Why weight loss requires strength training, even for women and seniors, Part 1

Why weight loss requires strength training, even for women and seniors

Part 1

 

Copyright 2006 Truth Publishing

Did you know that strength training is crucial for
successfully losing weight and keeping it off? I’m talking
about weight-bearing exercise. It doesn’t have to be a
huge, hulking workout where you’re trying to look like
Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, it just has to be some
basic strength training.

Why is strength training important for losing weight?
Strength training is important because many people try to
starve themselves into weight loss. They think it’s all
about controlling calories. Unfortunately, a lot of
dieticians and nutritionists don’t really understand
strength training, and they also think that it’s just about
calories: Calories in, and calories out. You consume extra
calories, you’ll gain body fat. If you have a calorie
deficit, you’re going to lose weight.

While this may be true, this approach is only part of the
picture. Sure, you need a calorie deficit to lose weight,
but how does your body actually use calories?

It’s your lean body mass - that muscle mass underneath your
body fat - that burns calories 24/7, allowing you to
actually eat more calories without gaining weight.

Let’s say you happen to be quite obese and you have a high
percentage of body fat. I used to be in that situation; I
know what it feels like. Underneath that body fat you
actually have a very strong skeleton and strong muscles.
Your body has built up those muscles in order to carry all
of that extra body fat when you move your body. Just the
very act of standing up, walking across a parking lot,
going up a flight of stairs or lifting your arms requires
more effort when you’re overweight, especially if you’re
obese. So the heavier you are, the stronger your muscles
have to be just to allow you to do basic, everyday things.

Now this can actually work to your advantage - if you
manage to keep all of that muscle mass and bone density in
place while you are losing body fat, then you can maintain
the high metabolism that’s associated with that lean body
mass even while you are dropping body fat. But if you
starve yourself, you’re going to lose all the muscle
resources you already have. It’s a mistake a lot of people
make. They try to lose body fat by starving themselves, and
as the body fat vanishes from their body, their muscle mass
also disappears. Why would the body get rid of muscle mass?
Because, frankly, it doesn’t need it.

Your body adapts to the need. You see, the body is an
adaptive system. It will adapt to whatever loads you place
on it. So if you are a heavier person and you’re carrying
around body fat, then your body will adapt by creating
stronger muscles to lift your body. It’s almost like doing
a leg press every time you

Why weight loss requires strength training, even for women and seniors, Part 1

Posted by Herb under General Fitness , Womens Health and Fitness , Senior Health
 

Copyright 2006 Truth Publishing

Did you know that strength training is crucial for
successfully losing weight and keeping it off? I’m talking
about weight-bearing exercise. It doesn’t have to be a
huge, hulking workout where you’re trying to look like
Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, it just has to be some
basic strength training.

Why is strength training important for losing weight?
Strength training is important because many people try to
starve themselves into weight loss. They think it’s all
about controlling calories. Unfortunately, a lot of
dieticians and nutritionists don’t really understand
strength training, and they also think that it’s just about
calories: Calories in, and calories out. You consume extra
calories, you’ll gain body fat. If you have a calorie
deficit, you’re going to lose weight.

While this may be true, this approach is only part of the
picture. Sure, you need a calorie deficit to lose weight,
but how does your body actually use calories?

It’s your lean body mass - that muscle mass underneath your
body fat - that burns calories 24/7, allowing you to
actually eat more calories without gaining weight.

Let’s say you happen to be quite obese and you have a high
percentage of body fat. I used to be in that situation; I
know what it feels like. Underneath that body fat you
actually have a very strong skeleton and strong muscles.
Your body has built up those muscles in order to carry all
of that extra body fat when you move your body. Just the
very act of standing up, walking across a parking lot,
going up a flight of stairs or lifting your arms requires
more effort when you’re overweight, especially if you’re
obese. So the heavier you are, the stronger your muscles
have to be just to allow you to do basic, everyday things.

