One of the saddest things about the fitness industry is the amount of misleading, even outright false information that circulates. Often this misinformation comes from sources you would think should know better, and they probably do, but good information is usually less profitable and less attention-grabbing than trendy information, so we end up chasing worthless fitness fads. In this article I’m going to dispel a few of the myths and bad ideas surrounding weight loss, and offer some science-backed alternatives to get you better results
- Cardio exercise is ineffective to lose weight, your body gets good at doing it and stops improving.
- Many people understand calories, but don’t understand the underlying hormonal responses that instigate the burning of body fat, these responses are more important.
- Building muscle will help you burn more calories passively, without effort.
- Eating the right foods will contribute to this calorie burn, and help you build even more muscle, building a foundation for success.
Keep reading below for a deeper examination.
For the longest time, the standard fitness advice went: if you want to get bigger, lift weights; if you want to get smaller, do cardio. It was perceived as common sense, the obvious answer to some very common problems. But like many “obvious” pieces of information, it was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts. The basic mechanism of weight loss is well understood by most people, you need to burn more calories than you eat if you want to shed fat. Cardio burns calories, therefore if I want to lose weight I should do cardio. Obvious, right?
But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that information about calories is about the smallest grain of knowledge you can possess before you fall under the banner of “literally knows nothing at all”. You see the body is an incredibly intricate and powerful machine, and one of its greatest strengths is adaptation. When you exercise, you stress the heart, lungs and muscles, and after that occurs your body does its best to adapt those components to better manage that stress in the future. But your body’s prime concern when adapting is SURVIVAL, it doesn’t know that you want to lose weight, and it probably wouldn’t really care even if it did know.
Your body can’t actually THINK for itself, but the complicated reactions that take place can make it seem almost intelligent. When you place your body into an energy-negative state by eating fewer calories than you burn, a number of hormonal changes take place in an effort to keep you from starving. The fact that you’re constantly surrounded by food is irrelevant, because the body can only know what’s going on inside, and on the inside it looks like you’re beginning to starve, so it takes action.
One of the most common complaints people make when they begin a new diet is feeling tired all the time, which makes a lot of sense when you understand the mechanics behind weight loss. Your body wants to hold onto fat, which is effectively its energy savings account. The same way you’ll start to worry and cut your spending if you lose your job and start eating into your bank savings, your body starts to cut its energy use when you’re eating into your fat. The longer this goes on, the further the hormones insulin, leptin, ghrelin and cortisol move away from their normal values, and the more your body clings on to its fat stores.
As soon as you DO break your diet and gorge on that burger and chips, or bucket of ice-cream, your body takes advantage of that huge excess of calories to do two things; store away as much replacement fat as it can to make up for what it’s lost, and push those hormones closer back to where they’re supposed to be. Unfortunately the fat takes priority over the hormones, leading to the “rebound effect” that so many people experience when they finish a “12 week diet challenge” or similar. This effect is so common that it’s caused some, admittedly low-information, people to declare that it’s literally impossible to lose body fat long-term. They’re wrong, they just don’t know how to lose fat the right way.
Everything in your body is about balance, every system, every hormone is working to keep your body in a state called homeostasis. The challenge of weight loss is to keep your body as close to homeostasis as possible, while still stimulating a loss in fat. It sounds tricky, and it’s taken a lot of research to get to the point where we understand how to do it, but luckily the actual action steps themselves aren’t too difficult to understand.
At this point we need a disclaimer, most guys are totally down with building muscle, but many girls aren’t. It’s not their fault because again, they’ve been fed bad information, so girls this one is for you. A common concern among women starting training is that if they hit the weights they’ll “bulk up” and start to look like the bodybuilders you see on stage. Women are immensely capable, their work ethic is just as good as men’s, but unfortunately they lack one critical component when it comes to building muscle: testosterone. Women can out-train men day-in, day-out for months on end and still not build as much muscle as a dude half-assing his workout 3 days a week, all because of this little hormone. You’ll gain impressive amounts of strength with a good weightlifting routine, but the women you see on stage are often (though not always) taking testosterone-boosting supplements at a minimum, if not outright injecting anabolic steroids, and it would take you years of dedicated training to look anything like them. The good news is, the muscle you will gain goes a long way to shaping your body, meaning that by applying resistance training in your weight loss plan you can still maintain your curves, while also getting a flat tummy to boot. Best of both worlds right?
Now the rule is still true, that we need to burn more calories than we eat, but we need to keep the body burning calories, rather than slowing down to preserve them. This is where resistance training comes in. Lifting weights still burns calories, quite a lot of them actually, and it serves the dual purpose of building muscle too. Muscle is responsible for a number of biological processes beyond just movement, and the energy spent performing those processes consumes about 2/3rds of all the calories we eat, and that DOESN’T include the calories burned from exercise, which is an approximate EXTRA 17%.
What this means is that for every 10% extra muscle we put on our bodies, we’re burning 6.6% more calories every single day, without any extra effort. In an average person that’s equivalent to running about 20 minutes per day, without ever getting off the couch. But that’s just one small part of the equation. Resistance training doesn’t just burn calories while you’re in the gym, a good resistance workout will have you burning calories for up to 2 hours after you finish as your body uses energy to return you to homeostasis again.
Now the training isn’t the only component of losing fat, what we eat is important too. To build muscle we need to eat a lot of protein. Recommendations vary, some say you only need 1g of protein per kilogram of body weight, others say up to 2.5g/kg, which creates a lot of confusion and arguments. These are easily settled however, when you look at studies that show that you can eat up to 5g/kg with no negative consequences, so why wouldn’t you go for the higher value of 2.5g/kg to make sure you were meeting your needs? Another benefit of higher protein intake is the fact that your body has to use quite a bit of energy to break protein down for fuel, a technique called “Dietary Induced Thermogenesis”. So by adding more protein to your diet you build more muscle, and you burn more calories just by eating. It’s a big positive feedback loop that has you building on your past successes, rather than driving you into the ground the way that restrictive diet and cardio does. The end result is a smooth, shapely body that’s bursting with vitality, rather than a skinny, lank physique and low energy that makes you look like you’ve just gotten over the flu.
The descriptions I’ve given in this article are simplified somewhat to fit into a reasonably sized post, and I’ll be coming back to expand on some of the finer points later especially relating to what types of resistance exercise work best, and other important points about your diet, but the basic action points in this article will start to push you in the right direction.
- Focus on resistance training, you can still do cardio but it shouldn’t be a priority.
- Increase your protein intake, shakes are good but try to use whole foods where you can.
- Don’t restrict your calories to the point you feel tired, you’re just setting yourself up for failure.
And stay tuned for more articles.
Got a burning question you want answered? Email Jeremy@betterlivingfitness.com.au or find us on Facebook.