I have spent a lot of time over the last 11 weeks talking to Luke, researching and reading up about ‘weight’ loss. It is important to me that this post is factually correct so I asked Luke if he would be willing to proof read it for me. (For those of you that haven’t read my earlier post about Luke, he is a professional fitness coach, with more qualifications that I can list here, who specialises in body transformations, particularly for women.)
Luke agreed to take a look at what I’d written and we also decided that it would be an excellent idea if he wrote his own section on this post. The first part is written by me and the second part by Luke.
During the course of my research I have learnt three important things:
- dieting without exercising reduces your ability to lose body fat;
- muscle is much heavier than fat, and
- the scales don’t tell the truth – ‘weight’ loss is complete bollocks.
I wish that I’d known this stuff years ago – I wouldn’t have wasted my time with all the diets that I tried and failed at.
ONE: Dieting without exercise reduces your ability to lose body fat.
In order to lose body fat you need to gain muscle. The reason for this is that the more muscle you have the more fat you will burn i.e. muscle gobbles up fat (provided you don’t overeat).
So what I’ve been doing for the last 18 years by dieting without exercising is simply stripping my body of muscle. The vicious circle goes like this:
- you go on a diet and restrict your calories;
- your body panics and grabs the easiest convertible source of protein which is your muscle;
- muscle is heavier than fat so initially you lose weight as your body chomps its way through your muscle because you aren’t eating enough;
- your body then thinks that because it’s consuming muscle that a famine is coming and it stores fat;
- you give up because the diet doesn’t work;
- all you’ve done is reduce the amount of muscle you’ve got which reduces your ability to burn fat, and
- when you begin the next diet you have even less muscle than you started with before and the whole ghastly affair repeats itself.
TWO: Muscle is heavier than fat
When you are weight training properly you put on muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat so if you are weight training and the scales are moving downwards you are losing body fat. In fact, you will have lost more body fat than is shown on the scales because the muscle you’ve gained weighs more than fat. So, while the scales tell me that I’ve only lost 8lbs in 11 weeks, the reality is that I’ve lost much more fat than that.
Also, pound for pound muscle is much smaller than fat so although I’ve ‘only lost’ 8lbs I’ve dropped a dress size and I’m looking much smaller as shown by my week 10 and week 11 progress photos..
The best way to demonstrate this is with a side by side comparison of the same weight of fat and muscle:
Muscles, like children and puppies, need feeding. But if their appetite is bigger than the amount food that you eat then they consume your body fat. This is called a calorie deficit and it is how I need to manage my food intake to lose my body fat.
NB: if you don’t eat enough and the calorie deficit is too big, your body will go into starvation mode and get itself into the vicious circle that is described at points 1-7 in the section above.
It stands to reason that the more muscle you have the more you can eat. It explains how Olympic athletes consume 4000 calories a day without getting lardy.
The whole point of the process I’m putting myself through is to build muscle, burn fat and get to my ideal lifestyle weight. Once I’ve got to my goal I’ll be able to manage my body fat easily and I can be more relaxed about what I eat.
THREE: the scales don’t tell the truth – ‘weight’ loss is complete bollocks
Over the last 11 weeks I have learnt so much about the difference between fat loss and weight loss. I have come to think of it like this: if I lose a limb I will lose weight but if I want to reduce the size of my belly then I need to lose body fat.
At the end of 11 weeks of training 5-6 days a week I’ve ‘only’ lost 8 lbs in ‘weight’. This worried me a little and I asked Luke whether I should have lost more ‘weight’ by this stage.
Luke explained that we are aiming for fat loss and this isn’t shown by a normal weighing scales.
So when I diligently get on the scales every morning and I think to myself “ugh I exercised for nearly three hours yesterday and I’ve put on a pound’ (as happened to me on the Friday of week 10), I’m not seeing the whole picture.
If we assume for a moment that over the last 11 weeks in addition to losing 8lbs of body fat (as shown by the scales) I’ve put on 8 lbs of muscle from training hard, then this would mean that in terms of body fat – I’ve actually lost 16lbs in 11 weeks.
Suddenly I understand why Luke isn’t that concerned that my weight on the scales isn’t shifting at the moment. It’s because he is working on building the amount of muscle I have so it can burn off my body fat. My ‘weight’ at any given moment in time is actually fairly irrelevant.
I need to stop judging myself by an arbitrary measurement that has no correlation to how healthy I am, or how I look.
Luke says:
There are no short cuts when it comes to losing body fat. It takes hard work and most importantly consistency. Without consistency you simply will not get results.
To burn fat you have to have muscle, to build muscle you have to lift weights.
There is such a myth around weight lifting for women. One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is “But won’t I get really muscly? I don’t want to look like a body builder!”.
No one’s body turns into an Arnie look alike without a huge amount of very specific weight lifting training and nutrition. Unless you dedicate yourself, 24 hours a day, to becoming the next Mrs Universe you won’t get “big” from lifting weights. I promise.
What you will gain from lifting weights is a higher resting metabolism. The more muscle you have, the higher your resting metabolism, the more fat you’ll burn when you aren’t training. After a single weight lifting session you continue to burn fat for 38 hours.
This means that the more muscle you have, the more body fat you’ll burn and the smaller you will look.
This brings us back to consistency. If you keep training regularly, then you’ll keep burning fat when you are at rest and who doesn’t want to do that?! It certainly beats being miserable on 800 calories a day while you strip your body of muscle and send yourself careering towards fat gain and unhappiness.
And just so we are clear – no, you can’t transform your body in 4 weeks, no matter what the diet and fitness industry wants you to believe.