Lose Weight Gain Muscle...Maintain Muscle for Weight Management

The more muscle you have on your body, the more energy your body burns day to day. Muscle sucks sugar out of your blood and burns fats. Muscle gives you strength, supports your joints, and helps build up your bones. The goal of any weight loss program should be to burn the fat while building or maintaining muscle mass.

Don’t Make This Mistake

Many people make the mistake of starving themselves in a diet by restricting their calories to an unhealthy degree. No matter how much muscle you have, putting your body through this starvation only leads to a hormone led decrease in your metabolic rate. Furthermore, as you starve yourself you end up triggering the breakdown of muscle. This is where Yo-Yo dieting takes effect.

Severe calorie restriction leads to rapid loss of both fat and muscle. It makes you hungry and messes with your will-power and focus. As a result your body becomes a fat storing machine when you fall off the diet. The loss of muscle contributes to an even slower metabolism. Now you get heavier with less muscle to burn the fat. When you try to crash diet again you have to restrict more because you have less “metabolic currency”. The restrictions result in further loss of muscle and an endless cycle of getting fatter.

How can you avoid this? By getting out of “metabolic currency” debt! Build muscle! A lot of people believe that all they need to do to lose fat is do low intensity cardio like walking. This will definitely work if you have always been relatively inactive, but the process will be slow. If you build some muscle, the fat will come off faster.

Here are some ways to burn the fat while feeding the muscle:

1) Avoid starving yourself: Keep your dietary calorie restriction to no more than 500 Calories per day.  Use exercise to supply the majority of your daily caloric deficit.

2) Eat more protein: by keeping your protein intake high and dropping your carbohydrates you spare muscle proteins and preferentially burn your fat. Proteins that supply the amino acid leucine help your muscle stay anabolic.

3) Lift more weights: Resistance training builds muscle when the proper nutrients are available. Weight lifting burns calories and builds metabolic currency. Exercises utilizing large muscle groups, like squatting, help to put your body in a muscle building anabolic state.

4) Consider HIIT over LISS: Shorter sessions of high intensity interval training (HIIT), like interval sprints on the bike or treadmill, are great for building a little strength while significantly boosting your metabolism. Long sessions of low intensity steady-state cardio like jogging a marathon burn a lot of fat AND muscle especially if calorie deficient.

5) Add muscle fueling supplements: Supplements like whey protein,etc.help to augment the benefits of resistance exercise. Also, testosterone boosting supplements help you to stay anabolic.....

Spare your muscle and end the cycle of Yo-Yo dieting. Hit the gym and eat your protein.