Lean Not Light or Weights not Weight

In my last post, Give Me Some Skin, I said I'd go into some more detail about what you can do to reduce your body fat percentage.

The good news is that you already know all of the answers...the bad new is that, really, you already know all of the answers. If you have been reading this blog from the beginning, you have the foundation for loosing body fat. Yes, this is a weight loss blog, but my approach to weight loss isn't to make the scales give you a lower reading. If it were, I wouldn't have allowed myself to go about 10 days with no weight loss what-so-ever. I could have easily lost weight during that time by encouraging the loss of muscle. Instead, I spent the middle of those 10 days, watching my weight increase by 4 pounds – and I continued to lift weights KNOWING that it might increase my weight for the short term. Why?

Because I trusted my system, a system that is actually more interested in a healthy body than a low weight body. A health body is one that has an appropriate body fat percentage. The interesting thing is that when you have the right body fat percentage – you tend to be an appropriate weight for your ages, sex and height.

Much like in my second article, Kick It Up A Notch (or 2 or 3), where I said the most important thing about losing weight isn't calories, or protein, or exercise but rather metabolism - the goal for losing weight isn't to get the scale to read the number for which you are looking; it's to get your body fat to an appropriate level – everything else you want (including no loose skin) comes with it.

So, my personal system isn't so much a “weight loss” system as it is a “fat loss” system. That's why, in post after post, I talk about what good fat burners muscles are. Changing your diet alone will not help you get rid of loose skin (fat loss); it may help you lose weight, but as we know now – the two are not the same.

For continued fat loss you have to build muscle. That also means that eating too low a calorie diet, while possibly helping you lose weight, is not going to help you lose loose skin (you have no IDEA how hard I worked to use those two words next to each other – English major in me I'm afraid...). When you deprive your body of the appropriate amount of calories it goes into starvation mode, saving up the long term energy sources (fat) and burning of the quick sources (muscle). So, the first thing is to eat enough.

The next thing to do is don't eat too much – because you want to build muscle, not fat.

Then, begin understanding your metabolism – that's your best tool for burning fat (as long as you are not eating too little). One of the keys of ramping up your metabolism is building muscle. And the best way to build muscle is exercise.

So, like with everything else in weight loss, there is no magic pill (and don't believe the marketers that try to tell you otherwise). It takes work and dedication. It takes exercise and just the right amount of calories …. and enough patience to trust that over time the system will work.

And that is a great lead into my latest news. Since my last check in where I had lost 3 lbs after going 10 days with no weight loss, I have lost another 4 lbs! W00t! That's 7 lbs so far this week!

Keep at it and let me hear from you!