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In a world where social media is the information hub for health and fitness, there's just too much advice floating around. Some of this helps with clarity, but a lot of it causes anxiety. As a result, fitness feels complicated, confusing and intimidating when it is, in fact, quite simple and intuitive, So, let's skip the specifics and zoom out for a second. Let's understand concepts instead of memorising facts. Let's learn to reason instead of blindly believing. Let's make fitness approachable and attainable. Let's simplify, and simplify ruthlessly.
In a hundred short chapters, fitness and nutrition coach Raj Ganpath clears the haze around fitness, offering focused and actionable advice to get you going on your fitness journey.
Here's an excerpt from Raj Ganpath's Simple, Not Easy
Your body doesn’t want you to lose weight
I’m sure you’ll agree that everyone is in a hurry to lose weight. Every diet and gym advertises rapid weight loss, and every nutrition expert is trying to figure out ways to increase the rate of weight loss. Because everyone wants to lose weight as quickly as possible. But have you wondered why that is?
Because weight loss is uncomfortable. Eating less, saying no to delicious things, suffering through endurance exercise, lifting weights, learning new movements and trying to be disciplined are all uncomfortable. And since we are designed to avoid discomfort, we want this uncomfortable process to be over as quickly as possible. It’s like walking barefoot on a hot day and going from one shaded area to another. You don’t really want to linger on the hot ground. You want to get to the other side as quickly as you can.
For your body too, losing weight is not comfortable. Weight loss is a significant event. During weight loss, all the organs and systems in your body, including your heart, lungs, muscles, bones, hormones, blood flow, breathing rate, blood composition, glucose levels and triglycerides are affected. And rapid weight loss means that these organs and systems need to be pushed to the very extreme—to mobilise stored energy (fat) out of cells and then oxidise it. This is not something the body does readily because of the intensity of work involved. Also, fat is energy that is stored by the body for future use.
Like money you have invested for the future. So, naturally, accessing this stored energy and using it is not something the body is very open to. And it’s not going to make it easy for you to do it. This too is a survival mechanism.
Ideally, your body doesn’t want you to lose weight. Because losing weight means loss of water and tissue. And a gradual reduction in energy and matter in an animal signals atrophy, which happens in nature only when there isn’t enough food, which is a red flag. Or when the animal is diseased, which is also a red flag. Or when the animal is old and is winding down, which is the ultimate red flag.
So, when you force your body to lose weight, and do so at a high rate, it goes into panic mode. With red lights and alarms going off everywhere, your body, in an effort to keep you from dying, brings about physiological changes that slow down this process of losing energy and matter (weight loss). You hate it and you want the process to happen quickly so that you can look better and feel lighter. So, you keep pushing and doing your thing. Your body, on the other hand, doesn’t get today’s aesthetic demands. It wants you alive, fat or fit. And so it resists and does its thing. As a result, you are caught in this see-saw phase with your body where you both want different things. It sucks, but it’s necessary to see-saw. Because that’s the only way to make sure you don’t go too far on either side.
What you really want is ‘fat loss’
Let’s say you’re going on a long trek. You’re carrying a backpack with a few things in it. You have water, food, books to read, books to write, some rocks you picked up along the way, a phone charger and some knick-knacks you bought at a sale. All is well and you’re enjoying the trek with its incredible views, steep slopes and tree cover. In a few hours, you start feeling tired. Gradually, you find it harder to move forward with each step. You slow down and take more breaks, but it still feels hard. Your guide says your bag is what is weighing you down and the only way to make the rest of the trek is to lighten the load. What are you going to dump and what are you going to keep? There are items in your backpack that are essential and then there are items that are non-essential for the trek. Will you throw away the water? Or the knick-knacks? Will you keep the rocks? Or the charger? What do you need more right now—the books or the food? Surely, you’ll retain the things that are essential for you to complete the trek and toss out the ones that are not.
This is the difference between weight loss and fat loss.
Weight loss is a blanket term and is about reducing the weight of your body. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what contributes to this weight loss. You can lose water or fat or muscle or even chop off a couple of limbs, and it will still qualify as weight loss. It’s like reducing the weight of your backpack by randomly reaching into it, grabbing whatever you touch and throwing that thing away without paying attention to what it is. There is no differentiation between what is essential and non-essential.
But fat loss is a specific term. It’s about losing fat, and only fat, from your body. That means that while the goal of weight loss is to somehow reduce weight, the goal of fat loss is to reduce weight by reducing specifically the amount of fat you have in your body without losing muscle mass and strength.
Extracted with permission from Simple, Not Easy by Raj Ganpath, published by Westland Books.