When you gain weight you gain muscle and fat.
When you lose weight you lose muscle and fat.
So why do people get worried that they’re losing muscle plus fat when they lose weight?
It’s the nature of the beast.
It’s the nature of the beast to worry – about every action that creates change within and outside your body, the organism that is you, that you and you only own and control. It’s your body that’s changing and you’d better be worrying about the result. It’s your responsibility to do that.
It’s normal. Your body/mind is designed to expect inquiries into the self and what is going on with it at all stages and junctures of change. So you worry, then you realize both are your beast’s nature then you realize that in order to lose fat, you’re going to have to lose some muscle along with it.
Body building is different. Builders take growth hormones and aminos to add muscle mass. But they control where it gets added, or the sequence in which it gets added, by the extreme weight lifting, pulling and pushing they do to further expand the growth in the muscles they target.
Increasing exercise increases the need for more energy, which burns fat, but it also requires that the organism consume more calories.
Steve walks five to seven miles a day five days a week at work as a security officer. Then on days off he walks to various stores to shop.
No one would believe at his size that he walks that many miles. For five years he’s done that.
Throughout my life when I exercised the most is when I was the heaviest. Now that I have chronic pain from chronic injuries I can’t exercise nearly as much. The more I exercise, the more pain. Short term I used to be able to do about anything within reason. Not so now.
When I was a skinny kid, I didn’t exercise and didn’t weigh myself. I was active, very active. When I quit my nursing job to go to college, I gained twenty pounds. I wasn’t as active as I was working an eight hour shift then coming home to do chores.
I also ate more, since I was sitting around either in class or at home doing studies. Boredom appears to be the primary factor. What to do now or next. I experience that now, working such long hours on the computer.
It doesn’t matter that I’m up and down, up and down, doing other chores or activities in between the computer work. The frequent changes in activities doesn’t appear to contribute to weight loss as one might think.
So don’t sweat it when your muscles get smaller when you lose the fat. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s part of the big picture. You can worry if you want to; it’s normal. But in the same way that your body/mind alerts you to any loss – because that’s it’s job in case we fell asleep – it’s up to us to translate that as a good sign that your body/mind is communicating to you that it’s awake and attentive to what’s happening to YOU.
It’s not just a ‘HEY YOUR BODY’S ON FIRE’, stop doing what you’re doing. It’s more like a ‘MEMO TO THE BOSS’, you can’t have it both ways, lose only fat and not some muscle along with it. Be realistic in your demands of your organism. Settle down. It’s okay.
Later gators,
Sharon
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