Burn Fat And Not Your Muscles

There's something really important about losing weight that the majority of dieters simply don't understand. Many of them will start a new calorie reduced diet, then a few days later weigh themselves and are happy that the scales are showing that they are a few pounds lighter.

The problem with this scenario is that the person on the scales doesn't realize that most of the weight that they have lost is not just body fat but rather bodily fluids and even a small amount of muscle tissue.

During any period of greatly reduced calorie or food intake, your body has to compensate for this lack of energy that it has become adapted to over many months or years. Your body will begin to break down both fats and muscle to synthesize glucose which is then used for energy. This metabolic process is known as gluconeogenesis.

To understand this, you have to realize that the human body is not just "weight". It contains both fatty tissues and vital tissues including muscles, bones, organs and others. So when you want to lose weight, you want to make sure that you don't just lose "any" weight, it's to lose excess body fat.

Otherwise, let's say you currently look a little like a "pear", and you end up losing "weight", you will end up just looking like a smaller pear. However, on the other hand, if you preserve vital tissues and lose only fat, you will end up looking like a "banana" (I hope this made sense).

A scientific study found that starvation type diets resulted in roughly 60% of the total weight loss to be water and 8% protein (muscle) which means only roughly 32% of all weight lost on these types of diets was actually fat. What this means is that you can't just go in and burn only body fat quickly in your first week of dieting.

What actually happens is that your body will burn up all of it's internal reserves of sugars, which also causes water to be excreted which is responsible for the large amounts of weight loss in the first few weeks of dieting.

The water that is lost when dieting is also quickly replaced and can leave the dieter feeling disappointed from the falling and subsequent rising of their weight.

To counteract the body burning up it's own muscle tissue, you need to add protein to your diet as well as exercise regularly. One of the best forms of exercise to preserve your bodies muscle mass is weight training, that forces your body to build your muscles rather than eat away at them.

Having more muscle on your body will cause you to lose weight faster, because first of all it takes a lot of energy to build muscle, but muscles also need a lot of calories for maintenance, so the more you have the more calories you will burn overall.

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