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Stop Losing Weight If You Want To Get Lean!
By admin | August 5, 2008
Losing weight should not be your goal if you want to look good and be healthy. No, I’m not crazy. I understand that weight loss is what most people focus on for two reasons.
One, that’s what you hear about all the time in the media when the topic is discussed, whether it’s via “news” stories or weight loss commercials.
And second, weight loss is an easy way to measure your “progress.” But remember, weight is made up of both fat, which you want to lose, and muscle, which you want to keep.
Unfortunately, most fitness and nutrition plans don’t account for this fact. So what should you do?
Too many people go on weight loss programs by severely restricting the number of calories they consume, and combine it with lots of aerobic work, such as riding the stationary bike.
This is a recipe for disaster and the cause of almost all the weight rebound stories you hear about. Why is that? Because on a fitness plan like the one above, you’ll end up losing a lot of muscle.
By restricting calories too much and losing muscle, you end up slowing down your metabolism, which not only causes a weight loss plateau, but is a major factor in gaining back the weight you lost in the first place (and sometimes more).
And it’s really worse than that because what you’ve gained back is all fat so even if you end up weighing the same as you did before you started your diet, you’re really carrying more fat and less muscle than before!
This type of program will take you from a fat person to being a skinny fat person and if you’ve ever seen a skinny fat person, you know it’s not an attractive look.
So what should you do instead of the “traditional” weight loss program?
First, stop focusing on the scale. Pay attention to how you look in the mirror and how your clothes fit.
In addition, you might want to buy a pair of fat calipers, which allow you to measure your body fat by measuring spots on your body, such as how much you can pinch at your waist. It only takes a couple of minutes to do.
After that, you need a proper weight loss, nutrition, cardio and weight training program. Yes, weight training. This is the true key to getting the body you want and keeping the fat off once you lose it.
Don’t restrict calories. Bring them down slowly. You want to eat 300-500 calories less per day than you need to maintain your body weight. Then you want to burn 300-500 calories a day from exercise. This will allow you to effectively lose weight without starving yourself.
When you combine this type of nutrition plan with weight training, you’ll make sure that most, if not all, of the weight you lose will be fat. You’ll look better, feel better and most importantly, it will be much easier to keep the weight off permanently.
I’ll talk more about using proper weight training for an effective weight loss program in future posts.
In the meantime, go look in the upper right corner of the site and grab your free copy of my special report, Fat Loss Secrets Revealed.
Topics: Fat Loss |