By Jorgen Albrechtsen
Conventional wisdom would decree: “Eat less and exercise more and you get the lean, healthy body you have dreamed of.” However, this is not really the case and here is why:
When you eat fewer calories than you require to meet your body´s energy needs, your body turns to its fuel stores – body fat and stored sugar – to make up the difference by breaking down or burning up its tissues. On a low calorie diet, your body will recognize that it doesn’t have nearly enough protein coming in for the day-to-day growth and repair of body tissues. To make up the difference, in addition to burning fat and stored sugar for energy, the body will begin to break down muscle that it will turn into the protein raw materials it needs for critical functions. Since muscle has weight, breaking it down and using it up results in weight loss on the scale – but not the kind of loss you´re after. Studies have repeatedly shown that on a low-calorie diet, as much as 40 to 60 percent of the weight loss is from muscle, bone and vital organs. If you add aerobics to the mix, believe it or not, you can actually lose more muscle on a typical low-calorie eating plan than if you didn’t exercise at all. Too little food plus aerobics exercise often equals muscle loss. You want to lose excess fat not muscle tissue.
The Futile Cycle of Yo-Yo Dieting
If you continue the approach of “eat less exercise more” and try to maintain your weight loss (loss of muscle), you are more than likely doomed to failure, because your reduced muscle mass now burns so many fewer calories that unless you are prepared to stay on starvation rations forever, your weight will creep back up. Only this time when you return to your original starting weight, you will be worse off than you were before because you now have less muscle and even more body fat. If you decide to take yet another crack at losing weight using the same old prescription, you´ll fall into the futile cycle that we all know as yo-yo dieting.
Turn Your Body Into a Fat Burning Machine
Concept 10 10 turns your body into a fat burning machine, not because of the extra calories you expend in the workout, but rather because of the metabolic and hormonal changes it brings about. When you work a muscle to the point of failure, as you do with Concept 10 10, it sends out hormonal signals to the rest of your body telling it to preserve the muscle at all costs. Once the body receives these signals, it will pretty much leave the muscle intact and go after your stored body fat to make up its caloric deficit.
But here is the best part: lean muscle mass requires the burning of energy – that is, it has to burn calories just to sustain itself in your body. So the more lean muscle you have versus fat, the more calories you burn while you sit, while you relax, and while you sleep. A lot more! Three extra pounds of lean muscle burns about 10,000 extra calories a month, just sitting around!
Since aerobic exercise like jogging burns only about 100 calories per mile, and a typical aerobic workout burns 100 calories every 15 minutes, having 3 extra pounds of muscle burns as many calories as running 25 miles per week, or doing 25 aerobic workouts per month without leaving your couch!
Your muscles will burn calories 24 hours a day by itself, just by being there. Concept 10 10 will actually turn your body in an automatic fat burning machine!
The Importance of Losing Fat and Gaining Lean Muscle
And don´t forget 1 pound of muscle takes up much less space than 1 pound of fat. So, if you lose 5 pounds of fat and gain 5 pounds of muscle, your body will look quite different, but you will still weigh the same. This also illustrates the point that you should not be obsessed with your scale, but rather with losing excess fat and gaining lean muscle tissue.
How Should You Eat?
Forget about various diets and special solutions, those are mostly marketed to confuse the public and sell magazines, powder and pills that are utterly useless. The answer to losing fat is quite simple: If you are overweight, eat 10% less of everything, which is not too tough to accomplish. At the same time, try to avoid eating too much sugar and fat. Combine this with a once a week 20 minute Concept 10 10 workout, and you will be amazed at what will happen to your body and your well-being.
Spot Reducing
Spot reduction is the idea that exercising a specific body part, such as the abdominals, causes the involved muscles to use the surrounding fat for energy. This belief is the reason high repetition sit-ups, side bends, leg raises, and twisting movements have been practiced for years as a way to remove fat from the waist.
Spot reducing might seem logical to a lot of people, but, unfortunately, it does not work that way. It would be nice if the fat cells would be taken from areas where you have the most fat deposits. But there are no direct pathways that exist from your fat cells to your muscle cells. When fat is used for energy, it is mobilized primarily through your liver from fat cells all over your body. The mobilization process actually operates in reverse order from which you store fat. The last places you store fat are usually the first from which you lose it. The thickest layers of fat for a man are usually located on the waist. A woman sometimes stores fat there, too, but usually the thickest layers are over the buttocks and upper thighs.
Why do the Western nations have the fattest people who have ever lived on Earth, and the highest obesity percentage ever? The simple answer is—we have the most plentiful and most accessible food supply, combined with the fact that our leisure-time activities increasingly revolve around television, movies, computers, and other passive activities. But we also have the capacity to be the smartest people who have ever lived. At least, we have access to information that provides us with that potential. To become smarter, we must understand and act.
The Myth about Heart and Lung Endurance
At first, when we explain to people that aerobics doesn’t really strengthen the heart and lungs – that instead it makes their muscles a little stronger and it just seems like their hearts and lungs work better – and we tell them that 20 minutes a week doing a Concept 10 10 workout will give them as much endurance as three hours of jogging, they often look at us like we must be nuts!
However, this unlikely claim is true! The Concept 10 10 workout will give you greater cardiopulmonary fitness and endurance than running. The endurance you get from running along for miles every week comes not from any cardiovascular conditioning but from the strength that such a routine ultimately develops, as well as the sport-specific training effects that occur. The heart and lungs don´t get much stronger, if at all. The muscles in general, and in the legs and hips in particular, become stronger, and this increased muscular strength brings about the changes we call ”getting in shape.” Running and other forms of “aerobic” exercise strengthen the muscles. Stronger muscles working more efficiently to draw oxygen from the blood reduce the demand on the heart and lungs, which gives the impression of improved cardiovascular or cardiopulmonary fitness.
Strengthening Muscles is The Key
You have the heart and lungs you are born with. Each of these organs has a limited performance capacity, and as long as you are working within that capacity, they seem to work just fine. When you exceed that capacity, however, the perception is that your heart and /or lungs are out of shape. As you age and lose muscle mass, activities you used to do with ease when you were stronger now become difficult, you pant and puff and your heart pounds when you try to do them. But that isn’t because your heart and lungs have gotten weaker – your muscles have, and as a result, their inefficiency makes you exceed the comfort level and capacity of your cardiopulmonary system. You don´t need to strengthen your heart and lungs; in fact, you can´t. You need to strengthen your muscles so that they can once again function easily within the capacity of your heart and lungs.
For more information, testimonials, or videos, go to www.naples.concept1010.com. Call for a free introductory session: North Naples – 239.431.7143 or Downtown – 239.659.1033.