Now this can actually work to your advantage - if you
manage to keep all of that muscle mass and bone density in
place while you are losing body fat, then you can maintain
the high metabolism that’s associated with that lean body
mass even while you are dropping body fat. But if you
starve yourself, you’re going to lose all the muscle
resources you already have. It’s a mistake a lot of people
make. They try to lose body fat by starving themselves, and
as the body fat vanishes from their body, their muscle mass
also disappears. Why would the body get rid of muscle mass?
Because, frankly, it doesn’t need it.

Your body adapts to the need. You see, the body is an
adaptive system. It will adapt to whatever loads you place
on it. So if you are a heavier person and you’re carrying
around body fat, then your body will adapt by creating
stronger muscles to lift your body. It’s almost like doing
a leg press every time you get up out of the chair. If you
weigh 300 lbs., you’re doing a 300 lb. leg press, you see?
Now if you were to drop 150 lbs. of body fat, and end up at
150 lbs., your body wouldn’t need the same amount of leg
muscle to lift you. It would eliminate those leg muscles
through catabolic action.

While it is eliminating this muscle mass, your metabolism
begins to slow. Remember, it’s the lean body mass that’s
burning calories day in and day out, even when you’re doing
nothing. If you reduce that muscle mass by allowing it to
go away (by not challenging your muscles), then your
metabolism is going to slow. A lot of people end up at a
place where they’ve lost the body fat and they’re lighter,
but it’s suddenly so much easier to put on body fat. They
don’t have the muscle mass they once did, they’re not
automatically burning calories, and if they overeat just a
little bit, they’ll start packing on the body fat again.

Strength train while losing weight. The solution to all of
this - the strategy I want to focus on here - is to engage
in strength training while you are losing body fat. If you
do this, then you will be able to maintain the muscle mass
that you already have underneath your body fat while you
are in the process of losing the fat. This will leave you
with a greater proportion of lean body mass to body fat,
meaning that you will be slimmer, yet you’ll have the
muscles that you had when you were overweight.

If you get rid of enough body fat in this way, then those
muscles may begin to show - if you’re a man. If you’re a
woman, don’t worry. You’re never going to bulk up. A lot of
women are mistakenly afraid of strength training. They
think that if they pump a few weights they’re going to turn
into Lou Ferrigno overnight. They think they’re going to
have this competition muscle-bound body from lifting a
couple of weights. Believe me, that is not the case at all.
Most bodybuilding women have trained for years, even
decades, just to produce that kind of muscle mass. Women
are not built to puts on lots of muscle mass, so don’t be
afraid that you’ll bulk up. Women who are afraid of
exercising because they think it’s going to make them look
bigger have it all wrong.

Women need strength training, too. Let’s take a moment to
cover that myth here. Let’s say you’re a woman and you have
more body fat than you want. You’re trying to decide,
“Should I engage in strength training as part of my weight
loss program?” Some women say, “No, because I’ll bulk up
and it’ll make me look fatter.” That’s a complete myth;
it’s totally false.

When you have a high percentage of body fat, that body fat
is stored not only in the tissues that are obvious - such
as your hips and your midsection, your arms and legs and so
on - it’s also stored intramuscularly, which means it’s
stored within the muscles of your body. It’s sort of like
the marbling of beef from a cow. If you slice a muscle from
a cow, there’s some fat inside the muscle. that is the same
kind of fat that’s in our muscles when we have a high
percentage of body fat.

That fat takes up a lot of space in the muscle, so it
actually makes the muscle look bigger, because there’s fat
inside. When you start losing body fat, even if you’re
engaged in strength training, that intramuscular fat will
begin to vanish. So even if your muscle mass begins to grow
- which, again, is very difficult for women to accomplish -
your overall muscle size is probably going to be smaller
when you’re at a lower percentage of body fat. The net
change in your muscle size is going to be almost nothing,
unless you really start to do strength training on a
regular basis for a period of a year or two, and then you
might actually begin to put on a little bit more muscle.

