Weight Loss: What works?

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Can you tell by looking, or stepping on a scale, whether you are too fat or just too heavy? No, you can’t, that is why a body fat measurement is vital to any weight or fat loss program, without this simple test, you don’t know whether your efforts are doing good, or bad. Most people assume that they are just too heavy, and all of the fad diets, and fancy pre packaged meals focus on this to make money from the unfortunate, fat, ill-advised consumer.

Yes, if you are active, work hard, and yet eat the wrong food, and drink too much, you can still be fat, and maybe one of those fad diets can do you some good, at least temporarily, the same goes for the fancy pre packaged meals, but, how do you know what is working? Measure your fat!

The graph above is for me, for about a month, with un-regular measurements, meaning, I did a couple of fat measurements only a couple of days apart, here and there, and it looks like the curve flattens out, when in reality, it doesn’t, so, let’s just use the results for my example.

Over this time period, I lost a total of about 18 lbs of body fat and gained about 11 lbs of lean body weight, for a net loss of 7 pounds. It is recommended that one should lose no more than about 2 pounds a week, but no one ever says anything about the details of fat vs lean weight.

No matter what diet you get on, all they ever talk about is weight, eat this, lose weight. The problem with that is that you can do more harm than good, by simply losing weight and not monitoring what type of weight, fat or lean, is being lost, and this is the most important detail, but all they care about is selling you a book, a membership, or some over-priced food!

So, what works? Yes, exercise, but, not just any exercise, because things like spending hours on a treadmill, will cause you to burn muscle, as well as fat, and that is not good, because muscle is your best friend when it comes to burning fat, so, what do you do? Resistance training, more specifically, weight training, is the answer, but, this too must be done properly, or, it is not much better than running, you must train heavy! No, you don’t have to become a power-lifter, but a man, doing a set of curls with a dumbbell that weighs about the same as a beer, just will not give you the desired results, the effort must hurt!

Before you get crazy, and do something dangerous, by hurt, I mean it must be something beyond what you would normally do, like drinking a beer, we have all heard the term “12 ounce curls”, and personally, I have done sets of 20 or 30 in the past! What I am trying to say is that it requires a bit of “discomfort” to get results, the keyword being, Intensity. Intensity, is what determines whether any exercise does anything, and it must be adjusted to your own level of fitness or health, so, get informed, if you go to a gym, or fitness center, the trainers there should be able to help you, and if you let them know that you want to gain muscle as well as lose fat, by training with weights, they can get you started in the right direction.

Just remember the old K.I.S.S. acronym, which means, Keep It Simple Stupid. If you eat food, as close to the way God made it as possible, meaning, NOT PROCESSED, and without added sugar and so on, and start training with some good ole iron, you can do it!