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Chapter Four: Chow's On

Americans are always on diets these days and despite this we�re getting fatter. Slim is in yet as a society we remain mostly overweight and over fat. Health care costs continue to sky rocket as our crowded hospitals treat many obesity related diseases like atherosclerosis and adult onset diabetes. As individuals we need to take charge of this situation and do something about it. One of the things we can do is to stop trying to lose weight through crazy diets and take a sensible approach at losing excess body fat.

Fad diets that enjoy so much popularity today are usually deficient in vital nutrients (see section two of this chapter). This inhibits your ability to put on or even maintain lean muscle mass. Even if these diets do provide some temporary weight loss, most of it will invariably come from lost muscle. Any diet that results in a loss of lean muscle mass is not going to work. Many women fall into this trap of working out and not eating enough to sustain and support those intense workouts. Men (especially firefighters) will generally over eat and their problem stems from too many calories.

Your body is made up of a certain percentage of fat and a certain percentage of lean muscle mass. A healthy body fat percentage for an adult male is about fifteen percent and for an adult female it�s about twenty-two percent. I�ve trained clients with body fat percentages ranging from as low as eight percent to as high as over thirty percent. Monitoring not only your body weight, but also your body fat, will assist you in keeping your exercise and nutritional program on course. There are many methods to determine your body fat percentage including the expensive but very accurate water immersion method and the slightly less accurate but more practical skinfold measurement method just to name two. A skinfold caliper along with an instruction booklet and associated charts can be easily purchased at select sporting good or health food stores. See chapter six for more details on this convenient and inexpensive method of body fat assessment.

Fat is burned strictly by muscle tissue. About thirty percent of a healthy woman�s body and about forty percent of a healthy man�s body is made up of muscle tissue but that muscle burns almost one hundred percent of the fat. Increase the muscle to fat ratio and you�ll burn more fat, it�s that simple.

What you need is a simple program that will assist you in losing fat without sacrificing lean muscle mass. It�s got to deliver a balanced, highly nutritious, relatively low calorie diet that�s easy to follow.

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