I bet you’ve already started to see the ramp up for the new year from every corner of the health and fitness industry. They’re telling you to drink this or eat that to lose weight. Telling you that there’s a secret to why you haven’t been able to lose weight and they have the answer. Telling you that if you lost weight, you’d be happier.
Here’s what I want to share with you – there isn’t anything special about being healthy or about losing weight. It’s probably the simplest concept ever. Eat moderately and be active. What moderate and active mean to you depends on your overall personal goals.
So many of these programs, including your doctor’s office, rely on BMI (Body Mass Index) to tell you whether or not you’re healthy. Your BMI is based off of your height and weight. That’s it. It doesn’t take into consideration what that weight, your mass, consists of.
What is your body composition? Mostly fat? Mostly muscle? BMI does not care.
I can tell you right now that I do great at carnivals where you win a prize if the guy can’t guess your weight within 5lbs. My BMI for as long as I can remember has always indicated that I was slightly overweight but over the last 10 years, I’ve gone from being 47% fat to 32% fat with just about a 7lb difference in weight. How that happens is by creating a healthier body composition where there is more muscle than fat.
Many people shortcut this information and say muscle weights more than fat when the fact of it is that 1lb of fat and 1lb of muscle weight the same (both a pound remember?) but the fat will take up more space/volume than fat will. You also cannot turn fat into muscle because they are different types of tissue but you can reduce the amount of fat in those cells and increase the amount of muscle mass. To do this, you must eat protein because that’s what muscle needs to grow. You can’t eat nothing but protein either because your body needs the other macros – fat and carbohydrates.
Your body will not process any of the macros on their own without the other two present.
You also cannot process more than 40g of protein per hour.
If you are at a caloric deficit without adequate protein intake and you’re expecting to build muscle – it’s not going to happen.
If you are losing weight, you are losing both muscle and fat. Your body is engineered to make this decision for you. Fuel is fuel to your body.
Did you know the more muscle mass you have, the better your body composition and the more calories your body burns at rest? That means, instead of trying to outrun your fork with working out for 2 hours a day at the gym, 7 days a week, you can actually have more time to do other things that interest you?
