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Why are the best selling books all about diet and weight loss? We have emerged as a society that
craves the next best secret plan to lose weight and slim down. We devour these dietary gospels cover to cover until we become
obsessed with the latest “proven” way to keep fat off permanently. You “go on a diet” or you “go
off a diet”. That’s why diets are really bad for you and in the long run actually set you up for a lifetime of
storing fat. How? Well, most diets are about eating less food or restricting certain kinds of foods. Most of them work in
the short term, because if you reduce your calorie intake, your body starts to burn itself off in order to keep itself alive.
It sounds a little cannibalistic, but our bodies are unique in that self-preservation and protection are an ongoing, natural
occurrence. The first thing your body does when it is short on calories is to dump the body tissue that takes the most calories
to maintain. That’s muscle. So, on a low calorie diet, your body burns away muscle and tries to store fat. YES……STORES
FAT !!! Sure, you’ll lose weight, and you’ll eventually start losing fat as well. BUT, when you “go off”
your diet, you’ll start to to put weight back on. And guess what kind of weight you’ll gain? PURE FAT. Also, you
have taught your body a harsh lesson: It has to be on the lookout for potential low-calorie periods in the future, so it had
better store fat just in case. You’ve also lost valuable calorie-burning, fat burning muscle, so you’re likely
to end up fatter than you were before your diet. That’s why people who try diet after diet not only don’t lose
weight, they gain it. Also, eating 3 meals a day is not enough. You have long periods of time between your next meal when
your body needs the energy, but it’s not there. It begins the process of “slowing down” your metabolism
and also storing fat because, as you have conditioned your body, it doesn’t know when it will be nourished next. Then
when you finally do eat, you may over eat because you are so ravenously hungry. Your body will never be able to burn off all
of those extra calories. You are creating an energy imbalance. If you want to control your weight, it is essential that you
eat! Add three snack times in addition to your 3 meals and you will balance out your energy more, lose fat and increase your
lean body mass, power and endurance. A
program that combines strength training and eating foods that give your body a well balanced supply of nutrients and muscle
building components, is one in which you can live your life by…easily! In order to control your weight you have to
recognize the fact that our bodies have their own natural fat burning mechanism….muscle. Building just a few pounds
of muscle in your body is the physiological equivalent of kicking fat out on its butt and telling it never to come back again.
Muscle exponentially speeds up the fat-busting process: 1 pound of muscle requires your body to burn up to 50 extra calories
a day just to maintain that muscle. Now think of what would happen if you add a mere 6 pounds of muscle. It’ll take
your body up to 300 extra calories a day just to feed that muscle. Essentially, you’ll burn off an extra pound of fat
every 10 days without doing a thing, (and more so if you change your diet to include foods that promote muscle growth, like
lean protein). You will turn fat into muscle!
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