Fitstreet - Mobile Personal Training in Surrey that guarantees results

The Big Fight: Diet v Muscle

Low calorie diets fail to deliver long-term results, yet more people than ever are chasing from one to the next, hoping to find that elusive answer to fat loss. Low calorie dieting does nothing except slow your metabolism, making it progressively more difficult to lose weight and keep it off.

Forget the term 'diet'. The word you are looking for is 'muscle'.

The more of it you have, the healthier your appetite will be and the higher your metabolism will soar. Muscle is a fat-burning furnace of 'goodness' that you simply can't do without - unless you want to remain wedged deep between 'fit' and 'fat'. The answer?

Hello strength training, goodbye starvation!

When you drastically cut calories, your body's natural response is to store fat. Despite doing this your body still needs feeding, so it goes in search of nutrition, which, while on a diet, obviously isn't going to be coming through your mouth in large amounts in the near distant future! So, it starts banging on the door of your muscles, demanding sustenance! Since your body is the landlord and your muscles are merely tenants inside, they have no choice but to hand over what the body wants.

If you persist in heavy dieting to lose weight, the body will break down muscle tissue for fuel. According to the scales you will drop a few pounds, leading you to believe that this self imposed act of starvation is working, but in reality your body is shrinking, your muscles are wasting, you're losing water weight and your metabolism is nose diving at an accelerated rate. Every time you go back on a diet your body devours a little more lean tissue to stay alive, leaving you will less defences each time to combat excess calories.

Maintain your lean muscle, eat healthily and regularly and your metabolism will remain lifted. Skip exercise, skip meals and slay calories and say hello to weight gain - pound after pound after pound...