Don’t lose the muscle you’ve already built. So with that
crazy myth covered, let’s get back to the main point, which
is that engaging in strength training will conserve the
muscle mass you have now. Now here’s why this is so
important: It’s very easy for your body to shed useless
muscle. So if you’re not using a muscle, your body will get
rid of it over a few months. It’s gone. But to gain that
muscle back - now that takes some effort! That could take
months or years of strength training.

It is much harder for your body to engage in anabolic
reactions (to build muscle mass) than it is for your body
to catabolize and get rid of muscles. So, if you decide
you’re going to starve yourself while you lose weight and
get down to the minimum weight possible, and afterwards you
engage in strength training, then you’re going to find that
it’s a much more difficult process to gain lean body mass
than it was to slim away what you had to begin with.
Building lean body mass is a huge challenge.

It’s also important to note that when people talk about
weight loss, they throw that term around without really
understanding what it means. Everybody says “I want to lose
weight,” but they don’t really mean that. They mean they
want to lose body fat; they don’t want to just lose weight.
A limb amputation will cause you to lose weight, but that’s
not what people have in mind! People want to lose body fat.
So be careful what you wish for - and don’t use that
bathroom scale as a measure of your progress. There are a
number of reasons why.

One is if you just starve yourself and you start losing
lean body mass, then that counts as weight loss. But you’ve
done yourself no good whatsoever, because now you’ve
actually lowered your metabolism. The scale says, “Hey! You
lost another three pounds!” But it could be 2 lbs. of fat
and 1 lb. of muscle, and that’s not a good situation to be
in. You want to lose maybe 2.9 lbs. of fat and 0.1 lbs. of
muscle, or maybe 3 lbs. of fat and no muscle. But to do
that, you’ve got to challenge your muscular system through
some weight bearing exercise.

Don’t forget the glycogen fuel stored in your body. The
other thing to keep in mind when you’re using the bathroom
scale is that when you first start limiting your calories,
your body is going to start burning through its glycogen
stores. Glycogen is basically a fuel stored in your body.
It stores sugars together with water and locks them up in
the tissues and organs of your body like an energy battery,
ready for you to use at a future time.

There’s water locked in with those calories. That water
weighs a lot. So when you start restricting your calories,
the first thing your body burns is this extra storage of
energy, this extra glycogen. And the glycogen causes you,
as it’s burned, to shed water. You might look at the scale
and think, gee, I lost 5 lbs., but you really lost no body
fat whatsoever. It was just water, because your body
released glycogen. What usually happens to people when
their glycogen store has reached zero is they get really
hungry, they think they’re in a starvation panic, and then
they overeat. Their glycogen stores fill right back up,
they gain the 5 lbs. back, and usually they over ate to
such an extent that they store another half a pound of body
fat or so. Now they’re half a pound heavier than when they
began and they lost no body fat whatsoever. It was just a
game of glycogen and water storage they saw reflected on
the bathroom scale.

Bathroom scales are useless. So ignore the bathroom scale.
It is not useful for telling you how successful you are in
losing body fat. I don’t use one at all. The only measure
you should use is a “fat scale” or a caliper. A caliper is
the best way to measure body fat. Body fat calipers measure
the thickness of body fat in key locations around your
body. For men, one location is on the upper pectoral area,
another is the midsection and the third is on the top of
the quadriceps of the leg. For women, it’s the back of the
arm, the midsection and along the hip.

However, you’ve got to learn how to use a caliper correctly
if you want it to be an accurate indicator of fat loss
success. I just mention it as a tool for people who are
really serious about losing fat. People who use bathroom
scales to figure out how much weight they’ve lost are just
playing a silly game of deception - the bathroom scale is
useless. I mean, you could lose bone mass and you’d still
look like you were having lots of progress on the bathroom
scale.

How do you lose bone mass? Easy: you stop engaging in
exercise, stop walking, and stop running. If you do all
that (which I’m not recommending, by the way), then you
would start to lose bone mineral density, and that would be
reflected as weight loss. When you say you want to lose
weight, be careful what you ask for. Your body has a number
of ways to lose weight that have nothing whatsoever to do
with losing body fat or enhancing your overall state of
health.

