This post is being broken down into 3 parts as the topic is long and deserves some space. I hope you find this stuff as fascinating as I do!
It’s only been in the relatively recent past that we homo-sapiens have begun actively trying to lose weight and build more muscle. To accommodate that, there have been many, many different programs and concepts set forth from both amateurs and professionals alike. It can be frustrating to realize that while there are so many books, DVDs, and programs out there, people are still having a hard time losing that fat and building that muscle. The truth is, it’s best to think of your body as an adapting machine that has evolved to hold onto its most basic need: survival. Most of us are stuck on the idea that if we just go to a gym and randomly lift some really heavy weights, we’ll get great results; unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way, and here’s why.
Basically, your body doesn’t really want to put on muscle. One of the things we often forget is that our bodies aren’t designed to do what we now find appealing in our modern lives. For instance, while our modern society praises lots of muscle and a lean build, evolutionarily our bodies fight against this. The body is equipped to adapt to what we need it to do, which for our purposes means building muscle when it needs to have it. When you go to the gym, you are essentially fooling your body into “believing” that you need this muscle for survival. Your body doesn’t realize that you aren’t out there in a fight for your life against a bear for those 45 minutes every other day. It just knows that you’re counting on it to deliver strength, so it accommodates that need the best it can. It’s important to remember though that your body is only doing this for survival purposes, and just like it is designed to adapt to situations for survival, it has certain preferences in its blueprint to help meet those adaptations.
One major preference is to not hold on to muscle—because excess muscle is expensive to our bodies’ survival. We know that muscle burns more calories than fat, and to us in our modern lives, that’s a good thing: we’re deliberately building that muscle to counteract our sedentary lives and the processed foods in our diet. Your body, however, isn’t designed for your modern life; it’s designed for survival in the wild. It wants to store as much excess energy as possible, and it does so by storing fat. Therefore anything that burns excess energy (calories), such as too much muscle, simply by being there is a bad thing. When your body needs energy that is not immediately supplied by food, it can take it from two primary places: from fat or muscles. If it feels it needs the muscle for survival it will keep them intact, but if that muscle is causing too big a drain on its resources without providing enough benefit, it will cannibalize the muscle even before it goes for your fat stores.
If most people could have their way, they would have their body easily build and keep as much muscle as they wanted, and have it destroy all fat stored and ingested into your body like a school of hungry piranhas on the attack. Most of us don’t fully understand why we can work out and eat healthily and still not be an Adonis. So try to think about it from your body’s perspective: what you’re essentially asking for is your body to fill itself with excessive, virtually worthless-to-your-survival muscle that does nothing but drains the precious energy your body has tried so hard to acquire. It would be like going to the bank and getting a loan, then burning not only the money they gave you but also your life savings. You’d have to work day and night to put in enough money to keep from bankrupting (or dying in your body’s case) and you’d have nothing to show for it—remember, your body doesn’t care that you look good at the beach! To your body, fat (energy) is a good thing and excess muscle (a drain on your energy) is a bad thing. If you are trying to build muscle and burn fat, you are fighting against nature, and nature is going to do everything in its power to stop you or at least slow you down. It’s important to know this going into any fitness program so that you have a full understanding of the demands you are putting on your own body.
Now of course I’m generalizing to some extent, and of course too much fat is more detrimental to your health than too much muscle. It would seem to reason that your body would shut off excess fat gain just as it tries to ward off excess muscle gain, but keep in mind where it’s coming from. If you are running around in the wild, fighting animals and procuring your own food, you aren’t going to get huge and fat. Your body therefore has no reason to have that emergency shut-off switch; your very lifestyle is supposed to be the shut-off switch. What with the primal lifestyle our bodies are still evolutionarily used to (finding and preparing your own food, fighting for territory rights, building your own shelter), the human body’s problem is not supposed to be storing too much energy, it’s supposed to be not having enough—and all that muscle you’re putting on now is simply a drain on its precious energy.
The bottom line is that when you’re trying to build muscle and burn fat, you are fighting against nature, against the amazing system that is your body and brain. Your body has developed systems so complex that we may never completely understand them in order to accomplish what it wants. Literally, weight-lifting and body-building is a science experiment as we continue to figure out the human body.
Continued in part 2 on Saturday
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