Weight loss or body recomposition?

By gab

Do you really need to lose weight? Why is that? Are you not satisfied with the number or rather you need to change the composition of your body mass? Since weight loss is such a buzzword and we all feel a bit guilty of over eating we all phrase our needs as losing weight. However, for most of us the actual weight is a minor problem, what we really need is increase the ratio between fat and muscle mass. We just need to lose fat and put up some more muscles.

The distinction is not academic. It has great importance on how we tackle the problem. You can lose weight by losing water, which we do not want, or losing muscles mass which is also not what most people would like to achieve. What most of us need is to convert some of the fat stored by over eating into muscles while keeping our energy level high and our training abilities intact. We also want to keep the best body composition for the rest of our active life. That mean the change ought to be slow.

It is scientifically proven that just lowering our calories intake is not going to have great impact on our body weight, rather it might work against us. It is much easier for the body to “eat up” on the muscles that burn out the amount of fat we have stored over the years. This is a metabolic matter of fact.

Recent studies have shown that decreasing the amount of daily calorie intake, has only a mild effect on weight loss. Moreover, drastically cutting down in food is devastating for our muscle mass. Indeed, our body is incredibly resilient in changing his composition. If you fuel it with a lower power fuel, that is, if you eat less calories, the first reaction the body has is to lower the basal metabolism. Basically, less energy intake means that, first of all your body will work less, not that it will start looking for energy in the stored fat. Actually if anything, it will start looking for energy in the that body percentage that is made of muscles.

So the key of your strategy to improve fitness and to improve your look needs to be on body recomposition. On finding the strategy to make your body go for eating up the store fat and increasing your muscle percentage.

How do you do that?

Reduce only marginally your calorie intake, let’s say of about 300 calories daily and increase the physical exercise. Ask you body to build up muscles while you are asking it to work on just bit less energy. This will initiate a complex metabolic mechanism that will stop the melting of muscles, and will prioritize burning fat. In this way you will start changing the actual composition or your body toward the desired, healthy, good looking swimmers body type.

So just to recap, you need to:

check out how much calories you get in daily. You can do this by consulting a calorie table, I found the charts on http://www.caloriecounting.co.uk/resources/intro.htm quite useful and handy to dot hat.
reduce it by let’s 300 kcal
Increase you physical exercise. Find a swimming training program. I have proposed the 4 weeks swimming training plan.
and just keep consistent to your final goal. Body recomposition.

The path is not overnight success, there is nothing like that in life, I am afraid. But if you stick to it, it is going to change the way to look forever..

Good luck with your effort and keep swimming.

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