Proper Weight Loss

Overweight individuals say that they want to lose “weight”, so they weigh themselves on a scale to find out whether they are shedding the pounds or not. If the pounds go down, they are elated, but if the scale does not change, they lose their motivation and regress to the behaviors that made them overweight in the first place.

The problem with this way of thinking is that not all weight is made equal. Humans can lose weight through loss of water, loss of muscle, loss of fat, and loss of waste material located in your digestive tract.

Try this experiment today: throw out all carbohydrates, and eat only protein and fat. The next day you will probably be a few pounds lighter, and you might be pleased with what you see in the mirror. But before you get all excited about this sudden weight loss, please realize that you have barely lost any fat weight.

In fact, due to the absence of carbohydrates, you have lost water weight. If you don’t believe me, try eating a full plate of pasta and rice, and you will see how you regain all the pounds you lost almost immediately.

Also, try weighing yourself before and after eating a meal. You will notice that your weight has increased after consuming a heavy meal. Once your meal has digested properly, you will probably go back down to the weight you had before you ate the meal.

As for muscle loss, I have seen people go on extreme starvation diets, or fasting, in order to lose the pounds. The results are abysmal. At first, they are happy because the pounds come off pretty quickly, but after weeks or months of starving themselves, they realize that a lot of the weight they have lost is muscle weight!

Thus, they end up becoming “skinny fat.” These people look skinny when they are dressed, but when they take off their clothes, they look horrible because all the areas of fat storage stick out like a sore thumb.

So by now you should have realized that your main concern should be fat loss and nothing else. If you use the scale as your only reference, you will be misguided in your efforts to achieve the physique of your dreams.

In order to achieve proper weight loss, i.e. fat loss, you should stick the following principles:

Eat enough protein to maintain your muscle. Around 0.8g of protein/lb of bodyweight should be enough for most people. You should adjust this amount according to your activity levels.
Perform resistance exercise, like weightlifting, gymnastics, strongman, or whatever you like, to keep the muscle you already have, or even build more muscle!
Always burn more calories than you consume on a daily basis. This is the only proven way to lose fat. Keep track of your caloric intake and perform some type of cardio, whether it be running, cycling, swimming, or boxing, to burn some extra calories.
Keep track of your fat loss, not just your weight loss. Along with the scale, try to use calipers or some other method of measuring your fat loss. A simple way to do this is to measure your waist with a measuring tape. If your waist goes down, that’s a sign that you are losing fat, but if your waist goes up, then you are doing something wrong.

In this article, you have learned that not all weight is created equal, and that your main concern should be fat weight. You have also learned that using a measuring scale is not enough; you need other methods in order to measure your fat loss, not just your weight loss.

In terms of dieting, you now know that your goal is to keep the muscle that you have, and burn the fat. Losing weight for the sake of losing weight is not healthy. You must always be concerned about the type of weight you are losing, not just the amount.

I hope this information has shown you the path to achieving your dream physique!