—————————————————-
Mike Adams, “The Health Ranger,” is chief contributor and
editor of the NewsTarget Network, a leading independent
news source for natural health, nutrition, medicine and
other wellness topics. NewsTarget and Webseed.com are
leading information resources for consumers seeking
independent information on natural health and nutrition.
More than 12,000 searchable articles are available at
http://www.newstarget.com

Herb Daly Jr

While it is eliminating this muscle mass, your metabolism
begins to slow. Remember, it’s the lean body mass that’s
burning calories day in and day out, even when you’re doing
nothing. If you reduce that muscle mass by allowing it to
go away (by not challenging your muscles), then your
metabolism is going to slow. A lot of people end up at a
place where they’ve lost the body fat and they’re lighter,
but it’s suddenly so much easier to put on body fat. They
don’t have the muscle mass they once did, they’re not
automatically burning calories, and if they overeat just a
little bit, they’ll start packing on the body fat again.

Strength train while losing weight. The solution to all of
this - the strategy I want to focus on here - is to engage
in strength training while you are losing body fat. If you
do this, then you will be able to maintain the muscle mass
that you already have underneath your body fat while you
are in the process of losing the fat. This will leave you
with a greater proportion of lean body mass to body fat,
meaning that you will be slimmer, yet you’ll have the
muscles that you had when you were overweight.

If you get rid of enough body fat in this way, then those
muscles may begin to show - if you’re a man. If you’re a
woman, don’t worry. You’re never going to bulk up. A lot of
women are mistakenly afraid of strength training. They
think that if they pump a few weights they’re going to turn
into Lou Ferrigno overnight. They think they’re going to
have this competition muscle-bound body from lifting a
couple of weights. Believe me, that is not the case at all.
Most bodybuilding women have trained for years, even
decades, just to produce that kind of muscle mass. Women
are not built to puts on lots of muscle mass, so don’t be
afraid that you’ll bulk up. Women who are afraid of
exercising because they think it’s going to make them look
bigger have it all wrong.

Women need strength training, too. Let’s take a moment to
cover that myth here. Let’s say you’re a woman and you have
more body fat than you want. You’re trying to decide,
“Should I engage in strength training as part of my weight
loss program?” Some women say, “No, because I’ll bulk up
and it’ll make me look fatter.” That’s a complete myth;
it’s totally false.

When you have a high percentage of body fat, that body fat
is stored not only in the tissues that are obvious - such
as your hips and your midsection, your arms and legs and so
on - it’s also stored intramuscularly, which means it’s
stored within the muscles of your body. It’s sort of like
the marbling of beef from a cow. If you slice a muscle from
a cow, there’s some fat inside the muscle. that is the same
kind of fat that’s in our muscles when we have a high
percentage of body fat.

That fat takes up a lot of space in the muscle, so it
actually makes the muscle look bigger, because there’s fat
inside. When you start losing body fat, even if you’re
engaged in strength training, that intramuscular fat will
begin to vanish. So even if your muscle mass begins to grow
- which, again, is very difficult for women to accomplish -
your overall muscle size is probably going to be smaller
when you’re at a lower percentage of body fat. The net
change in your muscle size is going to be almost nothing,
unless you really start to do strength training on a
regular basis for a period of a year or two, and then you
might actually begin to put on a little bit more muscle.

Don’t lose the muscle you’ve already built. So with that
crazy myth covered, let’s get back to the main point, which
is that engaging in strength training will conserve the
muscle mass you have now. Now here’s why this is so
important: It’s very easy for your body to shed useless
muscle. So if you’re not using a muscle, your body will get
rid of it over a few months. It’s gone. But to gain that
muscle back - now that takes some effort! That could take
months or years of strength training.

