If losing excess fat weight is your goal there is one thing that you need to achieve first and that is improved ‘metabolic fitness’. This means your body is efficient at burning fat and stops it being so efficient at storing fat. When you have poor metabolic fitness it is likely that your metabolism is a bit like an un-tuned car, it will not be burning fuel cleanly and efficiently and it splutters and coughs when you put your foot down.
It is easy to have this poor type of fitness in our world today. Eating the wrong types of foods, eating too much of them and not doing enough proper exercise all conspire to slow our metabolic motor. So we become overweight, lose our vital energy, grow weak and if we keep on going down this path our health deteriorates and we get sick.
Most people think they just need to go on a diet to lose some weight and improve their health. But approaching it this way rarely works as firstly, ninety five percent of diets fail as they work against the metabolism and slow it further, and secondly a diet does not address the root cause of you becoming overweight in the first place.
To get your body burning more fuel is the goal – raising the metabolic rate and to do this we need to improve our body composition (muscle/fat ratio). If you have not been doing any muscle building and maintaining activity it is likely that your muscles have become weak and flabby. When they are in this condition their energy requirements are low.
The condition of your muscles is vital to permanently losing fat as it is within their cells that the food you eat gets burned for energy. Your muscle tissue makes up to fifty percent of your body weight and any reduction in its fat burning capabilities means you are burning less of it and more is being stored as excess body fat.
Our ancestors never have needed to go to the gym, each day was filled with the tasks and activities of daily living and much energy was spent just finding enough food and keeping warm and dry. Now-a-days we can get up from our bed and spend the entire day barely ‘moving a muscle’ and this is the main reason why two thirds of the population has become overweight to varying degrees.
So the journey back to slimness must involve rebuilding and re-toning the driver of our metabolism – our muscle tissue. There is only one way to do this and it is a proper strength training program that works the muscles through their ranges of movement under a load. Just 2-3 sessions each week will get you toned back up if you put some effort into the sessions.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that low intensity, long duration activities like walking, jogging or cycling to do this job as you will be very disappointed. What we want is to get our calorie burning rate up when we are not being active and even when resting or sleeping and to achieve this we need to work the muscle directly.
The old fashioned method of calorie burning only addressed the rate we burned them while we were actually doing the activity. Now we are concerned with what happens after we finish an exercise session and have progressed on from the outdated ways we used to think worked. We now have the scientific research to back up and help us improve our fitness and weight loss methods to rev up our metabolism to not only get us slim and trim but keep us that way for the long-term.
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