To Your Health
April, 2011 (Vol. 05, Issue 04) |
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Take Control of Your Body
3 Keys to Losing Weight and Building Lean Muscle
By Dr. Jeffrey Tucker
As we get older, many of us lose touch with our inner child. We forget how to be in control and how to play. As kids, we had willpower; there was no way parents could get us to eat certain vegetables or tell us when to fall asleep.
And time was not even an issue – we had lots of time to play. Now if we could just use some of that stubborn attitude and playfulness as adults to burn fat, lose weight and build lean muscle, we could stop searching for instant results and no-effort diets and exercises.
Another unfortunate consequence of aging is a tendency to gain fat around the waist. This often goes hand in hand with less effective metabolism. How can you counteract these normal effects of aging? Here's how to eat and train effectively as part of a priority system for losing weight and getting leaner the healthy way. Let's call it the three keys to taking control of your body.
1: Diet and Nutrition
There are lots of options here, and it's not just about creating a caloric deficit, as you'll see. It certainly helps to have a caloric deficit, but it's just as important to increase your intake of quality protein, good carbohydrates (especially vegetables), fiber, healthy essential fats and water. For the majority of my patients, the bottom line when it comes to getting leaner is eating less carbohydrates (less than 150 grams daily) and eating more protein. I also believe that if you want a body that functions at a high level and looks lean, you are going to need a multi-vitamin/minerals supplement, too.
Here's another suggestion: I continue to notice that patients who keep a food diary get better results. There is only one way to find out what you actually are eating: keep track of everything that goes into your mouth. Since calories come in liquid forms, such as fruit juices, alcohol, sodas etc., these can easily add up and derail a fat-loss effort quickly. So keep a journal and review it regularly with your doctor.
2: Resistance Training
The bulk of calories burned is determined by your resting metabolic rate, which is largely a function of how much muscle you have on your body and how hard it works. If you think you'll just bump up your cardio for a while to lose weight, think again. You must add activities that burn calories, promote or maintain muscle mass and elevate your metabolism. This means working every muscle group and training it hard.
Let me be perfectly clear: I am not talking about doing aerobics here. It's not about adding more walking, treadmill, running or bicycling. It's about adding weight training! Let's face it, muscle looks good on the body. Muscle is an active tissue that requires calories to maintain, and muscle burns calories when it is working. Resistance training can be done in such a way to make you stronger and leaner. Studies and experience show that people who weight train lose more fat than those who diet and perform long bouts of aerobics.
There are various ways to burn more calories when you exercise, including explosive exercise training, interval or circuit training, supersets, sprints, etc., some of which you may have heard of. These are all effective methods to burn more calories and increase what's called "Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC)," defined as the "recovery of metabolic rate back to pre-exercise levels." What this means is that, depending on whether you've performed a few minutes of light exercise or an hour of hard intervals, you'll burn calories hours after you've completed your workout - up to 38 hours, research suggests.