It is much harder for your body to engage in anabolic
reactions (to build muscle mass) than it is for your body
to catabolize and get rid of muscles. So, if you decide
you’re going to starve yourself while you lose weight and
get down to the minimum weight possible, and afterwards you
engage in strength training, then you’re going to find that
it’s a much more difficult process to gain lean body mass
than it was to slim away what you had to begin with.
Building lean body mass is a huge challenge.

It’s also important to note that when people talk about
weight loss, they throw that term around without really
understanding what it means. Everybody says “I want to lose
weight,” but they don’t really mean that. They mean they
want to lose body fat; they don’t want to just lose weight.
A limb amputation will cause you to lose weight, but that’s
not what people have in mind! People want to lose body fat.
So be careful what you wish for - and don’t use that
bathroom scale as a measure of your progress. There are a
number of reasons why.

One is if you just starve yourself and you start losing
lean body mass, then that counts as weight loss. But you’ve
done yourself no good whatsoever, because now you’ve
actually lowered your metabolism. The scale says, “Hey! You
lost another three pounds!” But it could be 2 lbs. of fat
and 1 lb. of muscle, and that’s not a good situation to be
in. You want to lose maybe 2.9 lbs. of fat and 0.1 lbs. of
muscle, or maybe 3 lbs. of fat and no muscle. But to do
that, you’ve got to challenge your muscular system through
some weight bearing exercise.

Don’t forget the glycogen fuel stored in your body. The
other thing to keep in mind when you’re using the bathroom
scale is that when you first start limiting your calories,
your body is going to start burning through its glycogen
stores. Glycogen is basically a fuel stored in your body.
It stores sugars together with water and locks them up in
the tissues and organs of your body like an energy battery,
ready for you to use at a future time.

There’s water locked in with those calories. That water
weighs a lot. So when you start restricting your calories,
the first thing your body burns is this extra storage of
energy, this extra glycogen. And the glycogen causes you,
as it’s burned, to shed water. You might look at the scale
and think, gee, I lost 5 lbs., but you really lost no body
fat whatsoever. It was just water, because your body
released glycogen. What usually happens to people when
their glycogen store has reached zero is they get really
hungry, they think they’re in a starvation panic, and then
they overeat. Their glycogen stores fill right back up,
they gain the 5 lbs. back, and usually they over ate to
such an extent that they store another half a pound of body
fat or so. Now they’re half a pound heavier than when they
began and they lost no body fat whatsoever. It was just a
game of glycogen and water storage they saw reflected on
the bathroom scale.

Bathroom scales are useless. So ignore the bathroom scale.
It is not useful for telling you how successful you are in
losing body fat. I don’t use one at all. The only measure
you should use is a “fat scale” or a caliper. A caliper is
the best way to measure body fat. Body fat calipers measure
the thickness of body fat in key locations around your
body. For men, one location is on the upper pectoral area,
another is the midsection and the third is on the top of
the quadriceps of the leg. For women, it’s the back of the
arm, the midsection and along the hip.

However, you’ve got to learn how to use a caliper correctly
if you want it to be an accurate indicator of fat loss
success. I just mention it as a tool for people who are
really serious about losing fat. People who use bathroom
scales to figure out how much weight they’ve lost are just
playing a silly game of deception - the bathroom scale is
useless. I mean, you could lose bone mass and you’d still
look like you were having lots of progress on the bathroom
scale.

How do you lose bone mass? Easy: you stop engaging in
exercise, stop walking, and stop running. If you do all
that (which I’m not recommending, by the way), then you
would start to lose bone mineral density, and that would be
reflected as weight loss. When you say you want to lose
weight, be careful what you ask for. Your body has a number
of ways to lose weight that have nothing whatsoever to do
with losing body fat or enhancing your overall state of
health.

—————————————————-
Mike Adams, “The Health Ranger,” is chief contributor and
editor of the NewsTarget Network, a leading independent
news source for natural health, nutrition, medicine and
other wellness topics. NewsTarget and Webseed.com are
leading information resources for consumers seeking
independent information on natural health and nutrition.
More than 12,000 searchable articles are available at
http://www.newstarget.com

Herb Daly Jr