SCALES ARE FOR FISH Muscle V’s Fat. That long thought over question, “Does muscles weighs more than fat?” The long and short of it is it doesn’t. A pound of muscles weighs the same as a pound of fat. The difference is that muscle is much more dense than fat, so by volume, (a pound of fat takes up about four times as much space as a pound of muscle), it would seem to weigh more. In laymen’s terms, a pound of muscle takes up less space than a pound of fat. Also, because a pound of muscle burns more fat than a pound of fat, even at rest, by increasing your lean muscle tissue mass, youre helping your body burn more calories. If you only have a small amount of weight to lose, then you may feel like increasing your muscles mass is not helping you move down on the scale. In fact your weight may even go up, but you will look thinner and your inches may go down. This is due to an increase in lean body mass (muscle, bone, blood volume) and a decrease in body fat. In other words, even if the scale doesnt change much, you will probably see a difference in how your clothes fit. On the other hand, if you have a lot of weight to lose, you will also experience an increase in lean body mass and loss of body fat. But the results on the scale will probably be more dramatic. So, the myth that muscle ‘weighs’ more than fat is busted but, too much body fat can contribute to serious health conditions like, coronary heart disease, diabetes and stroke. On the other hand too little body fat can have unhealthy consequences such as reproductive dysfunction in women. The body needs a healthy balance of both muscle and fat to function correctly and maintain good health and fuel an active lifestyle. Now, if you are really not convinced NOT to be so obsessed with the scales, consider these other factors that can affect weight. Weight loss and weight gain can be drastically affected by the following: Fat Muscle Water Glycogen Feces Now taking all this in to consideration, it may look sometimes like you have hit a brick wall with weight loss and plateaued but you could still be losing body fat and inches. That is why on your KSFL lifestyle journey we put a lot of importance on taking pictures and using inches and a measure of fat loss. Daily, weekly and monthly (TOM) fluctuations in body weight relating to the points listed above can give incorrect results in weight loss compared to fat loss. So in light of this information, “STEP AWAY FROM THE SCALES, SCALES ARE FOR FISH”
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 23:42:42 +0000