[ck]

My opinion:

I haven't been posting much in the last month and a half, so since i'm getting back to be committed to my exercise and diet again, i thought i'd start posting some more again. I used to post a lot on the importance of maintaining muscle mass. Seems like it is time to do it again. Seeing a lot people wanting to lose huge amounts of weight quickly. While this is emotionally satisfing, it presents some problems. Fast weightloss does not equal fatloss. Fast weightloss is appropriate if a medical condition is involved or just to gain mobility to be able to pursue a healthier lifestyle.

Fast weightloss results in loss of as much muscle as fat. Why is this important? As one phenster said to me recently "women don't care about muscle". Muscle is the main factor keeping your metabolism (the amount of calories you burn each day and hence how many calories you can eat each day without gaining weight) high. For example, everyone knows your metabolism slows as you age (due somewhat to hormone changes) and it becomes easier to gain weight. Studies shows that through resistance training to maintain a youthful muscle mass, the metabolism slowing is hardly noticible. Maintaining muscle mass is the key factor.

How does this directly apply to dieting? Some of you may have heard of the viscious cycle of dieting. Dieting ... gaining more back ... dieting gaining even more back ... etc. Besides being caused by not maintaining healthy life style, a big factor in this is due to muscle loss, caused by ill concieved dieting. Crash dieting is not condusive to a lifestyle change and results in loss of muscle. Two strikes against it. The loss of muscle will make it easier to gain back the weight, because at the end you can not even eat as much as you could in the beginning without gaining weight. Most likely you will gain back more weight. Then if you go on another crash diet you will lose even more muscle. Soon a stick of celery will cause you to gain weight because your metabolism is so slow. And even at the same previous weight you will actually be fatter than before.

Example by the numbers:

First Diet: Say we have a 200 pound woman who has a lean mass of 110 pounds. She has a 45% bodyfat at this weight. She goes on a very restrictive diet and losses 50 pounds. But because she lost weight very fast she loses 15 pounds of muscle in addition to the fat loss. She now weighs 150 lbs with a lean mass of 95 pounds. She has a 36% body fat. If she had loss slower she could have loss 50 pounds and maybe 5 pounds of it was muscle. She would be at 30% bodyfat and look even slimmer than the other way.

Second Diet: Same women gains back 60 pounds. Now weighs 210 and has lean body mass of 95 pounds. After diet she weighs 150 again. But she has lost another 15 pounds of muscle in diet and 45 pounds fat. At 150 she now has a body fat of 46% at same weight as before and metabolism is even slower. And she is fatter at target weight than ever before.


Some articles:

How to Reduce Muscle Loss When Dieting?

Weight loss studies have shown that when we diet, the weight we lose is on average 75 percent fat and 25 percent muscle. This is bad news, because the less muscle we have on our body the fewer calories we need and the easier it is to gain weight!

The good news is, you can reduce this muscle loss by adding resistance or strength training to your regular exercise routine.

Strength training is any exercise that uses resistance - like, weights - to strengthen and condition the musculo-skeletal system, thus improving muscle tone and endurance, and boosting lean (muscle) tissue. It includes, rowing, climbing stairs, as well as exercises like pushups. "Strength-training" is used as a general term synonymous with other common terms: "weightlifting" and "resistance training."

Dieting and Metabolism
by Renee Cloe
ACE Certified Personal Trainer

Low calorie dieting slows your metabolism, making it progressively more difficult to lose weight and keep it off. The failure rate of most diets is astronomical, yet people continue to try one after another, always hoping that each new scheme will provide the solution. If you’re a veteran of the diet wars, the one word answer to your dilemma may be muscle. Let’s take a look at why diets often fail and how strength training and a healthy appetite can rev up your metabolism.

Dieting fails due to a combination of hormonal changes, muscle loss, and flat out frustration. When faced with a shortage of calories, your body’s natural response is to conserve fat. This mechanism may have come in handy for your distant ancestors trying to survive a famine, but the "starvation response" and it’s associated hormonal changes make life difficult for many a dieter.

If a dieter persists long enough with the self-imposed famine, the body begins to break down muscle tissue for fuel. When protein is broken down, it releases nitrogen. Your body will quickly wash away the nitrogen by releasing water from tissue cells, causing an immediate reduction in water weight and a noticeable drop on the scale. However, water and muscle loss is nothing to celebrate. The water weight will be quickly regained as soon as you have something to drink, and the missing muscle can wreak havoc on your metabolism for a good long time.

