Diet and Calories

I'd have to say that the vast majority of questions I get from people can fall into two categories: How to build muscle and how to lose fat. Typically  they ask what kind of workout routines they can do to achieve these goals. In reality your diet is just as important as your workout.

For gaining muscle you want to make sure your daily consumption of calories is the same as or greater than your daily expenditure. If not, your body will burn the protein you ingest (or quite possible already in your muscles) for energy rather than use it for repairs and growth. So if you are eating less than you are burning while doing your workout, you will actually end up losing your muscles! Especially for thin people, it can be quite difficult to eat the perfect amount while working out. This is why I recommend people to eat a bit more than they consume. It's a lot easier to manage and it gives a bit of breathing room rather than trying to match exactly and risk not eating enough. Those people with a little extra chub however, are able to get away with a bit more when pumpin' iron. With larger fat reserves to dip into I find the body will tend to build muscle better when there is more fat. 

Omnom

To simply lose fat is quite simple. Duh! Eat less than you consume. Wait, I lied, it's not that simple, it never is!  If you eat less than you burn in a day you will lose fat, but guess what happens when you go back to eating normal. You gain fat right back. Sometimes a bit faster if your previous diet was really skimpy. So not only should you reduce your intake but increase your consumption as well. There are a couple of ways to do that. One is to move more A.K.A. cardio. If you run, bike or swim every day then your daily consumption will increase. So decreasing your calories by 150 and increasing your consumption by the same amount will give a net difference of - 300 calories. To me that's easier than skipping desert! There's another problem though: soon as you miss a day of cardio you miss out on the added consumption.  Why must it be so hard!?

I wish I could say it's not so hard, but that would just be a lie. Don't be too worried just yet though, we have a few approaches here. So short term we can reduce calories by eating healthier and increase consumption by moving about. I call it short term because the effects only last as long as you're doing the activity. The long term approach  then is to think about actually changing our bodies. We can actually increase our natural calorie consumption. How do we do that? Well we build the parts of our bodies that burn energy. I'm sure most of you are already on board with what I'm getting at: increase your muscle mass! The more muscle mass you have on your body the more calories you'll burn just sitting around as well as moving around. 

Most of the guys are probably thinking "oh yeah, I can get ripped and lose fat at the same time!". I'm really hoping the ladies are thinking the same though, but I fear they won't. Many women have told me they avoid weight training because they don't want to get butch.

I R Butch. Grrr!

Well, I have a few things to say about that! When you look at images of the women above, they are huge exceptions to the rule! For one they have very low body fat levels which give them a more masculine look. It would be really hard to get to this level without doing it on purpose. Also, very important, is that it takes a very very very very VERY long time to build muscle like this and for most people quite impossible. The most muscle you could expect to put on in a year is 5 - 10 lbs. For women it's going to be far closer to the 5 lbs mark and if you're under 5'4 probably more like 2 or 3 lbs. This would also be if you had a very strict diet with a very intense and strict workout routine. Last, if you were to some how put on a bunch of muscle and didn't want to get any bigger, you could just stop increasing the weights and intensity of your workouts and you'll stop growing. You'd have a long time to see it coming too!

Here are some examples of women who are fitness models. I personally think these are all fairly achievable physiques to achieve. Being fitness models these women ALL work weights quite regularly. Oh also, these may not be safe for work.

And check out this lady. She's 42 and has gone through an amazing transformation, with resistance training!!

http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/SpicyHot/more.php?section=progresspics

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