How to Lose Body Fat and Not Muscle

If someone feels they’re carrying about too much fat, they’ll probably say they need to lose some weight.

Ironically, if that’s their only goal–reducing the number on the scale–they’re like to run into a new problem along the way: becoming skinny fat.

You see, the phrase “weight loss” is tossed around by just about everyone, including myself, but what we really want is a bit more than that.

We don’t want to just “lose weight”–we want to reduce our body fat percentage and thus improve our body composition. That is, we want to reduce our total amount of body fat without reducing our total amount of lean mass.

If this is obvious to you, you’re in the minority. Most people don’t realize how much muscle they can lose with a poor “weight loss” diet and exercise routine and are puzzled when they succeed in losing weight only to be disappointed by a weak, soft physique staring back at them in the mirror.

Well, in this article we’re going to talk about how to do “weight loss” properly: how to lose body fat and not muscle and get that tight, muscular look you’re actually after.

When “a Calorie Is a Calorie”…and When It Isn’t

Like the ridiculous anti-sugar hysteria and low-carb worship that are currently in vogue, various diet “experts” are also claiming that weight loss isn’t as simple as eating less energy than you expend. That you can’t simply get there with proper meal planning and restricting calories.

Instead, these ignoramuses and shysters claim, all you have to do to lose weight is avoid foods that cause “hormonal clogging” (whatever the hell that is) or large insulin spikes or other physiological voodoo or eat foods somehow conducive to weight loss due to efficient processing or even metabolic acceleration.

These types of sales pitches sound pretty good to the “get rich quickers” of the fitness space. You know, the people that always talk about wanting to get fit but don’t want to regulate food intake or exercise much and thus are always on the hunt for that “one weird trick” that will “melt off the belly fat.”

Well, I’ve written about the indisputable physiology of the metabolism and the science of proper calorie counting for weight loss in quite a few other articles, so I won’t review it all here.

Instead, in this article I want to focus on a paradoxical aspect of “calories in versus calories out.” Namely…

When we’re just talking about weight loss, it all boils down to maintaining a negative energy balance. Consume less energy via food than you expend over time, and your weight will go down.

What you eat to get in those calories doesn’t matter–a calorie is a calorie in this sense.  Professor Mark Haub lost 27 pounds on a diet of protein shakes, Twinkies, Doritos, Oreos, and Little Debbie snacks, and you could do exactly the same if you wanted to.

Hell, if you really want to speed things up, severely restrict your food intake as welland you could drop as much as 5 pounds per week for the first few weeks at least.

If you did these things, however, you would run into several problemsincluding muscle loss, which brings me to my next point…

Reference: http://tinyurl.com/jhyk5un

When we’re talking about losing just body fat and not muscle, however–improving body composition–we must not only maintain a negative energy balance, but we must do so with a proper balance of macronutrients.