I was talking to a lady the other day who was 5’3” and 135 pounds. She came into the office because at 44 years of age, she was having trouble getting her weight down. She told me that she was doing everything right to lose weight but nothing was happening.
I asked her what she had been doing and realized that even though sometimes people think they know what they are doing when it comes to exercise and weight loss; often they don’t have a clue.
She told me that based on the fact that she wanted to lose 2lbs a week that she needed to burn off 1000 calories extra a week to meet her goals. She had cut her calories to below 1000 a day and was lifting light weights so she didn’t bulk up. It was then I knew where her problem was. To lose two pounds a week you actually need to create a deficit of 7000 calories over the period of a week through both diet and exercise. One pound of fat contains 3500 calories. To lose two pounds in a week, 7000 calories is the amount of calories you need to burn off. This large number is why people have such a hard time trying to drop weight with diet alone. It’s very hard to cut that many calories out of your diet unless you are eating way too much to start with. What you do to make it easier is exercise part of it off and eat only what you need to maintain your healthy muscle.
This combination approach not only makes the dieting aspect easier to handle but the exercise also remodels your entire physique for a total body transformation.
The funny thing is, most people I coach refuse to eat ENOUGH of the right foods and this causes the metabolism to shut down. This means a rapid stop to any fat burning and weight loss. Sometimes when people go too low with the calories and the body rebels. Its says, “Your not feeding me, so I’m not letting go of the only calorie storage I have, my fat”.
The other consideration and benefit of resistance training when losing weight is an increased metabolism created by maintaining a toned muscular body. The most common hurdle for females trying to lose weight and hitting the gym is that they lift too light out of fear of putting on too much muscle. Please put that fear aside.
Muscle growth is created through anabolic hormone systems in the body, specifically testosterone. As a female, you have less of this than a man and putting on enough muscle to make you look un-feminine, is a rare case. The women you see in the magazines are usually using drugs. So please don’t look at them as the norm of what happens when a women lifts heavy weights.
I hope this helps a little and trust me when I say that if you are looking to change your body, make sure that you’re efforts are based on solid facts and information from a professional. It really is a shame to spend all that time and effort on a strategy for weight loss based on myths and misinformation.
