The facts are two thirds of us overweight to some degree or another and when we look closely it is easy to see why. Our modern sedentary world offers little in the way of built in daily physical activity and has us sitting for the best part of 80 percent of our day. Unless we have a manual working type job or go to the gym regularly we simply do not get enough muscular exertion anymore and our muscles grow weak, flabby and we lose as much as one half pound per year of this precious tissue. Then energy requirements are lowered as it is muscle tissue that burns fuel (calories) created from the food we eat.
When we aren’t burning fuel as we should it be it is very easy then to store it as fat and become overweight. And that is what is happening to us. As we continue to downgrade our metabolic motors from an absence of enough muscle building and maintaining activity they become sluggish. Fat storing hormones pile the excess fuel (fat) on our bodies spoiling our appearance, damaging our mental and emotional wellbeing and threatening our health.
Yet we tend to think of our overweight plight as simply eating too much food so we immediately think of going on some sort of diet. As many as 50 percent of us are on a diet at any one time so you would think that most of us should be slim and trim but this is not so. The numbers of overweight people are skyrocketing and don’t look like coming down anytime soon no matter how many diets we go on.
The reason this is so is because a diet (the restriction of food) does not address the root cause of the overweight problem – lack of toned calorie burning muscle tissue. Muscle tissue is where glucose is burned for energy and when they are un-toned and weak they cannot take up the glucose as they have no use for it.
So, it circulates around the body with nowhere to go and this is what sets the stage for those nasty killer diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes and dozens of their mates. They all love the unused sugar that a sedentary body has plenty of floating around.
A diet is not the overweight solution
Yet we still obsess about our body weight and dislike the prospect of having to live in an overweight feel-bad body and we continue to think that a diet is the solution. Some people have screwed their food intake down to where it fits through the eye of a needle yet they still remain overweight.
The answer lies in our muscles. We need to get them working again, getting them strong and toned and keeping them that way. Muscles are not just for looks and play a huge role in our overall health and when they are neglected becoming overweight is just one of the consequences.
Many people think that exercise is some sort of low intensity, long duration activity that doesn’t require much effort but does require a lot of time (like walking). This puts many people off exercise as they simply do not have hours each week to devote to it. People that don’t know what they are talking about say “Just go for a walk that is all you need” which is totally incorrect misleading information. Low intensity cardio type activity is not going to tone muscles and that is your ticket out of that overweight body.
Exercise away your overweight body
A program of proper strength training exercise is what is needed to work muscles directly under a load through their ranges of movement. This tones them up, gets them strong again and rebuilding strength so that fuel is burned up for energy rather than stored on an increasingly overweight body. Just 2-3 sessions are needed each week if the program is done correctly and some effort is put into each session. Rebuilding muscle tissue is not going to happen with little pink dumbbells or too easy exercises.
To fix our overweight global problem we need to put physical activity back into our lives in the way of proper exercise. It is only when we get our bodies burning more calories than we take in each day (not trying to eat less than we burn with diets) that we will reclaim those slim trim bodies that we desire to live in so much.
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