Benefits of Fat Loss and Muscle Gain
Most people give up too early in the game when they stop making visible progress.
Before I outline the steps on how to lose fat and gain muscle, I want to highlight the social and personal benefits you’ll experience once you’ve reached the other side in hopes that it’ll motivate you keep going till you’ve reached your desired results.
Increased Discipline to Reach Our Goals
Body transformations don’t happen overnight.
You don’t get results by eating well just once a day or going to the gym once a week. When you commit to the journey, you understand the importance of building the right habits and having the discipline to follow through.
It’s not about willpower, but having the focus to develop a consistent set of actions that will get you closer to your goals. Once a habit has been developed, they go on autopilot requiring little to no willpower.
Consistent discipline is something that gets developed over the journey and what all successful people have in common.
A Source of Stress Relief
For those who love to workout, the gym is considered a sanctuary and outlet for relieving stress.
One of the reasons I fell in love with lifting weights is because I can completely focus on one thing at a time and experience a state of flow. It’s the place where I get to focus just on me and how I feel, forgetting my life outside of the gym.
Working out is one of the best ways to relieve stress while improving your health after having a bad day. No one has ever said I regret working out!
Aesthetics
The best part of this journey and usually the primary reason we started is so we can love what we see in the mirror again.
Flabby arms transform to strong defined arms and shoulders that we love to show off in tank tops. Our soft muffin top turns to a toned, firmed midsection that we can show off on the beach.
We start feeling amazing about our bodies again!
Lifting weights makes you feel attractive and feeling attractive makes you feel confident. For the first time we start identifying ourselves as strong and feel sexy as hell!
Skyrocket Your Metabolism to Lose Fat
The ability to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time is one of the biggest misunderstandings of body transformations because they are opposite metabolic processes.
To lose fat, you must eat in a caloric deficit; and to gain muscle, you must be in a caloric surplus but you cannot do both at the same time.
When you look at pictures, it looks like it can be done simultaneously; but what is actually happening is a change in fat and muscle percentages.
If your weight stays the same through your journey and your body fat decreases, your percent of lean muscle mass automatically goes up by default. You didn’t gain any muscle but your fat and muscle ratio percentages just shifted.
Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)
You’ve heard that to lose weight and gain muscle, you should be eating lots of protein. This is true for a number of reasons:
- Increasing protein in your diet automatically lowers your intake of other types of foods like processed carbs.
- Protein increases satiety so you never feel like you’re deprived when cutting back and eating less calories.
- The building blocks for your muscles are found in protein. Animal sources of protein are a more complete source of protein versus plant protein. A diet of only plant protein will require eating a large variety of sources to get the equivalent nutrients found in animal protein.
- Protein has a high TEF. About 30% of the calories you eat from protein are burned off during the digestion process which includes absorption and waste removal of it. Eating more protein as oppose to other macros increases the amount of calories burned during digestion. That’s why you feel fuller with a higher protein diet.
Calculating Your Calories to Lose Fat
There are many good calorie calculators out there that will give you an estimate on how much to eat to start losing fat. Usually cut about 10 to 15% of your TDEE calories to start the process.
Remember that the calculators are just an estimate. It’s up to you to track your measurements and to adjust your caloric intake to ensure that you’re getting the results you’re looking for and modify your calories if you’re not.
Metabolism calculators take into account four different ways your body burns calories to come up with your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) or how many calories you burn in a day. The four different ways are your resting metabolic rate, the thermic effect of food, thermic effect of activity, and non-exercise activity thermogenesis.
Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)
This is your baseline metabolism at rest or how many calories your body needs to survive if you spent the entire day lying in bed awake.
RMR accounts for about 60 to 75% of your total daily energy expenditure. Your RMR is mostly determined by how much you weigh. A heavier person has a higher RMR than a lighter person even if the lighter person has a higher lean muscle mass because the metabolism of muscle only contributes to about 20% of your total RMR energy expenditure.
Thermic Effect of Activity (TEA)
The calories burned in TEA are relatively minor in your entire TDEE equation. TEA is any calories burned during official exercise like going to the gym, an aerobics class, or for a run. It covers any exercise you do outside of your normal activities.
Boosting Your Confidence and Social Capital
Aside from seeing changes in the mirror, a boost in confidence is the biggest change people experience when they start lifting weights.
Instead of using clothes to hide their bodies, they start dressing differently. They become more comfortable with putting on clothes that are the right size for them and show off their hard earned muscles.
Many of us go through a phase of social anxiety and extreme insecurity during our school years that follow us through adulthood. But when we start lifting weights, that feeling of self-consciousness disappears and we notice that people start treating us differently in a good way.
The steps to losing fat and gaining muscle are simple but the journey to get there is not.
Tracking and measuring your calories is the quickest way to lose fat along with increasing your activity level outside of the gym. Having a stronger, more toned body can be yours when you follow the laws of building muscles consistently.
