With improving living standards and higher disposable income, this has resulted in a new type of self made disease. This disease is call obesity or otherwise known as “rich man” disease. Why? …Have you ever seen a poor beggar suffering from obesity? You will really be hard pressed to find one on the streets. Because of changes in our lifestyles, the foods that we take today are no longer healthy. With pressure like time constraints, people seem to spend more time at restaurants rather than at home. With what is normally served at restaurant, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a person will gain weight quickly.
Wrong! Self-proclaimed fitness gurus, charlatans, etc. would advise you to lose weight. But they are giving you just a general type of advice. If you visit a doctor or a professional nutritionist, they will tell you that it is the FAT you should lose, NOT weight!
Our body is made up of not just fats. It is comprised of muscles, bones and other tissues as well and water. When you bear this in mind , only will you realizes that the phrase “weight loss” is misleading and inappropriate. So what most people are actually referring to is “Fat Loss” but sad to say many are unaware of this important difference.
So if you are set for losing weight, you could end up in endangering your health instead. How can you do something right when you don’t even know what you are doing?
With so many ways to lose weight quickly, how would you know which is the correct method? To be more aware what is good and bad, let us take and example of a starving yourself to lose weight. You might lose some weight initially, but are you losing the right kind of weight? You might find that at the end of the day that you didn’t lose a single gram of fat.
When you starve, your body’s primary energy source (that is, food) is cut off. It will then look for the available carbohydrates in order to produce energy. When the carbohydrates are all used up it will then turn to protein, and your muscle tissues. Only when all your muscles are burned away will your body turn to burn fat!
As you can see, if you starve, fat is one of the last things you will lose, and muscle is one of the first! You will lose valuable muscles, make your bones weak and cripple your body in several different ways by starving. But that is not where it ends.
Most people starve for a few days and then they are unable to bear with hunger anymore! What they do next is start gorging on food like never before! This won’t necessarily help you regain your lost muscle mass, unless you exercise regularly, but you will surely gain a lot of extra fat than what you had! That is because in the absence of muscles, your fat is not burned at the level it used to be (do you know that the more muscles you have the more fat you can burn?)!
If you are serious about trimming down that huge tummy, you need to lose FAT, not weight, and for that, you not only need to eat healthy foods regularly, but also workout at least five times per week. Choose a weight loss program that meets the above criteria!
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