That photo of fat vs muscle is a great one to help people visualize why they can still lose size but not necessarily lose much weight. I found another photo that clearly indicates why one must include exercise, specifically resistance type exercise, in any weight loss regieme.
How they took the pictures, I have no idea! But the top photo clearly shows what happens if you lose weight correctly, and the bottom photo shows what happens if you simply "diet" with no regard to exercise. Why is this important?
As a quick review for those that are not clear on the importance of exercise, first realize that muscle is metabolically active tissue. A pound of muscle tissue burns around 50 calories a day. Fat is inert. It just sits there as fuel storage. It burns little, if any calories.
When you diet by cutting calories, you lose mainly two things – water and muscle tissue. On that WL4I diet, for instance, they advertise that you can lose 9 lbs every 11 days. Right! Likely 5 lbs of that weight loss is comprised of muscle. What happens when you lose muscle is that your metabolism slows. Once you come off the diet, you’re ravenous and start eating. Only now, having lost five pounds of muscle, you can only assimilate 250 less calories than you could before the diet. If you just ate as much as you did before the diet, you would store an extra 250 calories a day as fat. That works out to about a pound gain in fat every 2 weeks.
Now every time you “diet”, the cycle is repeated. You continue to lose more and more muscle tissue each time you “diet” - the muscle "atrophies" as the picture above shows, and you keep getting fatter and fatter. All is not lost, though. The good news is that muscle tissue and your metabolism can be restored through proper eating and exercise.
Now a fair question you might ask would be, why does the body burn muscle and not fat when you diet? So lets answer that. We’ve all heard of carbohydrates. They are a plant based food source that gets their energy from sunlight. Once carbohydrates are digested and broken down into simple sugars, the liver converts them to glucose that is then carried to the body cells to supply energy to the cells. The liver also converts glucose to glycogen, the storage form of glucose that is also used to fuel the muscles.
Now when we “diet”, one of the first things we cut back on are the carbohydrates. Once the supply of glucose is depleted, the body has to find more. Glucose can’t be created from fat. But through a process called gluconeogenesis, muscle tissue can be broken down to create glucose. That’s why we lose muscle on calorie-restricted diets.
It should be noted too that a molecule of glycogen holds a great deal of water. As we use up our supply of glycogen, water is released. That accounts for the initial drop in weight we see when we “diet”. It’s simply a matter of water being released from the tissues because glycogen supplies are being depleted.
As we’ve seen, we can’t afford to lose any of the lean muscle tissue we have. We need all we have to burn fat. And that is what modern weight loss is all about – losing fat, not pounds. You could lose 5 lbs of fat, but build 5 lbs of lean and the scale would show no improvement. But you would be a much smaller person because muscle is so much more compact than blubber. Look again at that photo that illustrates the difference between a pound of muscle and a pound of fat and you will clearly see why you can be a smaller, healthier person without losing too much weight – if you go about it the proper way!
So how then do you lose weight correctly? You need to utilize three techniques in your strategy. First, eat a nutritious diet, but one that has slightly fewer calories than your daily requirements so as to create a slight calorie deficit. Second, start a program of cardio work to burn the fat, and third, also include resistance exercise into your workout routine to help maintain the muscle mass you have. This is a case of “synergy” where the combined effect of diet, cardio, and resistance, is greater than the sum of their individual effects alone.
Another Great Photo Showing Why You Must Exercise!
