I’ve coached and aided many people transform their bodies over the years and without fail, the conversation always starts along the lines of ‘Doc I want to lose weight’!
But do you really?
What is the weight you want to achieve? Where did that number come from? Did you just pick the number out of the air? Did you calculate your BMI and use medical charts and calculators?
No matter what your answer is, you’re still wrong! Why? Because you want to lose fat, not weight!
Now this is a very important concept for anyone looking to improve their body composition and be healthier, especially if you’ve been deemed to be medically over weight and at risk of weight-related health issues (diabetes, heart disease, bone and joint problems as well as certain cancers).
If you lose weight quickly and crash diet, spend hours doing only cardio, you may indeed lose weight but research suggests that up to 25% of the weight lost can be from losing muscle and not fat!
Now this is bad for a number of reasons.
If you lose weight too quickly, your body perceives this as a possible threat to your survival, thinking that you’re perhaps starving and to compensate for this, your body drops its metabolic rate and increases hunger hormones in a bid to get you to eat more and restore the lost lean muscle tissue.
Invariably, this leads to overeating and fat overshooting, where you end up putting on more weight, specifically fat, than you had before you even started dieting!
The other downside of losing weight inappropriately, as you finally get towards the body weight you’ve been aiming for, more often than not, people are still not happy with how they look.
Remember, lose weight too quickly and incorrectly, you’ll lose significant muscle mass and in the end you won’t reveal a toned, athletic, muscular physique, but a lighter but still flabby body! What we lovingly call being skinny fat! Congratulations!
So what’s the solution?
You have to be smart with your nutrition and training, aiming to lose fat while maintaining and even gaining some muscle!
While men seem to be more aware of this, many women balk at the idea of putting on muscle, fearful of getting bulky, unaware that putting on any muscle is tremendously difficult for women given their innate lack of the hormone testosterone.
The following women are shining examples of what can be achieved when you don’t just follow the numbers on the weighing scale and are not afraid to pick up a pair of dumbbells!
You might be wondering what sorcery is this, how are they able to look so different but weigh the same?
No, it’s not because they all have broken weighing scales!
It’s because these ladies put on muscle while losing fat!
Yes you heard right, they put on muscle and they don’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, do they?!
Muscle is much heavier than fat, so you can lose a lot of fat and put on just a little muscle and look remarkably different and avoid being skinny fat, while the weighing scale shows no actual net loss of weight!
Looking at the weighing scale alone will only give you part of the picture, looking at actual pictures of yourself on your fat loss journey, will give you the rest!
So like I said before folks, you don’t really want to lose weight, you want to lose fat and you want to feel great while you’re doing it! And yes, as these ladies show, this is definitely doable!
So what’s the best way to achieve success?
Stay tuned and all will be revealed very soon folks!
Kindest regards,
Dr. Bobby Stryker
