Fitness mantra: Lose your weight, not your muscle
Anupama Menon
Obesity is a disorder that can be overcome, a battle that can be fought. Unfortunately, it is also a flourishing business that could play with your mind and body to a point of no return. It could be a journey ridden with stress; a myriad ofhormones playing squash in your insides, or it could be a slow process that doesn't talk of deprivation or starvation. Actually there's no choice.
But everyone wants quick results. A 20 kg excessbody fat could have taken 10 years to find its way into your extremities, but its effects must wear off in three months. Is it reasonable or even possible?
Look around you and there are a thousand weightloss plans that promise you the world. The most prominent a 5-7 kg drop a month without exercise. The one that hits my funny bone says: "Pay 500 ONLY for every kg of loss."
Over time such weight loss claims have only marred our minds to believe that a significant loss in size comes from a tremendous loss in weight, not realising that such extreme weight loss could cause our most dynamic fat-burning muscle and metabolism to break down. The story doesn't end here. You lose weight more than half of which could be muscle; our fat-burning capacity drops with our metabolism, making our bodies a playground to build more fat stores.
Lose 10 kgs today and gain 20 tomorrow. Is this what one really needs?
The weight loss story is mostly a stress-ridden one. Say weight loss and out come the scales. One weighs himself before exercise and after, before eating and after, before hitting the bed, and first thing in the morning a¦three times an hour and 20 times a day. Even 100 gm up brings the doer's world crashing down, blind to the fact that even a 100 ml of water could be the culprit. Then follow the infamous starvation diets and the salad diets, which ensure more muscle breakdown and the worst plateaus you could ever be faced with.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, runs high in such scenarios ensuring fat burn is at its slowest. Cortisol peaks trigger unwanted surges in insulin in the bloodstream, stimulating fat synthesis. To top all of this, a highly calorie restricted diet secretes the hunger hormone (ghrelin) in more scores than usual. You can't hold up against this beast for long.
Hormones control all our body functions and we cannot get away working against them. For good fat-loss results that complement your efforts and visual realisation in a size drop, you have to befriend your hormones, understand their nuances and work with them to gain long-term results.
The three pillars you need to rest your lean image on are 'Time', 'Mindset' and 'Patience'. You must work with all the three to steady your hormone function, eat as per your need and exercise a consistent workout schedule.
Realise that enduring results take Time. Train your Mind to believe that a measuring tape can speak volumes about your success. Be Patient, keep trying to set your eating patterns and exercise schedule right.
While obesity fights its battle to conquer all those mindless eaters, it is a good thing to gather your energies in striking against this condition. What is not so good are the measures adopted to achieve this end. Just as easy it is to understand why anyone would want to see themselves in a leaner frame so is it easy to understand why fighting obesity could be such a stress-inducer if the mind is not educated about the way the body functions.
(The writer is a Bengaluru-based consultant on lifestyle and diet management)
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