Your Pants and Reality
January 23rd 2007 05:20
My pants feel tighter after the holidays-not a lot but the trend is in the wrong direction and I want to reverse it. My immediate, visceral response is what interests me. I want to lose weight,period. I want my pants to be looser and the sooner the better. I know that if I clean up my diet and go on a crash regimen of cardio exercise that the calories will burn off and I will have lost the five pounds it will take to create the looseness I crave. Understand that I want to lose weight and I am not so concerned about the composi
tion of the weight.
If this is a familiar set of emotions for you, welcome to the club. It is, however, a myth to believe that all weight loss is the same. When you've gained a few pounds and the rush is on to lose it, you will use the tried and true. Ramping up the cardio will work and you will lose the weight. The reality is that you are making no progress in the abiding,problem you have with weight. That is because you do not have a persistent problem with weight;you have a persistent problem with fat.
Here is the no myth version of weight:You can gain weight and not gain fat. You can lose weight and lose very little fat. You can lose both very easily. You can lose fat and maintain muscle only with difficulty. If you go on a crash program to get you pants feeling like they should, you will lose weight mostly in the form of water and muscle with a little fat thrown in. We see the validity of this statement when we look at individuals who lose a large amount of weight. They tend to look thinner, but drawn. The reason is that a portion of their loss is muscle. That's what causes the real problems,because less muscle means lower metabolic rate and thus less calorie burning and that means that maintaining a weight will be harder.
When weight loss involves muscle, you lose even if its only five pounds of weight loss. The real trick is to set a goal of losing fat. That is about ramping up the weight training and cutting out the junk. Start putting in more time in the gym and don't ruin it by eating flour, sugar, prepackaged foods, and the like.Put your body on fat burn by reducing carbohydrate intake to the healthy low glycemic kinds. If you really want to loosen those pants, go ahead and throw in the cardio,but don't think that that is more than a short term answer to your problem. Your servant, as always.
His pants were too tight to wear!
If this is a familiar set of emotions for you, welcome to the club. It is, however, a myth to believe that all weight loss is the same. When you've gained a few pounds and the rush is on to lose it, you will use the tried and true. Ramping up the cardio will work and you will lose the weight. The reality is that you are making no progress in the abiding,problem you have with weight. That is because you do not have a persistent problem with weight;you have a persistent problem with fat.
Here is the no myth version of weight:You can gain weight and not gain fat. You can lose weight and lose very little fat. You can lose both very easily. You can lose fat and maintain muscle only with difficulty. If you go on a crash program to get you pants feeling like they should, you will lose weight mostly in the form of water and muscle with a little fat thrown in. We see the validity of this statement when we look at individuals who lose a large amount of weight. They tend to look thinner, but drawn. The reason is that a portion of their loss is muscle. That's what causes the real problems,because less muscle means lower metabolic rate and thus less calorie burning and that means that maintaining a weight will be harder.
When weight loss involves muscle, you lose even if its only five pounds of weight loss. The real trick is to set a goal of losing fat. That is about ramping up the weight training and cutting out the junk. Start putting in more time in the gym and don't ruin it by eating flour, sugar, prepackaged foods, and the like.Put your body on fat burn by reducing carbohydrate intake to the healthy low glycemic kinds. If you really want to loosen those pants, go ahead and throw in the cardio,but don't think that that is more than a short term answer to your problem. Your servant, as always.
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