if you burn up the calories through exercise. However, it?s unlikely you will, so stick to two or you will develop more cellulite!

The only thing diet has to do with reducing cellulite is that you must eat sufficient to ensure that you will not burn muscle tissue rather than fat. If you do burn fat through exercise, it may help you get rid of cellulite, but building muscle can also help. If you exercise your thighs, fat loss can be from your stomach (it?s true!). Thigh exercises will eventually tone up your thigh muscles, making them look trimmer and smoother, and appear to have less cellulite. Continued exercise will strengthen them, but the fat loss could then move to your stomach since there is none left in your thighs to lose.

The final result you want in trying to get rid of cellulite is to remove that orange peel and cottage cheese effect on your skin. You can do this by developing and toning your muscles. You may not get rid of cellulite, but you can get rid of the effect it has on your skin!