Muscle is a metabolically active tissue. It requires a certain number of calories each day to maintain itself. Therefore, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn even when you’re just sitting around. As your muscle mass drops, so does your daily calorie requirement. Suppose, for example, that a dieter loses 10 pounds of muscle (along with maybe 20 lbs. of fat) on a strict diet. Now suppose that each pound of muscle had been burning 50 calories a day just sitting there. Together, those 10 pounds of muscle had been burning 500 calories a day. With this muscle tissue gone, the dieter must now consume 500 fewer calories a day in order to maintain that weight-loss.

However, we know that most dieters won’t keep up the starvation routine for long. They’ll eventually return to their old eating habits. When this happens, the weight inevitably comes piling back on. The kicker is that while they lost both muscle and fat during the diet, what they put back was all fat. So, even though they may weigh the same as they did when they started, they now have a lot more fat and a lot less muscle than they did before the diet. This means that their metabolisms are slower and their calorie requirements are lower. Even if they return to their pre-diet eating habits, they still require 500 fewer calories a day due to the muscle loss. That’s one reason dieters are prone to regaining all of the lost weight and then some.

The solution to this dilemma is an active lifestyle that includes aerobic exercise, a solid weight training program, and a healthy diet. What is a healthy diet you ask? A healthy diet is based around whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, and lean protein. A healthy diet keeps your metabolism in high gear with 4 to 6 small meals a day. It’s flexible enough to allow for popcorn at the movies or cake at a birthday party. No food is off-limits, but sweets and high fat junk food are eaten less often and in smaller quantities. A healthy diet is realistic and permanent; not something you suffer through for a week or two and then quit.

The goal is to consume as many calories as you can while still losing body fat and maintaining or gaining lean muscle. If your calories are already below normal, don’t restrict them further. Instead stick with your current amount and focus on becoming stronger and more active, so you can gradually increase your calories to a normal healthy level. If your calorie intake is already in a healthy range, decrease it only slightly, and only if necessary. A small reduction of about 250 calories a day, or 10-15 percent less than usual, is more likely to protect your lean muscle and less likely to trigger a slow-down in your metabolism.

Following this type of routine, it’s possible to gain about one pound of muscle per week and lose about one pound of fat per week. The end result is that the number on the scale might not move much at all, it may even go up. Your clothes will get loser and your self-esteem will sky-rocket. Yet the number on the scale won't budge!?!?! It's at this point that a lot of people will chuck the weight training because they don't understand the physiology of what's happening.

The truth is that when you're strength training it's possible to get smaller and heavier at the same time. Muscle is a much denser tissue than fat. A pound of muscle is like a little chunk of gold, while a pound of fat is like a big fluffy bunch of feathers. The fat takes up more space on your body. At this point, it's best to toss out the bathroom scale and rely on the way you look and the way your clothes fit. The scale can be misleading and discourage you when you're actually doing great.

The bottom line is that you want to make strong, healthy, positive changes rather than punishing your body and your spirit with starvation. Your goal is the sleek healthy body of a naturally lean person who can enjoy what they eat. You want to avoid at all costs the frail sagging body of a chronic dieter who has to measure every morsel.

How to Reduce Muscle Loss When Dieting?

Weight loss studies have shown that when we diet, the weight we lose is on average 75 percent fat and 25 percent muscle. This is bad news, because the less muscle we have on our body the fewer calories we need and the easier it is to gain weight!

The good news is, you can reduce this muscle loss by adding resistance or strength training to your regular exercise routine.

Strength training is any exercise that uses resistance - like, weights - to strengthen and condition the musculo-skeletal system, thus improving muscle tone and endurance, and boosting lean (muscle) tissue. It includes, rowing, climbing stairs, as well as exercises like pushups. "Strength-training" is used as a general term synonymous with other common terms: "weightlifting" and "resistance training."

THE DANGERS OF DIETING
THE DANGERS OF DIETING Why is it that so many people are dieting? Why are they mostly women? And why has the incidence of obesity risen in North America when this national pastime has become more popular than ever?

I don't propose to answer all these questions in one small article, but I believe there are some major physiology basics that people are forgetting when they embark on their latest weight loss diet. I work as a Registered Dietitian, in the field of private nutrition counselling and eating disorders. This is an opinion paper and not meant to be a formal scientific review of the literature. Everyday I see the misconceptions people have about dieting and weight loss, so I just wanted to briefly share some of my knowledge about nutrition and the human body so that maybe even a few women will avoid the dangers of dieting and the cycle of despair it brings.

