What Are Our Bodies Made Of?

The first mistake that people ususally make when starting some new diet or exercise plan is confusing weight and fat. Most people say they want to lose weight when in fact what they really want is to lose fat.

Its your excess body fat that makes you physically look fat and flabby. Its your excess internal fat around your organs that make you more susceptible to heart disease and all manner of other ailments.

However, our bodies are not just fat! They are made up of bones, muscle, skin, water (lots of water) and many other things. For simplicity, we usually separate out all of these things into two categories:

1) Body Fat
2) Lean Body Mass

The Lean Body Mass is basically everything that is not fat. This is the good stuff. You need strong bones and muscle to enable you to move around and function normally. As we get older, past around the age of 30 or so our bodies naturally start to lose muscle and our bone density reduces. The lack of muscle tissue makes us weaker, and lets not forget that the heart is a muscle so that is affected too! The lowering bone density can make us more susceptible to breaks and diseases such as osteoperosis.

Getting old sucks! The good news is that it is possible to reduce the effects of this muscle loss and lowering of bone density by regular strength training, but let's leave that for another post.

So we know that our bodies are made up of both body fat and lean body mass so what does it mean to lose weight? When a friend comes up to you and says "Wow, I lost a stone in 2 weeks on the Atkins diet!", what does that mean? Well, it probably means something quite different from another friend who says "It's taken me four months to shift this stone!".

It is actually rather easy to lose 'weight' quickly. Firstly, our bodies are primarily made up of water so dehydration will lead to weight loss which can be quite dramatic. For example, have you seen adverts for services that wrap you in cling film and make claims about how much weight you can lose in the process? Sure, you'll lose a few pounds doing that because you've just sweated out a few pints of water! But what they don't tell you is that when you get home and have a couple of glasses of water that weight is right back where it started! Those kinds of treatments may be wonderful for the skin but they will not do anything to help you permanently lose fat.

Going back to your two friends that both lost a stone in different ways... fat cells are stubbon creatures and it takes your body considerable time and effort to 'burn' the fat that is contained within them. If your body is put into a position where it needs energy quickly, it may not have time to get to the fat cells so it will simply metabolise something it can access quickly, such as a chunk of your right bicep! Ok, that is perhaps a silly metaphor but the point is that body fat must be lost slowly. I'm sure you've all heard the guidelines of no more than 1-2 pounds a week unless you have a lot (like 4+ stone) to lose. The reason for this guideline is that your body simply cannot burn huge amounts of fat quickly and if you try to force it to do so, you'll eat into your lean body mass instead.

Why is this such a bad thing? As I mentioned earlier, the heart is a muscle and if you lose muscle you could be losing part of your heart tissue and the smaller your heart is, the weaker is it. That may sound far fetched but it is not. There was once a singer called Karen Carpenter who suffered from Anorexia for many years. She died aged 32 from a heart attack. Her overall bodyweight had reduced so low that her heart had weakened to the point where it could no longer function.

Of course, that's an extreme case but there is a another reason why lean body mass, in particular muscle, should be very important to somebody interested in losing fat: the amount of lean body mass that your body carries is a primary factor in determining how many calories your body needs on a daily basis.