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Author: Terry Sandhu

Lose The Fat and Keep The Muscle

A lot of people that want to lose weight are sometimes confused about what it takes to get slim. The truth is that weight loss is not what you should be aiming for; fat loss should be the goal you are reaching for, because it is the extra fat that you are carrying on your body that is making you look and feel the way that you do.

Many people don't consider the fact that when they lose weight they are losing muscle as well. You must do as much as you can to keep muscle loss at a minimum.

Muscle is tissue that is actually alive, and it needs plenty of calories to survive. So if your body has lots of muscle, you will burn more calories by keeping it there.

Ironically your body prefers not to keep too much muscle on its frame, because it has to use so many calories to stay put and your body would rather not waste so many calories on muscle, when it could use those calories as an emergency store in the form of fat.

Back in the day when there were no supermarkets or fast food outlets the ability to store fat was beneficial so that it could be used for energy when times were hard.

Today however this ability is not such a blessing as we have food readily available to us. Your body has not had enough time to evolve to suit present day conditions. It still prefers to store fat when it can and it doesn't give a damn if you don't look good in the mirror.

Many diets advise you to cut back on your calories in high numbers. On top of this any exercise you do will deplete your calories further. This could appear to be ideal conditions to lose weight as burning more calories than you are consuming equals weight loss right?

Your body will have a different set of rules. As soon as it realises that all the calories it used to receive are no longer there, it will think that there is some sort of problem.

Its answer to this problem is to slow down its abilities to burn calories and to find more calories from elsewhere. These extra calories will be extracted from your muscles first as they are so 'calorie expensive' to keep. This results in muscles shrinking and weakening. Due to your muscles becoming smaller their abilities to burn calories will also decrease. Because your body is trying to hang on to the calories now, it becomes harder to lose the fat, and it will be a real fight for any results to appear. You have to realise that out of the all weight you might lose initially, much of that could consist of muscle. You must have experienced this scenario. You go on a diet, at first things seem to be going well, but after a short time results start to slow down and eventually stop. It seems like the diet is no longer working, so like many others you stop dieting. The bad news is that it's very hard to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, but it's not all grim. You can minimise the amount of muscle you lose by using weight training as part of your exercise program.

On top of this, weight training by its very nature will require that you don't cut back too much on calories, because your muscles will require calories for growth. You just need to eat more healthy food and drop most of the junk food.

There is weight training and there is WEIGHT TRAINING. Keep away from exercises that only work 1 or 2 muscles at a time. Focus on compound exercises; these are exercises that use lots of muscles with one exercise.

Design a program around a handful of exercises such as squatting, bench pressing, dips, dead lifting, chin ups, and bent over rows. These exercises's stress your body tremendously and set off all sorts of beneficial chemical reactions in your body. Your muscles will scream for calories and your body will have to send them to your muscles, leaving less for fat storage. To improve your chances further, increase your protein and reduce carbohydrates a little. Following these strategies you will lose the fat and keep the muscle.

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