The First Key is Body Composition Rules not Body Weight: Being super thin is very different from being super healthy. The distinction lies in understanding body composition, which is the ratio of lean-to-fat tissue. Your body is composed of lean tissue such as bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, organs, and blood, as well as fat tissue throughout your body.
Healthy body composition is not determined by the number on your scale or the size of your jeans, but by the percentage of muscle to fat mass. Keeping the percentage of fat low and lean muscle high is ideal for maximizing your strength, maintaining hormonal balance, revving up your metabolism, and controlling your weight. Why is that so?
Because after age 25, adults lose on average between 0.5 to 1.0% per year of lean, muscle mass. So, by age 45 you could be down between 10 to 20% in terms of your muscle mass. This is important because muscle mass metabolizes about 75% of the calories you take in each day while fat mass burns hardly any calories.
So, if you lose 20% of your muscle mass over time, but eat the same number of calories each day, your body can no longer metabolize this number of calories, and stores it as fat in the abdominal and/or subcutaneous regions of your body. As your muscle mass goes down, your body fat goes up. That is why most people get fatter with age.
Fat gain, bone loss, and muscle depletion are all factors that can result in an altered body composition. The skinny-fat person is someone who appears slim, but has a high percentage of body fat. In this case, body composition may not be altered by excess fat, but rather by an unhealthy loss of muscle and bone mass.
The Second Key is to Lose Weight Slowly over Time: The rule of thumb is to lose weight slowly and safely over time. This loss should be between ½ to 1 pound of body weight per week, and no more. This means if you need to lose 50 pounds, it may take up to 50 weeks, or longer. Why so slow?
If you try to drop the weight too quickly, for every pound of weight your body losses, it will take about ½ pound of muscle mass with each ½ pound of fat mass. This is undesirable and self-defeating because muscle tissue is the biggest user of calories in the body. You want to preserve your muscle mass, and even increase the amount of muscle mass you have over time, which will enhance your metabolism.
Therefore, it is very important to lose the weight slowly over time. In this way, when you lose a pound of body weight, it is a pound of fat mass only that you are losing, and not any muscle mass.
The Third Key is that Body Fat is a Reflection of What We Eat and Do: Once you reach your ideal weight, which is usually your set point, you want to maintain this weight through a number of healthy, lifestyle changes. These changes are rooted in what you eat and do on a daily basis.
In other words, we need the right proportion of nutrients and the correct amount of movement each day so that the calories we take in from food are balanced by the calories that we expend in our activities. Maintaining this caloric balance means no weight gain over time.
To lose excess weight and keep it off for good, refer to the contact information below and the Permanent Weight Loss Program.
Jim combined his former science background and writing skills with his recent holistic nutrition and personal trainer abilities in the design and development of a number of comprehensive, preventative health and fitness programs for adults aged 25 to 65. One of the programs is entitled the Permanent Weight Loss Program.
In addition, he recently setup the site Health-Tips-for-an-Ageless-Body.com, which provides over 500 tips related to exercise and nutrition for adults who are interested in weight loss and disease prevention. He firmly believes that an ageless body is our birthright.
Jim can be reached at:
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