THE UNAMERICAN UNDIET HOMEPAGE
Welcome to the UnAmerican Undiet:
A Cure for the American Diet Problem,
By a Comedian (Not a Communist)
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THE UNAMERICAN UNDIET MARCH NEWSLETTER
Losing Weight vs Finding Tone
As Spring Break, Memorial Day, and bathing suit weather approach, it’s a great time to examine your goals, and your path to reaching them. While Guinness and Easter candy reap their havoc on your body, this month’s tip is how to burn off the excess fat, without hurting your metabolism, and without – Leprechauns forbid – dieting.
Dieters often focus on weight loss. Losing weight is easy, since all you have to do is eat less all the time, ignoring the consequences. Your body will pull reserve fuel from other parts of your body. It will slow your metabolism, acting in the interest of self preservation. Your muscle can provide a great deal of sustenance, so your body begins to digest that along side the stored fat you have.
Then you end your diet, going back to your old ways. But the weight comes on faster than before, mysteriously yo-yoing you back to your old self, and probably worse.
The relapse comes from the fact that your body has lost muscle and lowered your metabolism. Now when you eat your way back into your old habits, you’re doing it from a more difficult position. Dieting has hurt you in the long run, and in the meantime has left your body without tone, and without the strength that preserves your physique.
Dieting addresses losing weight, not losing fat. Don’t focus on that scale. Instead, get your body fat measured by a professional at your gym, or do it yourself. You’ll need a measuring tape, but that’s well worth knowing whether or not your exercise routine is working.
If you want that beach body, you can’t ignore your body’s need for exercise. It’s unlikely that you work manual labor on a farm or hunting animals in the wild, but that’s what our bodies were designed to do a very long time ago. Since you lack the regular exercise we evolved to get and to need, you have to supplement.
And it doesn’t matter who you are, you need resistance and cardiovascular exercise. Sorry to be the one to break it to you. Girls, you won’t bulk up by doing a few toning exercises in your lower body and core section. Guys, if you want washboard abs, no amount of sit-ups will get you there unless you slim down the overall body fat.
Muscle builds metabolism, gives you tone, and keeps you in shape far longer than cardio alone. Cardio increases the total output of your body, trimming away the excess fat you want to lose today. But without both, you won’t achieve lasting results. You will lose weight, instead of losing fat. And when you lose weight, it’s much easier to find it again.
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