The problem with all crash diets and not enough strength training exercise

Many diets promise fast weight loss, and with enough calorie reduction every diet is 100% successful to lose weight. But unfortunately we can’t live this way forever and eventually the weight comes back 100% of the time (usually with in 6 months to 1 year), so long term every one of these diets nets to 100% failure. But the failure goes deeper than most of us realize. Our weight that we can change is made up of fat and muscle. So when we lose weight we lose both fat and muscle, not just fat. Strength training, which combats the muscle loss, is often the forgotten exercise component to healthy weight loss. Other then aspiring athletes most of us do not spend the time and energy toward strength training programs. Strength training is often times the missing ingredient to help us achieve the weight control we would like long term.


Many of us have gone on multiple different diets in our life only to end up back where we started. These “yo-yo” diets can have a significant impact on our metabolism and our chance to successfully get weight off and keep it off to be healthy. In our attempt to lose weight we lose fat and muscle as we stated. It is biologically very difficult to lose weight and not lose some muscle. Our goal needs to be losing as much fat as possible and not muscle. The best way to accomplish this is to go slow (1-2 pounds per week) and make sure we are strength training. The faster our weight loss the larger percentage of it will be muscle. When we gain weight back it will be fat weight not muscle, unless we are doing lots of strength training.

Here is an example of the problem. If you lose 30 pounds, 20 pounds of fat and 10 pounds of muscle, but then regain the 30 pounds it will now be 30 pounds of fat if you aren’t doing strength training exercises. You know have to eat about 300-500 calories less then before your “yo-yo” diet even though you weigh exactly the same to maintain that weight. Why? Realize the more fat percentage you have, the slower your metabolism. Your metabolism is the amount of calories you need to keep your body alive and maintain your weight. A pound of muscle burns about 30-50 calories per day, whereas, a pound of fat burns about 5 calories per day. This is why some very heavy people can eat very little and still not lose weight or even continue to slowly gain weight, they don’t have enough muscle and their metabolism has slowed down dramatically. The only way to speed up our metabolism is to increase our muscle mass percentage to body weight through strength training exercises.