How you can Burn Calories while Conserving Energy

How can you gain one thing but subtract another?

12:19 03 November 2020

Well, while shedding body fat isn’t an easy feat, gaining muscle and losing fat simultaneously is one of the greatest fitness challenges. Many people strive to get in shape and lose fat, but have concerns about losing muscle in the process. Fortunately, you can achieve the different goals of losing weight but not muscle. You just need to follow a few fitness and eating guidelines to help you achieve the desired results.

 

To optimise muscle maintenance and fat loss, you have to lose weight effectively and safely. This is important for the maintenance of your physical activity, fitness level and overall function. Many fitness enthusiasts have accomplished these simultaneous goals, which serves as anecdotal evidence that achieving body re-composition is possible.

 

The ability to build muscle and burn fat boils down to exercise and diet habits. With the right approach, and with the help of a professional weight loss consultant, it’s possible to maintain muscle mass while losing fat.

 

Tips for shedding fat effectively without losing muscle using recommended eating and exercise plans

 

1. Dieting wisely

 

Burning fat ought to be your main goal, rather than losing weight. As such, you need to focus on diets that just subtract little weight with a keen focus on fat. Regardless of whether you are following a paleo or ketogenic diet, or you’re a vegan/vegetarian, or have other dietary restrictions, adjusting your eating habits is mandatory if you want to lose weight. You also need to cut out processed sugars, limit poor-quality fats, avoid eating too much salt, and focus on lean proteins from either animal or plant sources.

 

To seamlessly prepare healthy meals at home, you can get a couple of appliances that are easy to use. You could also consider intermittent fasting. This has been proven to promote muscle maintenance while helping with fat loss. A few benefits of intermittent fasting include:

 

• Modulates the levels of hunger hormone ghrelin
  
  
• Boosts production of human growth hormone
  
  
• Helps to limit free radical damage while decreasing inflammation
  
  
• Regulates sensitivity of insulin
  
  
• Decreases triglyceride levels
  
  

The flexibility of intermittent fasting makes it possible for you to work around the fasting and eating periods on your schedule. If it seems too strict for you, you could try cyclical eating instead. This involves cutting your calories for a few days in a row, followed by a high-calorie day. Remember, the number of calories you consume should be reflected in your activities.

 

2. Reduce intensity or frequency

 

While intense activities help you burn more fat, they reduce the amount of available energy, causing calorie deficits. This means that if you go to the gym consistently without a break while maintaining the same frequency, intensity and volume of your resistance training and cardio, you may end up losing energy as your body may fail to recover.

 

To balance between weight loss and energy maintenance, reduce either the intensity or frequency of your workouts. Avoid excessive cardio and maintain your current fitness level without pushing yourself to go beyond the recommended limits.

 

3. Eat sufficient proteins

 

Besides choosing diets that support your weight loss goals, it’s important to consider a macronutrient ratio. If you need to maintain your muscle while losing fat, you need to eat enough protein. For your current body weight, you could opt for a range of 0.9 to 1.4 grams of protein per pound.

 

Anything beyond this range could overload macronutrients into your body. Whether you’re overeating proteins, carbohydrates or fat, too many macronutrients are stored as fat in your body. If you’re obese or overweight, get some useful insights from a qualified weight loss consultant or use your healthy goal weight.

 

Here are a few benefits of consuming proteins:

 

• Boosts basal metabolic rate, which helps in burning more calories all day
  
  
• Promotes satiety, which prevents you from overeating
  
  
• Supports muscle growth and helps to repair body muscles
  
  

4. Avoid shaving off many calories

 

No weight loss consultant will recommend crash dieting. This is because it puts the body into starvation mode. As it’s easier to break down muscle than fat, it will metabolise your muscle. Additionally, if you restrict your calories excessively, you will not get the appropriate amount of nutrients and vitamins. This means that you will not be in a good position to recover or heal from workouts, which is a disservice to your overall health and weight loss goals.

 

Avoid slashing your calories by the thousands. Instead, start with moderate calorie deficits of 200 to 500 calories, which is sufficient to maintain optimum metabolism without setting your body into shock.

 

5. Maintain your body muscle

 

As you cut your body fat, also maintain your present muscle. You can achieve this by continuing to lift the weights you’ve been lifting to build the muscle. Avoid falling prey to the myth that upping your rep range and cutting weight will signal to your body to burn fat. This is communicating to your body that it should burn that muscle as it’s not in use.

 

The hardest part of losing weight is getting started. Your body could be sent into shock mode by small daily routine changes, forcing it to burn more energy while adjusting to its new regimen. The number of calories that a person burns each day depends on several factors, including age, height, sex and usual activities. To avoid plateaus, one thing is a must-do for everyone: making certain modifications now and then. However, you can achieve huge pay-offs from just minor deviations.

 

In a nutshell, avoid skipping meals in a bid to burn excess fat. This slows down your metabolism, which in turn affects the ability of your body to burn calories while you’re resting. Food is the body’s fuel. If your body isn’t well-fuelled, your organs will be affected, which will make you feel tired and groggy. If your body is not supplied with sufficient calories frequently when hungry, it will prepare for an imminent crisis and switch to ‘starvation mode’. You will, therefore, not lose weight as the body is conserving energy for later and not burning any calories.