Why is Fat Loss more important than Weight Loss ?
08-09-2017 | Posted By: Chhavi | 3597 View(s)
Raise a hand if you consider yourself or know someone who proudly acknowledges oneself as a ‘Fitness Freak’?
I cannot physically see the raised hands, but if I had to guess, I’d say most, if not all of you did raise your hand (raising hands figuratively would also count). It is not uncommon to see people queuing outside gyms or yoga centres every morning these days.
People are putting more emphasis on being fit now more than ever. And they are becoming conscious of what and how much they eat and try to keep a count of the calories they burn daily, all in the pursuit of being fit. So Why is Fat Loss more important than Weight Loss? Read on to get the answer.
But, what does it mean to ‘Be fit’?
A lot of times People lack a clear understanding of what it means to be fit. Conventionally, we relate being thin to being fit. You might often hear someone saying this sentence, “I don’t need to exercise, I’m already thin.”
Being fit doesn’t just mean that you can fit into your pair of jeans better. Being fit also means feeling good about yourself and improving your overall health. People usually believe that to get fit they need to lose lots of weight. But, nothing can be farther than the truth.
Don’t focus on Weight Loss
Weight loss is the combination of muscle, fat and water loss of your body. This is the metric through which people usually measure their fitness. But, we want to tell you that you shouldn’t focus only on weight loss.
Weight loss might look good on the weighing scale, but it probably won’t help you much in looking and feeling better. If you are overweight, then you may need to lose a little weight, but one’s primary area of focus to achieve a greater level of fitness should be ‘fat loss’.
What is Fat Loss?
Fat loss, as you might have guessed is the loss of fat in your body. It is easy to confuse between fat loss and weight loss, but they are two different concepts. A simple trick to check your body fat percentage is to press the skin on your arms between your fingers. The thickness of your skin will indicate the level of fat in your arms. Ideally, the fat percentage in a male body should be around 10-15%, and in a female body, it should be 15-20%.
Why is Fat loss more important than Weight Loss?
People often use diets as a method to get fitter, not realising what is actually happening inside their bodies when they are dieting. When you are on a diet, you are essentially trying to reduce the number of carbohydrates in your body.
Carbohydrates bond with water to create mass, so a loss in the level of carbohydrates is directly proportional to water weight loss. That is why dieting shows such good results on the weighing scale. But would you feel fitter?
Water weight loss won’t be of much help to you if you want to get in better shape. And water mass can be just as quickly gained too, so all the efforts you put in dieting would prove pointless eventually. Controlling your diet is a good thing, but don’t believe in crash diets or some other similar hokums. Just make sure to eat as many calories as your body can effectively digest. This will depend on your body’s Basal Metabolic Rate popularly known as the BMR.
Even losing muscle mass can be dangerously counter-productive. Cardio exercises can help you increase the rate of weight loss, but without any strength training, they will only cause muscle loss. Diets as we saw cause loss in water levels in our body and without hydration, the muscles will start to shrivel up since water keeps them plump and vital.
Muscles are the fat burning mechanisms of our bodies. Building muscles increase your metabolism rate. This means that the more muscles you build, the more calories your body will naturally burn each day on its own.
If you remember, I told you, in the beginning, weight loss is the combination of water weight loss, muscle weight loss and Fat loss. We already ruled out water weight loss and muscle weight loss, which means we need to focus on fat loss, which is what I’ve been telling since the beginning of this article! If only I didn’t have to spend so much time in convincing you.
Tips to achieve Fat Loss
There is only one effective way to achieve fat loss, and that is by gaining muscles. Recall that I already told you, muscles are the fat burning mechanisms of our body. Even if you are sitting idle, your body will require much more energy to maintain the muscles; than it does to maintain fat. Thus, muscles will help you in avoiding weight gain, even if are not working out regularly.
So to acquire this important muscle mass, you should include strength training in your workout routine. Add some resistance in your daily workouts by using weights, or perform exercises which would increase your physical strength over time.
Strength training can help you reduce fat and replace it with muscle mass. This would not show immediate changes in your weight, but you would certainly start to feel a lot better. I hope this helps you in your pursuit of fitness and will answer your question as to Why is Fat Loss more important than Weight Loss!
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