Which is more important – losing weight or losing FAT?
In case you didn’t know it, losing weight is not the same as losing fat. The problem with so many diets today, is the focus on the amount of weight lost, instead of losing unwanted and unhealthy fat.
Don’t let the scale be your source of success or failure. Your body weight is the total amount of muscle, fat, bones, water, etc. The primary goal of any diet or weight loss program is To Lose the FAT. So, a better measurement might be how well your clothes fits after a few weeks and how you look in the mirror.
Some of the quick loss weight loss programs seem successful only because in the first few weeks, you may lose a lot of weight, but most of that loss could be water weight and loss of MUSCLE. The last thing you want to do, whether you are on a diet or not is to Burn Lean Muscle. Lean muscle helps keep your metabolism more active, so the more muscle you have or keep, the more metabolically active your metabolism is. Use our online health quizzes to Test Your Metabolism
FAT or adipose tissue is not very metabolically active and only contributes to additional inflammation and estrogen within your body, and that applies to both men and women. Therefore, the name of the game is to Burn FAT – Not Lean Muscle or Carbohydrates!
Losing Weight Doesn’t Mean You Added Tone and Shape
Don’t assume losing weight is automatically going to give you more muscle to show off. You will simply have less body fat covering whatever muscle you do have. Therefore, if you want to add shape and tone to your body, you need to exercise – but you don’t necessarily have to, to lose FAT. In my opinion, the goal of any weight loss program or diet is to get your metabolism functioning the way it was designed, so you can burning fats 23/7.
I always say 23/7, because it is the other 23 hours of the day when you are Not exercising, that your metabolism should be functioning the way it was designed, and that is to burn fats for energy, more readily than carbohydrates and proteins. And the simple fact that most workouts, if you are breaking out in a sweat, are coming from the breakdown of carbohydrates and lean muscle (proteins), not fats.
One major problem I commonly see, is to assume that when you exercise – you are Burning FATS. That is so far from the truth and why burning more calories doesn’t mean you are burning FATS. All those extra calories you are burning from your workout, could be coming from the breakdown of carbohydrates and lean muscle (proteins), which you don’t want to burn. Test Your Metabolism to see if it is functioning properly.
Eat Right & Train Smart – for Your Current Level of Health and Fitness….otherwise you could be hitting that dreaded plateau or sticking point and curtail all your efforts.