Weight Loss is an Oxymoron by Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale
What am I trying to say? Just that weight loss is an oxymoron. Who really wants to just lose weight? That means losing weight from all of the various tissues in your body, including muscle and bone.
That’s not what people want when they say they want to lose weight. What they really want to lose is FAT, not muscle. After all maintaining or even increasing muscle mass not only makes the body look and function better, but it makes it easier to lose body fat and keep it off.
It’s important to realize that fat loss is not simply a matter of exercising more and eating less, although these are part of the fat loss equation. Effective fat loss also means guiding your body down the right metabolic paths where you target fat breakdown and spare muscle.
It’s also more than just breaking down body fat. You also have to do something with that body fat so it doesn’t simply reform. That means getting rid of it by increasing the burning of this fat for fuel and flushing some of it right out of the body.
Besides increasing lipolysis and making sure you get rid of that released fat, it’s also important to make sure that the weight you lose is fat and not muscle. Cutting calories can lead to weight loss but some or even most of this weight loss may in fact represent muscle and other tissues. The trick to losing weight is to lose mostly fat so that when you’re down to your target goal you look and feel good.
It’s also important to keep making progress. Anyone can lose weight at first but it’s a real challenge to keep it up. That’s because your body reacts to the imagined threat of starvation by instituting some ages old survival mechanisms, mainly slowing the metabolic rate so you can get by on fewer calories, and increasing hunger so you can take full advantage of any food that you find. Even though you’re deliberately trying to lose weight to improve your looks and health, your body looks at the calorie reduction as a sign of impending starvation and adjusts accordingly.
So unless you understand what’s happens when you cut back on your calories, and make the appropriate adjustments, including taking the right supplements, you can reach a plateau fast.
Put all this together and it’s no wonder that most people find it impossible to lose any significant amount of fat, to keep any fat they do lose from coming back on, and to prevent loss of muscle while they’re dieting.
In my mind the most important steps to effective fat loss, besides reducing calories and exercise, are:
- Increasing fat release from the fat stores in the body, including cellulite – this is done by triggering lipolysis via various mechanisms including triggering the right signaling systems (for example by selectively increasing cyclic AMP levels in fat cells either directly or indirectly) and maintaining thyroid hormone levels and activity.
- Decreasing fat formation or lipogenesis. This is done by using various ingredients that decrease the stimulus and the enzymes that support lipogenesis.
- Increasing the elimination of the released fat from the body by burning it up and by flushing it out. Increasing the burning of fatty acids is done by increasing the metabolic rate (including normalizing thyroid hormone levels, increasing T3 formation and effect, and increasing UCP3 uncoupling protein – these also increase lipolysis), increasing the transport of fatty acids into the mitochondria (the fat furnaces of the body) and by priming and optimizing the functioning of the TCA cycle so that beta oxidation and the efficient utilization of the basic 2 carbon groups that result from fatty acids metabolism. Increasing the removal of fat from the body is done by increasing the amount of fatty acids that are dumped into the urine and flushed out of the body.
- Targeting fat loss and not muscle loss.
- And counteracting the metabolic effects of dieting, i.e. increased hunger and decreased metabolic rate.
:: Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale :: is one of the most influential voices on diet, performance and athletic training in the world. His innovative work in finding safe nutritional alternatives to anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs has won him praise from athletes, trainers and fitness experts around the globe. Dr. Di Pasquale was a world-class athlete for over 15 years, winning the World Championships in powerlifting in 1976 and world games in 1981.