Body Weight vs. Body Fat

It makes NO SENSE to begin a weight loss program, if you don't know your Body Fat percentage, folks. I can't stress enough how it's not weight you want to lose, it's body fat. And there is medical proof that, if you start a calorie-reduction program, you will lose the ONE thing you don't want to lose...Lean Muscle Mass. In fact, on a calorie-reduction diet you can even GAIN fat, while losing weight on the scale!

Monitoring your Body Fat percentage will enable you to see exactly WHAT you are losing, not just how much. Let me give you an example:

Laura is 45 and weighs 150 pounds. She wants to lose about 20 pounds. If she's like the average gal her age, about 35% of her weight is Body Fat, which is 52.5 pounds of Fat, and 97.5 pounds is Lean Muscle Mass. Laura goes on a diet, and starts eating low carbs, low fat, increasing her vegetables, and she doesn't take second-helpings at dinner. For a while, Laura loses weight. She steps on the scale about a month into her diet and discovers that her weight has dropped to 140 but her body fat is still at 35%. If she did the math, she would see that her total body fat is now only 49 pounds, down 3.5 pounds. But what about the other 6.5 pounds? You guessed it; she also lost 6.5 pounds of lean muscle mass.

How could that be? To quote Tom Venuto, from his book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle, "Body fat is like a reserve storage tank for energy. Thanks to tens of thousands of years of evolution, you've developed a body that is an incredibly efficient fat-storing machine. As paradoxical as it may seem, it is better to eat more and exercise more than it is to eat less without exercise. Slashing calories and not exercising slows the metabolism, decreases lean body mass and invokes the starvation response. Exercise allows you to burn fat while increasing your metabolism. Dieting without exercise is one of the major reasons for the the 95% failure rate of weight loss programs today."

So getting back to Laura, if her lifestyle is mostly inactive and she cuts her calories, her body will not go to her fat reserves for the fuel it needs, except as a last-ditch effort. Lean muscle mass is a much more available source of fuel so the body goes there before it goes to the fat.

I kept daily records for two 90-day periods, so that I could observe my body fat levels. I didn't cut calories, I cut out junk food, I stopped filling up on white breads, crackers, pastries, and pasta; I increased my lean meats and my veggies. I wasn't hungry; I ate more quality and more quantity!

When I was down 20 pounds, I could do the math and see that I'd lost almost 20 pounds of body fat...now that's worth getting excited about. If you want to know more about the program I designed for myself, send me an e-mail at herwisebody@hotmail.com. I'd be happy to answer your questions or design a program for you...I just know that you can Get Your Body Back!