Turning Fat Into Muscle
I’m sure you’ve heard it many times before, people talking about turning fat into muscle, and you no doubt want to know precisely how it’s done…
Well, in short…
It can’t be done!
The notion of being able to turn fat into muscle is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about how the body works, ever. I’ve no idea how it got started, but I do know that at this rate this myth will persist for many more years to come.
The reason why this is a myth is simple: muscle and fat are two completely different things, and you couldn’t turn fat into muscle no more than you could turn your leg into an arm.
The only thing that can be done is burning fat, and increasing muscle tissue. But, realistically, both can’t be done simultaneously. This is because for muscle to grow, a calorie surplus must exist, and for fat to burn, a calorie deficit – and common sense says both can’t co-exist.
What people tend to do is focus on one or the other to begin with. If your goal is to burn fat, then you’ll need to ensure your calorie intake is below your ‘maintenance level’, and perform steady and regular exercise to boost your metabolism.
You can find out what your calorie maintenance is by logging down what you eat over the course of several weeks, and continually monitoring your weight and fat levels with callipers. Should the scales go up, and the callipers widen, then you obviously have put on weight. Once you have a few weeks by which you have logged your food intake, and haven’t put on weight, then you’ve found your maintenance level – and now it is your task to continually eat less calories (try for around 500 a day less) so the fat begins to lessen – again, monitoring weight and fat with the callipers.
To aid fat loss, using a bicycle or exercise bike for 30 minutes a day, or just for several days a week, keeping your heart rate at around 130-140 BPM will help raise your metabolism into it’s greatest fat burning zone, and you’ll be amazed at how much weight you begin to lose.
So, turning fat into muscle is a huge myth; but I suppose it could be used as a figure of speech… turning bad into good, for example – but then again, maybe that’s why people get confused to begin with!
