Lose The Fat and Keep The Muscle

Most people who want to lose weight are often misled about their goals to achieve a slimmer body. The fact is that weight loss is a mistake; fat loss is what you should be aiming for, simply because it is the excessive fat on your body that makes you look and feel the way that you do. When people lose weight, they lose muscle as well as fat, and muscle loss should kept to a minimum. Your ultimate goal should be to lose the fat and keep the muscle.

Muscle is living and working tissue, and it requires calories to just stay on your body. So the more muscle you have, the more calories will be burned to keep it there. Your body does not like to have too much muscle, because it uses up too many calories and is therefore a calorie expensive commodity. Fat on the other hand is not expensive to store at all, as it is just surplus calories, so you body is quite happy storing it because it's easy to do and it can be kept as an emergency store.

Thousands of years ago this ability had great benefits when food was scarce. However in today's world it is a real problem where food is plentiful. Evolution takes a long time to take place and your body has not had the time to change its way of doing things. Your body will do all it can to ensure your survival and it wont take the slightest bit of notice if you think that you look overweight or if you are not happy with your body.

When you go on a diet you obviously cut back on your food intake. You may start doing cardio exercise which will deplete your calories. On the face of it this seems an ideal way to lose weight. I mean eating less calories and burning more calories is the solution to weight loss isn’t it?

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However you body doesn’t always see it like that. When your body realises that its calorie supply is being downgraded, it thinks that it is under some sort of threat. It needs to compensate for the calories you are not getting, and it does this by finding them from somewhere else. Because the muscle on your body takes more calories to keep them fat, it will start taking calories from your muscles. This in turn makes your muscles smaller and weaker.

Because you have less muscle now, it will burn fewer calories to stay on your body, making calorie shifting harder. You will at some point start losing some fat but it will be pretty hard to shift as your body will slow it's abilities to burn calories, to keep fat on your body as an emergency store.

If you lose 10 or 12 pounds in the first month of dieting, you can be sure that around 50% of that weight loss will be muscle loss. This will make the next 10 or 12 pounds harder to lose, and the next even harder. This is why so many people see their results slow right down or come to a standstill. Now the fact is extremely difficult to lose the fat and keep the muscle.

The good news is that muscle loss can be kept to a minimum by weight training. Not only will weight training help you keep most of the muscle you would lose by dieting, it will also boost your metabolism and burn more calories. If you use a good weight training routine you probably wouldn’t have to cut back on your calories a great deal. All you would have to do is to replace the unhealthy food with healthy food.

When you begin a weight training program forget all the little exercises that focus on 1 or 2 muscles, like cable exercises, leg extensions, triceps kickbacks, concentration curls and so on. You want to do exercises that are going to hit many muscles at the same time. This forces your body to work harder and invoke major chemical reactions in your body, your focus should be on compound exercises, these are exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench press, chin ups, dips, overhead presses, bent over rows and so on. These exercises hit a multiple of muscles at the same time, and in turn helps you keep them and make them stronger.

This will help your body to send more calories to your muscles and less to fat storage. To improve it even further, increase your protein intake and decrease your carb intake. A combination of both these methods will help you lose the fat and keep the muscle.

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