Kevans thoughts for the month which are factual but tinged with his own special sense of humour so we don’t take ourselves too seriously!

I want to lose weight!

How often we hear that plea! There are only a few people who haven’t thought it and they fall in to two categories. The ‘I don’t care what I look like, this beer’s good for me and she does still love me I think’ category and the ‘I’m only seven stone category’ – aren’t they just the worst! Anyway, when we say we want to lose weight what we really mean (I hope) is that we want to lose body fat. You see, it is possible to lose weight in other ways none of which are particularly desirable in the long term.

Option one – Remove clothing. A bad idea, at best you’ll get cold, and at worst you’ll get arrested and spend the night trying to explain to the smirking boys in blue how you were only trying to lose weight!

Option two – lose water. Another bad idea. Probably the easiest way to lose weight but after five hours without water you have a head ache and after five days, you’re dead so we won’t be recommending that one then.

Option three – maybe try not eating much for 30 days and send out invitations for people to visit you in hospital but ask them not to bring grapes! You’ll have lost weight and probably a hefty amount of lean muscle tissue as well. You see major energy restriction (like the old crash diets) leads the body to believe it’s in a famine situation so the next time you do feed it (let’s say when you broke the fast and had a Mars bar!) The body thinks it may be the last meal for a while and stores this as fat straight on the hips. Not only that, but now you’ve lost some muscle tissue your body doesn’t need as much energy as it used to, to keep it going. Muscle is five times more metabolically active than fat so if you lose muscle you lose your ability to burn calories. Add all this together and you could end up weighing more than before!

No, the best way to lose weight is to lose fat – ‘but how?’ I hear you shout. Put simply you need to create an energy deficit whereby you burn more fuel than you put in. What we have to remember is that it takes all of 30 seconds to eat a Mars Bar (yes I do have a big mouth) and approximately 30 minutes to use those 330 Kcals during exercise.

And now the bit you didn’t want to hear – you need to be more active! The distressing news is that 1kg of body fat equates to 7700 Kcals which is enough energy to power a sedentary female for four days. Now obviously, taking exercise will increase calorie usage during the activity but here’s the magic bit. Your body will continue to burn extra calories for up to 24 hours after exercise and if you do some resistance training too so you increase your muscle bulk, that will also increase your metabolism so that you burn more calories for every hour of every day.

Well that sounds pretty easy – watch what you eat, exercise regularly and if you do some resistance training we might let you have a Chocolate Button on a Sunday (just the one mind). ‘But I don’t want big muscles’ I hear you ladies cry. Now let me tell you I’ve seen lots of women train their butts off and not a big muscle in sight, tone yes, bulk no – it’s to do with hormones. I’ve only seen two women who looked over muscular, one was a Czechoslovakian 400m runner (I won’t try to spell her name, she had a voice like Billy Goat Gruff and rattled when you shook her) and the other one was in the British Rowing Team and will have to remain nameless because she knows where I live!

All the best – eat less, train hard and wear sun screen!

Kevan
Personal Best Fitness Studio