You want to lose weight, but you don’t want to lose muscle. It certainly sounds challenging. You want to start your fitness journey, but you don’t know how to start. You have done all the research by diligently looking up fitness websites and YouTube videos. Didn’t most of them intimidate you by advocating complex workout regimes, highly restrictive diets, and costly supplements?
You need not despair anymore! We are here to simplify things by pointing out the best technique to achieve the impossible. Yes! You can lose weight and build muscle simultaneously with this technique called body recomposition.
What is body recomposition?
Body recomposition changes your body make-up through diet and nutrition techniques to have less fat and more muscle. Body recomposition is focused on body composition and not body weight. Despite our obsession with the scale, the healthy muscle to fat ratio indicates good health.
Who can benefit from body recomposition?
Everyone can. However, if you are a beginner, you have the edge over others. Your body is not used to intense exercise. When you begin intense workouts, it responds by growing and strengthening your muscles.
How does body recomposition work?
Typically you cut calories and increase your workouts to lose weight. The scale does confirm your weight loss. However, what it doesn’t show is that you have also lost some muscle, along with your fat. Body recomposition aims to retain and build muscle while losing fat. However, the methods vary from person to person. A thin person will have a different exercise and diet program than an overweight person. It is, therefore, crucial to strike the right balance between diet and exercise.
1. High protein diet:
You need to be in a calorie deficit for fat loss, and for muscle gain, you need additional calories. How do you balance these opposites? The answer is by eating a diet rich in protein, you build more muscles and burn more fat. The focus should be on getting the required quantity of protein. There is no fixed quantity of protein. However, the general recommendation is to eat 1.5 g of protein per kg of body weight.
2. Other Macro-nutrients:
Eat unprocessed foods, including green leafy vegetables, to get minerals, vitamins, and fibre.
3. Calorie Deficit:
If you are lean and don’t have fat to lose, continue your maintenance diet without cutting calories. If you have fat, to lose a slight calorie deficit, say no more than 500 calories will help. But beware of dropping your calories too low as that may result in losing muscle, feeling tired, and quitting.
4. Strength Training:
Strength training or lifting weights builds muscles. With strength training, you continue to burn more calories long after your training session ends. With cardio, you burn calories while doing the workout, but it doesn’t continue beyond your training session. However, combining cardio and strength training results in more calorie burn by elevating the heart rate throughout the workout. Make sure to build muscle with progressive overload in the gym. It means you need to continue to challenge yourself by increasing the reps or going in for heavier weights.
What is the role of supplements in body recomposition?
A few supplements are beneficial in transforming your body into a lean fat-burning muscle-building machine. Instead of wasting money on tons of expensive supplements, you can buy multivitamins, whey protein, and fish oil.
1. Multivitamin/ Mineral: Multivitamins will ensure that you get your dose of micronutrients. Moreover, your minerals and vitamins can get depleted due to intense training, and a multivitamin can replenish them. While buying a multivitamin, read the ingredients to ensure that there are no allergens. You may want to avoid multivitamins with iron if you are male and are consuming red meat regularly. On the other hand, if you are female and are not post-menopause, you may want to consider a multi with iron.
2. Whey Protein: Whey protein is the complete protein. A high-quality whey protein powder will ensure that you burn fat and build muscles. Whey protein has amino acids and BCAAs to increase metabolism, burn fat, build muscle, and speed up muscle recovery. It makes it easy to ensure that you hit your daily quota of 1.5 g protein per kg of your body weight.
3. Fish Oil: Fish oil has endless benefits like controlling inflammation, promoting fat oxidation, inhibiting fat storage, joints protection, and helping muscle recovery.
Follow all these steps and gift yourself a lean muscular fit body within six months.
Takeaways: The progress may not be immediately visible on your scale. But NSV (non-scale victories) like a better fitting tiny-sized dress, a toned pair of legs appear first. You can burn fat and build muscle simultaneously without burning a hole in your purse through body recomposition.
