I don’t want to be fat no more, this is what a lot of people say even after trying out different diets and starving themselves for weeks on end. In a previous post titled Weight Reviews I wrote about how we should not take any notice of celebrities and their airbrushed bodies and how we can all be lean if we understand how the body works. So lets have a look and find out how we can lose fat and stay lean.
The body is an amazing complex phenomenon, but we can look at its simplicity without getting bogged down with the science. If we consume 3000 calories a day and only burn off 2500 calories then it stands to reason that we are going to be gaining weight on a daily basis and over time this can add up to a lot of weight. That is a pretty simple concept to understand. Eat more calories than you burn off and you will gain weight.
Now we burn so many calories through our daily movement even if we are not doing any exercise (which we should be doing), these calories that we burn through everyday activities amount to about 30% of all the calories we burn. Most of our calories are burned through just being alive and this is referred to as our basal metabolic rate (BMR), some of us have a higher metabolic rate than others, those with a slow metabolic rate will put on weight more easily than those with a higher metabolic rate.
Both the active calories burned through our daily movement and our BMR can be enhanced. One of the most important keys is to build muscle and that is because muscle will eat calories and speed up our BMR. So by doing some simple weight training we can turn the flab into muscle, this means we will be doing more activity through exercise, thus enhancing our activity burning calories and in turn this will enhance our BMR through our body having more muscle to eat calories.
This is such a simple concept and one that only makes sense, we are not talking bodybuilding here, just toning and building the muscle throughout our body. We will not initially lose weight through working with weights and the reason is that muscle weighs more than fat, but we will see the difference in our mirror. This is why we need to forget about weighing ourselves and concentrate on the muscle.
We can keep an eye on our calorie intake as opposed to our calorie burning if we so desire, but it is not necessary if we are eating a sensible amount of food and doing a good amount of exercise. There is no need to go on a deprivation diet as there is no need to cut out all the things we love, if we do that then we will only crave those things and end up giving up on our efforts to get lean and stay lean. Obviously if you are eating take outs everyday and a huge amount of candy and cakes then you need to evaluate your whole diet. A good balanced healthy diet coupled with a good amount of exercise will allow us to enjoy in moderation the things we love most, whether that be cakes, ice cream or take outs.
So this is the very simple concept of getting and maintaining a healthy lean body. Eat good food and a sensible amount, do not cut out all the things you love to eat, do at least six hours of exercise each week and try and make some of that exercise muscle building exercise. Forget about the scales and your body weight and just watch your body transform before your eyes.
