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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Losing weight - muscle or fat

After my 'you don't have to exercise to lose weight' post I did some more thinking. While I still agree with the post, there is an important fact you need to consider. When you lose weight, you not only lose fat, but also muscle and because I am not doing ANYTHING to keep my muscles (unless you call lifting my toddler exercise) that means the weight I'm dropping is also precious muscle.

Muscle is so important, even though it weights more than fat, the more muscle you have the more energy you burn, which is from the food you eat. Therefore, I think I need to add in a little muscle burning to my week. I plan to do this through a bit of weight training. Now anyone who hasn't done any weight training before may think I'll turn into a incredible hulk, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact women have a particularly hard time putting on solid muscle and have to work really hard to do it. I've weight trained before, really seriously weight trained and while my muscles got tighter, they didn't grow very much.

The fact it, you need to feed your muscles good protein on top of what you need daily for energy and I'm just not prepared to do that right now. I just don't have the time to think about anything else, so I just want to add a bit of muscle maintaining workouts into my day. A few squats/lunges here and there and a few press ups and maybe something for my shoulders and back. If you concentrate on the big muscles, the little ones will come along for the ride :-)

I lost another kg (2 pounds) this week which is pleasing. I expect the losing will slow down now my body is onto what I'm up to ;-) but I'm still feeling really determined.

So my goals for March are:
1. Drink more water
2. Add a few muscle maintaining routines into my day

What are your goals for March?
ZG

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