We know that we live in a culture that equates thinness with beauty, success, and happiness. Thus, the pressure for women to change their weight is enormous, and this is usually where the desire to diet comes in to play. It's too bad that the first information these women usually run into is 'magic' diets and pills promoted by company's whose major concern is their next dollar, not if someone actually loses weight or not. In fact, by using the typical calorie reduced diets, women are inevitably going to do these over and over again because in the process have trained their bodies to become better at storing fat. This of course leads to more profits for the diet companies. The information I am about to give you is knowledge the scientific community has had for years, yet because it is damaging to the 33 billion dollar diet industry, it is suppressed - the average consumer does not get this information.

Typical 'crash diets' fight your body's natural reaction to starvation. Lipoprotein lipase is an enzyme in the body that promotes fat storage and it increases tremendously when someone is not taking in enough food. The lowest energy level that a female who is 90 years old, bedridden, and 4'9 needs, is still approximately 1167 calories per day! Concentration camps during wars have shown us that humans need a minimum of 800-900 calories for sheer survival for any extended period of time. An average meal is around 500-600 calories so if someone skips breakfast, has a diet pop and salad for lunch, and a small dinner you can see how they could run dangerously close to these levels. A person's metabolism is the complex of chemical and physical processes involved in the maintenance of life, and the rate at which your body uses substances (ie. Burns calories)(1). When a human drastically reduces their food intake, their metabolism lowers, making it harder and harder to lose weight. This makes sense from a survival point of view, because if it continued at the same rate you would burn up! This is how people can end up 'yo-yo' dieting, because the body just gets better and better at storing energy. Cut calories, metabolism lowers; eat again (even if equal amount eaten before the dieting), and weight goes up. Usually higher than where they started. Of course the psychological damage diets can do are immense, and can take up another whole article, so for now we'll just look at the physical.

Let's look at starvation in the human body a little closer. When fuel is scarce, the body first uses up stored sugar in the liver and muscles. This stored sugar is called glycogen. Each glycogen is stored with a molecule of water, and this makes it relatively heavy. When they are metabolized, this is where one might see initial weight loss. During the first five to seven days of inadequate calorie intake, skeletal muscle protein is also broken down for energy. It is lost at approximately 360g (0.8 lb) lean tissue per day, and drops to a rate of 96g per day after those first five to seven days. This is not fat tissue. Adipose (fat) tissue will eventually be used for energy at a much lower rate of 18g per day. The body then shifts back and forth using muscle and fat tissue alternately. The last tissue to go would be the intercostal muscles necessary for respiration. The body also adapts to starvation by reducing activity, increasing one's need for sleep, and lowering body temperature.(2).

As one can see from this information, the weight loss that is seen with typical diets is mostly muscle and water. Muscle is actually the tissue that is the most metabolically active in the body. It burns calories just by being!

Okay, enough science. Hopefully you're convinced this is a dangerous way to lose weight. If someone really needs to lose weight to reduce their risk of heart disease or diabetes, for example, then how should they do it? Well, the answer is not magic, but it works with the body not against it and involves commitment and education.

First, let's look at what raises a person's metabolic rate. Eating regularly. I like to say every 4 hours or so - a meal or a snack - depending on the types of foods eaten. For example, a breakfast that includes whole wheat toast with peanut butter, a glass of milk, and a piece of fruit will last a lot longer than a bowl of Special K with a glass of juice. (The first one has fiber and more protein). The second thing that raises one's metabolic rate is the increase in muscle tissue. Good old exercise. Initially, someone may even gain a few pounds or stay at the same weight while doing this. The activity should be enjoyable, and something you could see yourself doing for a long time. Walking, hiking, swimming, lifting weights, aerobics, dancing, playing with children, any activity is going to help increase muscle tone.

Granted we can't eat fries and burgers, and drink lots of beer everyday to lose weight, but we can eat the amount of energy our bodies need in the day. The best way to do this is to follow Canada's Food Guide and decrease the fat intake in our diet (butter, oils, margerine, deep fried foods, pastries, chips, nuts, bologna, etc.). Notice, I said decrease, not eliminate. It is still okay to enjoy these foods once in awhile as long as one is eating a well-balanced, low-fat diet most of the time. The other improvement to make in one's diet would be an increase in fiber. Fiber is a non-digestible plant component found in foods such as brown rice, whole grain breads, bran and oat cereals, fruits, and vegetables. Fiber helps with digestion and elimination and also helps to fill a person up without adding too many calories.

So there you have it. A low-fat, high fiber diet, and plenty of enjoyable exercise. This is what will help an individual lose weight, and more importantly keep it off. No magic, no money to be made, just good sound information. Good luck, goodbye to unhealthy diets, and here 's to healthy living!

1. Webster's New World Dictionary. Gurlanik, D.1979.
2. Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics. Zeman, J.1991.


Jennifer Letham, RDN - 1998(jan)