Weight loss vs. fat loss
I’ve been quite overweight. TRUST me – I would have cut my HAIR do drop a few pounds when I was trying to get it off me!
Losing weight is relatively easy, if unpleasant: eat less, move more. The problem is that if you aren’t careful, you’ll lose too much muscle and not enough fat, which will virtually guarantee that you’ll gain it all back, and it might bring friends when it returns.
We often hear about the benefits of losing weight, but really, these benefits happen when we lose FAT. Muscle is the good guy – muscle increases insulin sensitivity, raises metabolism, improves your lipid profile (cholesterol), and keeps you strong. Muscle is the part that burns calories. But when you diet, your body knows what you are doing – you’re surviving a famine – and it wants you to survive that famine. It will jettison some of the metabolically expensive muscle so your caloric expenditure goes down. Fat “costs” very little for your body to run, and it will keep you alive as the famine (diet) continues.
So how do we achieve fat loss without muscle loss?
This is where it gets tricky.
(snip)
All exercise damages muscle. But it’s when it gets damaged intensely that we see some very interesting changes in terms of body composition.
Intense physical activity performed in short bursts, such as alternating sprinting-and-walking in short intervals, or lifting “heavy-for-you” weights with rests in between “sets” of say 6-12 repetitions, stimulates what is called the “anabolic response” – your body sees that you’ve done this hard, intense, heavy work that has caused a lot of damage. You go home, eat, and your body gets to work fixing this damage – repairing and reinforcing muscle tissue so that your body can deal with you the next time you decide to come in and start wrecking yourself again.
So here’s the big secret: if you train hard and heavy with weights while you drop calories, it’s virtually impossible to gain any muscle, but you might be able to convince your body that the muscle that you have is worth keeping. It’s like running a company during a recession – suppose you’re the CEO, and you draw a heavy paycheck – if you want to keep your job, you had better prove your worth to the company.
In a (self-imposed) famine (reduced calories), your body, which HAS to “cut the fat” somewhere, well, cuts the fat.
This is how you convince your body to drop fat instead of muscle.
It’s important to keep increasing the weights used as you train and get stronger – the more muscle you wreck, the harder your body has to work to repair the damage.
The more damage you have to repair, the more energy is required. That’s right. More food.
This is the part that got MY attention, too.
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