March 25th, 2008 Milan
When you start with exercise program and you resistance train, gaining weight is possible, you gain muscle and muscle weighs more than fat.
For beginners, you will notice some weight gain at the beginning of a work out cycle because of the dramatic increase of lean muscle mass, but these will later decrease as your body settles into it’s new frame and you stay active and follow your exercise program.
The important thing is the improvement of your body composition and health.
For example, when I stop working out, I will lose about 10 pounds in a month not doing anything. But I will lose muscle mass, which is not good. I will probably gain that weight back if I don’t exercise for a long period of time, but it will be fat.
The point is, you want to gain healthy muscle mass, which makes your body a very efficient calorie burning machine. And when you gain that active muscle mass weight in the beginning of your workout cycle, that will increase your metabolism and those muscle engines will burn that fat your body stores.
How far you can go with this is up to you. Combination of both consistent and intensive – resistance training and cardiovascular exercise and proper nutrition will dramatically increase your body’s potential to burn the energy that is being stored.
Read also: Why fad diets don’t work
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March 23rd, 2008 Milan
People are usually looking to achieve fat reduction, not a muscle reduction.
You could be 120 pounds and look completely out of shape while someone who is 150 pounds and has significantly lower body fat will have a much leaner physique and a healthier body composition.
Optimal combination of three key factors each dependent on the other to lose fat and gain lean muscle mass will contribute to your search for perfect body:
1. Nutrition – regulate the energy that goes to your body
2. Cardiovascular Exercise - increase the amount of energy burned
3. Resistance Training - build active muscle mass and develop muscular endurance
Imagine you are on a healthy balanced diet of wholesome foods and the energy you consume is 2000 calories a day. Since you do not exercise, I will assume that your body’s metabolic rate , the rate at which your body expends the energy at rest or sleep, is 1500 calories. That means that you accumulate 500 calories every day minus your daily activity.
Now, let’s add the resistance training. When you build some muscle mass, it will increase your body’s potential energy use to, let say 1700 calories (1 pound of muscle needs about 50 calories/day just to maintain it) + you burn another 200 calories while you work out. Already you decreased the energy you accumulate from 500 calories per day to 100 calories.
Finally, lets add the cardiovascular exercise assuming an expenditure of 300 calories on treadmill or any other cardio exercise. You are now loosing 200 calories every day.
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March 20th, 2008 Milan
There is very little people who hasn’t tried losing weight fast, too fast through fad diets, fasting, overly restricting their caloric intake, and other such attempts at starving themselves into thinness.
There are two main problems with these approaches to losing weight.
First, they seriously jeopardize our health.
Second, such dieting are fundamentally counterproductive.
Ultimately, they don’t work:
- we loose fat, yes, but also a large measure of muscle
- we unintentionally lower our metabolism
- we set the stage for gaining fat increasingly faster in the future when we come off the diet, and thereby get caught up in perpetual dieting
- we receive inadequate nutrients in imbalanced combination
- we drain the entire body from energy
Fasting and very low calorie diets (diets below 500 calories) cause a loss of nitrogen and potassium in the body, a loss which is believed to trigger a mechanism in the body that causes us to hold on to our fat stores and to turn to muscle protein for energy instead.
Don’t use fad diets to loose weight!
No system on severe food deprivation is wise way to loose weight. Even on the total fast, because you’re loosing muscle and altering your metabolism, you’ll actually be loosing less weight in the end than if you ate 100o – 1500 calories of protein and good quality carbohydrate rich foods every day combined with exercise.
For example, weight lost on high fat, high protein diets like Atkins Diet is primarily water loss, and even that water is lost largely during the first few weeks. This weight is quickly gained back.
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