Weight Loss is Not the Same as Fat Loss
Anytime anyone says they want to loss weight, what they usually mean is they want to lose the extra fat on their body. Then when the weight on the scale goes down they don’t really think about was it just fat they lost - they just think “yay! the number on the scale went down!”
However, depending on how a person goes about losing weight - fast vs. slow, etc. can determine if a person is losing more than they bargained for. Just because the scale goes down does not always mean celebration!
People gain weight, often as fat - which is extra stored energy your body couldn’t use at the time or before your next caloric intake. Fat is stored energy. It’s there as a safety mechanism we need a certain amount of fat - both men and women. We’re not really designed to be living in a very lean/low body fat states for long stretches of time - the body has the ability to go in and out of higher and lower body fat depending on the needs of the time. Genetics of body types play a decent role here!
Now that we have an abundance of foods that make it easy and tasty to not notice the extra caloric intake of foods combined with the decreased movement we have to do for daily life tasks; the body is doing what it’s supposed to do, turn the extra calories in fat and hold on to it. We must be needing the extra stored energy for something in the future.
If you decide to go about losing the extra fat that you have put on over time - rarely does a person suddenly gain a lot of weight - it’s possible, but it’s not the norm - what most people do is they set about to lose the extra weight - fat - as quickly as possible. We like instant gratification, people have been hawking quick fixes for nearly a couple hundred years now. So you go on the cabbage diet or slim fast diet or diet du-jour.
First the weight you lose is water - people get real jazzed and motivated by this thinking it’s the fat they don’t want and they continue on their restrictive diets.
But as people continue to cut calories the body is also breaking down muscle to use the protein to get converted to glucose for energy - it’s not all fat that is being burned and lost on the scale. It is very important to know that losing muscle mass is not a good thing.
Muscle mass is much harder to increase in the body than is fat. It requires both the fuel and the stimulation of the muscles. Whereas fat is quite easy to increase in the body, eat more food than you can use for body needs over time and wha-la, there it is waiting for you to needed for future energy needs. But in the face of the current food supply often that need for the back-up energy is not there, so weight creeps up.
If you go about a weight loss plan you have to make preserving muscle mass a mindful part of the the plan. People don’t like to do this, because the process is often slower and the instant gratification piece is diminished.
Why do we need to care about muscle mass? Muscle mass is a key indicator of health. Particularly as age. We naturally start to lose muscle mass in our 40’s and it will continue to decline without any effort to preserve it.
To maintain muscle mass and lose weight - eating adequate protein is a key part of the equation. You can reduce your caloric load, but have to eat adequate amounts of protein. There is some general debates on what that is - if you exercise minimally it’s about .8g/kg of body weight or if you exercise regularly and/or lift weights it’s about 1g/kg of body weight. There are more nuanced calculations but for the average person this is a good place to start.
So the slim fast diet of a shake for b’fast and lunch and a sensible dinner is not going to preserve lean mass while cutting fat mass. Putting on and taking off fat mass is a long-haul endevor. The body does not like to operate in extremes it works super hard to keep things in a fine window of functionality.
