Rationally you know this weight didn’t come on over night. It took months, perhaps years for you to put the fat on. And yet when you reach your limit and decide you want to do something about it, you want it off NOW. No, make that yesterday.
Now here’s the problem: the faster you lose the weight, the more likely it is that you’ll be just losing “weight” and not fat. That means you’re losing water, muscle, and other tissue. Sure, some of the weight you lose is fat – but not all of it. And that means that even though the scale says you’re losing, you actually don’t look better. You may even slightly shrink in size, but you’ll become even more “lumpy” looking because the weight you’re losing is muscle and not fat.
When this happens, you become “skinny fat.” Sure, you’re smaller. But you wouldn’t be caught dead in a tank top much less a bathing suit. When you wave, your arms get left jiggling. You have enough fat hanging on you that your belly looks like a bed sheet flapping in the wind.
In other words, it’s not pretty.
Besides being unattractive, losing all your muscle is also contradictory to your weight loss goals. You see, it takes far more calories per day just to maintain a pound of muscle versus a pound of fat. Indeed, you can consider muscle “active” tissue in that it needs calories to sustain itself.
That means that the more muscle you have, the more calories you’re burning all day long. And of course the flip side of that is that the less muscle you have, the fewer calories you’re burning …and hence the less you can eat before you start gaining weight.
One problem with crash diets and fad diets is that people lose weight so quickly that they’re losing muscle. Suddenly their metabolism drops like a ton of bricks because they no longer have that muscle to sustain. Losing muscle means your metabolism goes from a roaring furnace to a flickering candle.
Indeed, many experts suggest that one reason that people’s metabolism tends to drop as they get older is because they are losing their muscle. Suddenly they can’t eat like they did when they were younger, because now they gain weight when they do so.
By now you’re probably getting a pretty good idea of why you should seek to lose fat while still maintaining your calorie-burning, shapely muscle!
So what’s the solution if you want the best of both worlds? That is, what do you do when you absolutely need to lose weight fast …and yet your goal is to lose the ugly fat and not your sleek muscle? On this blog you’ll discover some great tips on how to keep your muscle and transform your body into a new shapelier, sexier you – quickly and easily.
