If you missed Part 2 you can find it here…

As we discussed in Part 2 of this series, diet alone will typically not lead to success for individuals looking to lose and keep off weight.

You need to positively try to raise your metabolism while simultaneously being in the caloric deficit necessary for weight loss. This is only possible by watching both your nutrition program and by exercising properly!

So you’re convinced now that you need the right diet and you need to exercise. Given that we’re looking to lose weight, what type of exercise should we do? Well, cardio is what burns fat, right? To some degree, yes. But if done the wrong way, it’s only going to slow your metabolism down and set you up for failure in the long run. Let’s look at why.

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and you go on a reduced-calorie diet. You also know that exercise will help, so you add in some cardio. What’s going to happen? Well, remember, your body is getting the signal that it’s not getting enough external fuel from food, so it’s going to turn to its own body tissues as a fuel source. We’re hoping that the body will turn to stored fat as a fuel source, right? And to some degree, it will. However, it will also start to burn up its own muscle stores as a fuel source.

You may have heard that muscle mass burns a lot of calories, and this is true. Muscle is what we call metabolically active. A lot of muscle on a body is like a big engine in a car– it burns a lot of gas, or food. Fat, on the other hand, is metabolically passive. It’s like a real efficient 4-cylinder– great gas mileage. So what happens when you put the body into a caloric deficit for an extended period of time? It gets the signal that its not getting enough food, and thus turns to its own body tissues for fuel; and given that the muscle mass of the body is putting such a big demand on its system for calories, it will get rid of what it considers needless fat stores.

In other words, if you’re in a caloric deficit over time and just doing cardio, you are probably going to burn up a decent amount of muscle mass. When this happens, your metabolism will drop, because you no longer have as much muscle as you once did. Thus, in order to keep losing the rest of the fat, you need to reduce your calories ever more and do even more cardio. This leads to more muscle loss, and thus a slower metabolism, etc., etc., etc. It’s a downward spiral. Where are you in 6 months? You’ve hit a “plateau,” where you can’t lose the last ten pounds, and you can’t figure out why.

This is precisely why you need to weight train if you’re looking to lose fat. Don’t think of the weight training so much as a means of building muscle mass, as much as a means of retaining current levels of muscle mass while in a reduced caloric state. You need to give a certain stimulus to your body in order to force it to preserve muscle stores while in a reduced caloric state. This is why you weight-train for fat loss. Don’t worry about getting “excessively bulky”– you don’t have the calories to do so! Worrying about building huge muscles without taking in enough calories is like worrying about building a ten-story building without having enough bricks for a one-bedroom house. The bricks– and the calories– are the physical materials that allow for the building, or the body, to be built in the first place. Granted, you might be able to build a little amount of muscle while in a reduced caloric state, but you’re not going to look like a bodybuilder.

So now you understand why you need to weight train in order to lose, and keep off, body fat. What about cardio and diet?      Continue on to part 4 of our series for the answer… (look for it tomorrow)