I was talking to a friend of mine today, and she was lamenting how she hadn’t lost any weight in the last week. In fact, she actually gained a couple pounds. She has been eating low fat ala Susan Powter who I turned her onto. She has also been running, and using an elliptical with a heart rate monitor which I also turned her onto. I asked her if she had been drinking enough water. She admitted that she hadn’t been drinking much water. So I told her she need to drink more water. Anyway, she has been weighing her self daily, and measureing herself monthly. Today she decided that if she didn weight under 160 pounds, that she would measure herself a week early. Well, she weighed herslef, and it came out as 161 lbs. So she measured herself. She was shocked to find that she had lost a couple inches around her waist, and a couple around her chest, though just a little bit around the hips. How is this that she hasn’t lost weight, but has lost inches? Well, it’s simple. Muscle weighs more than fat. That’s it. So a fit athlete might wiegh as much as a plump couch potato, but the athlete will be slimmer at the same height and weight.
How to gain muscle and burn fat? She is running and exercising while staying in the aerobic zone. In the aerobic zone, you burn primarily fat. When you workout harder, you start going anaerobic, and you start buring less fat, and more carbohydrates. So to burn more fat, you need run, or exercise slower and stay aerobic. You can find this by using a heart rate monitor. There are many different formulas and ideas about how to identify your arobic zone. Most of them have you working out at a percentage of your max heart rate. A simple formula to ESTIMATE your max heart rate is 220 minus your age. Another is 205 minus half your age. Personally, I ran sprint intervals up and down a hill to max out my heart rate giving me the number 193 BPM. I am 43 years old, and defy the estimates. My own training program is a mixture of different philosophies. But I try to keep my heart rate between 135 and 150 for all of my workouts. So if you workout like this, you will gain muscle, and burn fat.
But you also want to eat healthy. I try to eat low fat. Fat has 9 calories per gram. While carbs have 5.5 calories per gram. From what I have read, your body only needs to burn a single calorie waorht of the fat, to store the other 8 calories worth as fat in your body. For carbs, your body needs to burn half of the calories (2.75), to store the other 2.75 calories worth as fat.
So eat healthy low fat foods, and workout trying to stay in theaerobic zone. That is how to gain muscle and burn fat.

Posted by Rob in Whatever on February 10th, 2007 |