Later when you need more energy, for any reason, your body taps into its most plentiful and efficient energy source – your fat stores and mobilizes it to where it’s needed. Even though all the cells and tissues in your body use fat for energy, your muscles, which are always contracting and moving, require significantly greater amounts of energy than other tissues. Due to the strenuous nature of the work they perform, your muscles can be though of as miniature fat furnaces. They’re unsurpassed in the way they burn calories, at least 18 times faster than fat cells for example. That’s why central to our fat loss concept is exercise and protein intake to maintain and increase your muscle mass.
When you build muscle tissue, it becomes a fat burning powerhouse, and increases your metabolic rate, thus allowing you to eat more without gaining weight.
With this in mind, here’s something else that’s very important for you to understand: the distinction between fat loss and weight loss.
HIDE THE BATHROOM SCALES
If you are focused exclusively on weight loss and constantly checking the numbers on the bathroom scales you are making a big mistake. Scale measurements don’t tell us how much fat has been lost. Keep in mind that the weight lost can be comprised of water, carbohydrate, fat or your vital muscle. Believe it or not it’s actually possible to burn fat and increase muscle, while showing no change in scale weight. Since muscle is 22% heavier than fat, you can actually loose all your love handles and become significantly more toned even though your scales show you haven’t lost a kilo! Scale measurements don’t tell you anything about what’s happening to your love handles. Consider putting your scales in the closet and instead focus all your attention on the way your cloths fit and how you look in the mirror. Or better still buy a fat caliper such as accumeasure to check your fat percentage once a month. This will tell you if the weight your loosing is fat and not muscle!
WHY DIETS DON’T WORK
If you try to “starve off” unwanted body fat you, are playing a game you can’t win. To get long lasting results you need to work with your body not against it. Low calorie diets cause your brain to send a signal instructing your metabolism to slow – increases the number of enzymes that promote fat synthesis and storage, and stimulates you appetite all in an event to prevent any more weight loss. This is actually a survival mechanism passed on to us from primitive times. Our ancestors needed a way to conserve body fat during periods when food was scarce, and this mechanism worked very well. Unfortunately for people wanting to loose fat it’s still functioning in you and I today.
Eating fewer calories than your body burns creates an energy deficit. Here your body will utilize its stores of fat, carbohydrate and protein to make up the difference between the energy it needs to function and the energy it gets from food. So in principle just cutting the calories and therefore the amount of food you eat every day is a perfect way to loose weight. However, it’s not as easy as this to trick your body.
The reason why low calorie diets fail is because with a reduced metabolism, you have to cut your calories even further to maintain the weight loss. Notice I use the word weight loss, as your body also sacrifices essential muscle and uses up stored carbohydrates in to get enough energy to function. This loss of muscle is disastrous as it further cuts your metabolic rate. It’s very important to remember muscle is your body’s metabolic furnace. Muscles use energy, even while sleeping. Fat pretty much sits there. So with poor weight loss results, reduced motivation, a very strong appetite, more fat storing enzymes and a lower metabolism most people quit their diet.
However here comes the big problem, if you go back to your original eating habits and calorie intake, with less muscle and therefore a lower metabolic rate. You can now eat less and still gain fat – what a recipe for disaster! This results in people gaining all the weight back they managed to loose and often adding more kilos of fat than they carried before they started their original diet. This cycle of weight loss and gain is commonly termed yo yo dieting.
BUILD MUSCLE, BOOST YOUR METABOLIC AND BURN FAT
So, if you’re overweight or just wanting to get in shape for summer via dropping a few kilos of fat, it’s essential for you to speed up your metabolic rate if you want long term results. How do you do that? It’s simple really. All you need to do is increase your muscle mass. There are two factors essential to build muscle, one is by exercising via combination of weight training and the correct aerobic program (see training sections for more details) to give your body the stimulus to add muscle tissue. The other is to eat enough protein to give your body the building blocks to build muscle.
Remember your metabolic rate is directly related to the amount of muscle you have. In other words the more muscles you have, the higher your metabolic rate, and the greater your body’s need for energy.
As we grow older, it’s particularly important to maintain lean muscle mass. After age thirty, your muscle mass starts to decline and that’s one of the major reasons why as we get older we tend to get fatter! So it’s even more important as you get older to make an active effort to maintain or develop muscle tissue.
KVINDER SKAL IKKE VÆRE BANGE
Sometimes women get worried when they hear all this talk about muscles. They’re eager to drop fat and understand the importance of exercise but are scared weight training will turn them into Arnold Schwarzenegger. But there is no need to worry, because firstly fat takes up much more space than muscle. This means if you replace the fat on your hips, or thighs with the same weight in muscle, your thighs will get much smaller. Secondly, Arnold has something women don’t: male hormones. For hormonal reasons, women simply can’t get big bulging muscles no matter how hard they train. The muscular women we see in body building magazines have used extreme measures including the use of steroids in many cases. So ladies don’t worry, weight training and eating adequate protein will only increase your metabolism, tone your muscles in a feminine way and result in a younger looking you.
CONCLUSION
So the take home message is: For any successful fat loss program is you must maintain or increase your metabolism. It’s a principle that’s surprisingly simple but has amazing potential. You can achieve this by combining weight training (it’s a great way to build strength and muscle mass, strengthen the joints, build bone density and prevent osteoporosis) and aerobic exercise and by eating adequate protein to increase your muscle mass. This extra muscle mass will boost your metabolism allowing you to burn more calories every day, even while watching the TV!
