Avoid Losing Muscle When Losing Weight

When it comes to weight loss, a lot of people are not aware of the differences between the type of weight they are losing. Losing fat is good, losing muscle is not so good.

Some people are not aware of how much muscle they may have lost in the weight that they have lost. You must do as much as you can to keep muscle loss at a minimum.

Muscle needs lots of calories to function. 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 will still want to keep the fat, regardless of your thoughts on the idea.

The majority of weight loss methods advocate large drops in calories. 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 has it's own ideas. Once it understands that here has been a reduction in the calories it is used to, it will go on the defensive.

Its answer to this problem is to slow down its abilities to burn calories and to find more calories from elsewhere. Your muscles will be the first place your body looks to for these extra calories. The outcome is muscles lacking in size and energy. Because your muscles have shrunk they will burn fewer calories. As your body is doing all it can to keep the calories, it will be tougher to lose any weight. 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 looks as if the diet has reached the end of the road, so you give up trying. The problem is that it's difficult to get rid of fat while trying to increase muscle, however it's not all bad news. 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. Get more healthy food into your diet and get rid of the garbage.

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 sorts of exercises make use of a lot more muscles.

Design a program around a handful of exercises such as squatting, bench pressing, dips, dead lifting, chin ups, and bent over rows. Exercises like these force your body to send energy to your muscles, and calories are energy. Your muscles will scream for calories and your body will have to send them to your muscles, leaving less for fat storage. To get even better results, make a reduction to your carb intake and increase your protein intake. Following these strategies you will lose the fat and keep the muscle.

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