Exercise is Everything

If you don’t exercise, your body composition will alter over the years, even if you don’t change your eating habits at all. As I’ve already said, muscle is an active tissue that is designed to be used—to support the skeleton and to enable us to move. When we are using our muscles, we maintain the same LBM. If we stop using them or use them less, they will start to literally waste away. The individual muscle fibers become smaller and so require less fuel to function. This means, quite simply, that we then need to eat less.

Compare this to the engine in a car. Imagine a large luxury car with a very powerful engine. This engine would need a lot of fuel. You may get as few as 15 miles per gallon from this engine, so the tank needs to be very large. Let’s say this car’s gas tank holds 15 gallons. Now imagine a small hatchback with a much smaller, less powerful engine. This engine requires less gasoline, and you may get as many as 40 miles to the gallon out of the car. As a result, there’s no need to put in as much gas,and the tank doesn’t need to be as big. It may hold a maximum of 10 gallons, so if you tried to put in 15, it would overflow.

Now let’s compare this to our muscles. Muscles that are constantly being used require lots of energy—in other words, food, for which they have large storage tanks within the muscle itself. These tanks are constantly being emptied and refilled. On the other hand, muscles that are not constantly used become smaller. They literally shrink, and their storage tanks shrink accordingly. So what happens if we try to put in the same amount of fuel that we put in our large muscles? It overflows. The body has a very effective way of mopping up this overflow—it takes the leftover fuel and stores it as fat.

The amount of muscle will determine how much food the body needs in order to function efficiently. If we lose muscle through lack of exercise, we should reduce the amount of food we eat accordingly. If we don’t, as we get older, we will be eating more than our bodies require and creating a surplus. This surplus will be stored as fat.

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So Who’s Overweight?

If you are overweight, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are fat. Muscle tissue (which makes up most of our LBM) is an active tissue that burns calories in order to stay healthy. Even when at rest, muscles are still burning calories. Fat, on the other hand, does not need any calories; it just sits in its storage sites, stock-piling and doing nothing. Muscles are very heavy, much heavier than fat. This means that we can carry more weight in muscle and not be fat, even though the scales tell us we are heavier.

Imagine someone with a build similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. A very large percentage of his body is muscle, and he carries very little, if any, excess fat. If he used a traditional height/weight chart, however, it would probably tell him that he is overweight. This is because such charts do not account for the fact that muscle is heavier than fat. Therefore, although according to the chart he may be overweight, he certainly isn’t fat.

Similarly I have a very good friend, Carol, who is a fitness teacher. She is six feet two inches tall and weighs almost 180 pounds. This may sound a lot, but because her body has a large percentage of muscle and a relatively low percentage of fat, she is not fat. So again, although a height/weight chart may tell her she is overweight, she looks fantastic and turns heads wherever she goes.

As you can see from these examples, the scales do not always tell the whole story. What we need to look at is the body composition, not just the total weight.

Busting the Body Myths Part 3

continuing from part 2…

5) I can get rid of excess fat by rubbing in cellulite creams. False. This is one of the biggest myths of all. Where is the fat supposed to go? I don’t see it oozing out of the pores and running down legs. No, it stays exactly where it is. Of course, any kind of massage is good for circulation, but your fat cells will only release fat into the bloodstream to be burned when fuel is needed. The only way you can achieve this with a massage cream is if you jump up and down when applying the cream and continue to jump for 20 minutes or more, so that you stimulate your aerobic energy system into burning fat. A very expensive workout.

6) If I eat just high-protein foods and limit my carbohydrate intake, I will lose weight. False. High-protein diets are, unfortunately, very popular at the moment. As you have learned from the nutrition section, however, we actually need less protein than any other nutrient. Not only do we not need excess protein, but if we take in higher amounts than necessary over a long period of time, we can damage our digestive systems. The protein we eat is broken down in the stomach by acids, while all other foods pass through the stomach relatively unchanged and are broken down in the intestines. Eating more protein means producing more acid, and if the delicate balance between acid and alkaline in the body is disrupted, digestive disorders may occur. Excess protein, like any other food eaten in excess, is also converted into fat and stored by the body.

That’s all for now. Thank you for viewing our series. I hope you have learn something useful from it.