Muscle Weighs More Than Fat
These very useful Top 100 weight loss tips continue on with article number 47 in the series that is bringing you a great set of 100 unique, original and relevant articles that can help you achieve your ambition to lose weight.
In this post, I'll look at a side of the human body that there are still many people who don't know about, when it comes to calculating their body weight. That is there is a difference in what muscle tissue and fat weigh, by volume.
Muscle is Heavier than Fat
All weight, when it comes to the human body, is not equal. It's a fact that all the experts will tell you that muscle tissue, by volume weighs more than fat because it is denser.
Rather than arguing that a pound of fat is the same as a pound of muscle, it's more like comparing a matchbox full of soap to a matchbox full of lead. They won't both weight a pound!
When embarking on a weight loss strategy of any kind, the very last thing you should lose is muscle tissue! That's because its your muscles that do the work that causes your body to burn off the calories it consumes.
If your muscles are working hard, they'll burn off more calories the more mass they consist of. And the more you use them, the stronger they'll become and subsequently the more calories they will burn for a given amount of work.
For this one major reason, it's so important to make sure you get regular exercise and a daily routine is a great idea as long as that fits in your schedule. That's because without any exercise while dieting hard, your body will burn its way through the muscle tissue first, while storing ever more fat in preparation for a perceived bout of starvation, that of course in this day and age will never come.
Eventually you'll end up being even more imbalanced in your muscle to fat ratio than you were even to begin with.
Good Diet Plus Exercise
A better course of action is to eat a healthy, balanced and nutritious diet while getting enough daily exercise to ensure your muscles are worked and fed with all the nutrients they need to stay strong. If you don't like the idea of exercising, you can always choose a more enjoyable way of getting the activity those muscles need to stay healthy. Swimming is a great all-round exercise that is a lot of fun and doesn't even feel like exercise. Yet it does exercise all the major muscle groups in your body to keep them strong, active and burning fuel.
Even walking is better than no exercise at all (in fact it is surprisingly very good exercise). And if you walk with determination and at an elevated pace, while keeping it up for a decent length of time, you will provide a lot of benefits for your leg muscles at least.
Failing that, you could try dancing. This is an excellent way to stay in shape while strengthening your muscles as you enjoy yourself at the same time. Try a dance based workout program like Zumba fitness and you'll be building up your muscles while having a good time!
To lose weight and stand a good chance of keeping that weight off, you really want your body to be burning as much fat as it can and not muscle tissue, which it should keep strong by giving it enough work to do. So if you want to lose that extra weight, what you really want to lose is all your fat weight and not your muscle mass to stay healthy and maintain a healthy level of body weight.
100 Weight Loss Tips number 46 follows in the next post!
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Posted on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments
1 thoughts on "Muscle Weighs More Than Fat"
Sophia says:
Hi, this is a really interesting story about how muscle weighs more than fat as I had never really thought about it before. I'm really struggling to lose my own excess weight as well as some unsightly cellulite right now. It's good to learn as much about weight loss as possible, but I wonder if there'll ever be a reliable and affordable solution to this. Most of the best advice I read tends to focus on working quite hard to achieve a great looking body! Anyway, thank you so much for publishing my comment!