Losing weight vs losing Body Fat

Before you start your body fat fight you first need to realise the difference between losing weight and losing body fat.

Obviously if you’re fighting obesity these two concepts may sound the same thing. But there is a difference, and being aware of that difference will help you keeping a positive mindset and will avoid mistakes and feelings of failure and will keep your motivation high. This is especially important when you’re weight training. (Which is the fastest and more efficient way to lose body fat)

Having this in mind, the first step that you need to take is to get rid of your bathroom scale. This will firstly help you avoiding keeping track of your weight loss hourly, or daily, which to be honest is what 99% of anyone starting a fat loss regime do. I know what I’m saying as I’ve been there and that was exactly what I kept doing wrong. Track your weight weekly rather than daily, this is the best advice that I can give you.

The second step that you need to take is to measure your body fat percentage and if possible your muscle mass. Then you can keep track of your progress by measuring your BF% and muscle mass weekly as well.

And this brings you to the start of your training.

Today I’m only going to discuss the training side and will discuss the diet in future articles.

Being here you need to plan how many days a week you can take to train. If you are a newbie to exercise or it has been a while since you last trained, then I suggest 3 weekly sessions. Anything between 40 minutes to one hour will be a good start.

So now that you have taken few steps to get you ready to start, and that you’ve decided to plan your sessions, you are going to approach the training itself.

What type of training? Cardio or weights? If is a mix of both then how much cardio and how much weight training?

To these questions I reply WEIGHT TRAINING.

Definitely.

Some cardio as well, why not? But only the cardio enough that triggers your fat cells to burn. Excessive cardio will initially burn your fat cells but then will also burn your muscle mass. Maybe you have been there, and you did two hours of gym work, using your time mainly between the treadmill, cross trainer and gym bike. What happened? Maybe you lost some fat initially, I don’t doubt, but I bet that it came to a point that you found that your progress stopped, and you still had a bit of a belly to lose. You didn’t know where you were going wrong as your diet was good, you did all the classes at the gym, left the gym sweating like mad and still nothing happened.

I’ll tell you what happened. You had a wrong approach to your training.

What is the best approach then? Where does weight training come into equation? How can weight training help you losing fat?

About this I will discuss in my next article.

Filipe