Weightlifting as a Steady Diet

"The Path of Most Resistance" -

"The single best exercise you can do to improve your health is to lift weights. Yes, aerobic exercise is good, but it won't deliver the extra benefits of resistance training. And lifting weights is the best resistance training of all. Every day it seems a new medical study surfaces showing the efficacy of resistance training in improving the health of seniors, juniors, and all those in between. Working out with weights strengthens joints, increases the density of your bones to prevent osteoporosis, increases your muscle mass, improves your endurance if done correctly, decreases your insulin levels, and... stimulates the release of growth hormone, which improves just about everything.

"Each pound of muscle mass you pack on becomes a fat-burning dynamo, allowing you to increase your food intake without fear of fat gain. As your muscle mass continues to build, your body will begin to resculpt itself. You will lose all the little handles and bulges of fat you could never get rid of before, no matter how hard you dieted. Best of all, once that new muscle is there, and as long as you continue to work it, your metabolic rate will increase, allowing you to eat more than you can imagine --- even of carbohydrate foods --- without negative consequences. No more working hard to lose your weight only to watch it balloon back up as soon as you start eating normally again. You will actually be able to eat more than when you started and continue to lose fat. Sounds impossible, but it works like a charm --- if you do.

"If you're female, you may be thinking that this sounds great, but you're really not all that keen to look like the Incredible Hulk. Not to worry. Your female hormones and lack of male hormones will keep you unhulklike even if you train extensively. The women you see in bodybuilding magazines who do look like well-developed males usually have had a little help from their friends the anabolic steroids. Your friends --- work, sweat, and your own growth hormone --- will slim you down by decreasing your body fat. The muscle growth you experience will be in the filling-out of muscle tissue in places it has atrophied from underuse and in increasing the density of the rest of your muscles. When you start, your muscles will look like a piece of choice steak with fat marbled throughout. As you work out and follow this nutritional plan you will quickly begin to replace this intramuscular fat with more muscle, making your muscle not necessarily larger but denser.

"A word of caution: if you're trying to lose weight, you may be disappointed if you follow the scales too closely, because as your muscles become more dense, they become heavier. The new muscle you add weighs more than the fat it replaces, but its increased metabolic requirement that is stoked by the fat stored elsewhere on your body ends up making you much smaller, not to mention better proportioned, than before, regardless of what the scales say. It's much better to measure your progress by the way your clothing fits than by the bathroom scale."

--- Michael R Eades, M.D. and Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

Reprinted from "Protein Power" - New York Times Bestseller