Shedding body fat with minimum muscle loss: a better goal

Losing weight can actually be a bad thing, especially if you are doing it at the expense of lean tissue like muscle. If all you are using to gauge your fitness progress is scale weight alone, you are only getting half-the-picture. Forget about how much you weigh or what your BMI (Body Mass Index) is. Instead, focus on your ratio of lean tissue to body fat. Once you do this, you’ll actually start looking and feeling better.

Your body’s total weight:  includes body fat; lean tissue like muscle; your internal organs like the heart, lungs, and liver; the food and liquid currently passing through your digestive tract; water retained by body tissue; and skeletal material like bones and their connective tissue. In a healthy female of average weight, bones make up 12 percent of total body weight, muscle/lean tissue about 35 percent and body fat about 27 percent. The remaining body weight is skin, connective tissue, tendons, blood, organs and so forth. For health, a good percentage of body fat is around 15 to 20% for females. It's been determined a healthy body fat percentage between 17% - 24% for women is normal. 

We need to understand that fat storage is the sign of good health, it signals that metabolic resources are abundant and the organism is healthy. An extreme overabundance of body fat places stresses on the body and can be unhealthy. The higher your percentage of fat above average levels, the higher your health risk for weight-related illness, like heart disease, high blood pressure, gallstones, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and certain cancers. This set point is controlled by a gene called the ob gene that produces a protein called Leptin. Leptin is a strong suppressor of appetite and food intake. As your body fat rises, more leptin is produced and your appetite declines so that your body fat stabilizes. If your body fat falls, your leptin production declines and your appetite is dis-inhibited.

Why choose muscle over body fat?
A significant aspect is that, a pound of fat burns around 2 calories per day. Muscle, on the other hand, burns around 6 calories per day — and that is at rest. Exercise the muscle (for example, during weight training) and you can burn an upwards of 250 calories, depending on your existing levels of lean body mass.

Posted in: Health