Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

“I don’t want to build too much muscle, because I’ll look too bulky!” Very recently, I had this discussion at the gym, and realized that such ideas are still around and strong. While I haven’t had this kind of arguments with the men who go there, some of the women are so… let’s say entrenched within these wrong beliefs, that it’s almost a crime to leave things as they are and not try to explain what all of this really is.

Here’s a little anecdote, that I still remember this as if it was yesterday. When I was younger, many people around me (including from my own family - my aunt and cousin would always try diet after diet) used to say that exercising wasn’t good when trying to lose weight because “fat will turn into muscle and you’ll look very bulky”. I was a child, I would believe this, as it was said to me by adults; now that I’ve done my own research and experimented some of this first hand, such beliefs really make me feel like crying with frustration. Honest, it’s just as stupid as saying that a skin cell is able to turn into a neuron. Muscle will always be muscle, fat will always be fat; anatomically, scientifically, there’s absolutely no way for adipocytes to turn into lean mass.

For some time, I’ve wondered where this belief could have come from; we women lack an essential component of “becoming bulky with muscles”, and this one is testosterone (not exactly what everyone eats at breakfast everyday, eh?). Then, during this conversation I’ve had, I’ve realized that perhaps it’s just a misconception born from other facts, and I tried to make my own little list. Right now, I see two main reasons: muscle being more dense than fat, and people gaining muscle while not having shed off all the useless fat yet.

The muscle being more dense (it’s also formulated as “muscle being heavier than fat”) is a real fact: one kilogram of muscle will take less room in the human body than one kilogram of fat. When performing resistance training to an intense enough level, when building muscle, we’ll more than often actually gain weight, rather than immediately lose some; I know of a woman, at my gym club, who gained close to 10 kgs in one year, and these were only muscle - she’s not overweight, she hasn’t had to buy larger clothes, and she even lost a few centimeters on the hips and waist. Heavier, yes. Fatter, certainly not. In a way, though, I think that this weight gain can confuse and frighten people who’re trying to lose weight. It’s understandable.

The second factor I thought of was, all that simply, the fact that the fat loss/muscle gain doesn’t work like communicating vessels, and that we can pile up way more fat than muscle. I could watch this on myself perfectly well: I’ve gained muscle, but all my fat isn’t gone, and when looking at myself in the mirror, I still can’t very well see the difference between the fat/flabby me of old and the less fat/more muscular me of today. The difference is here, for sure, and if looking better, I now manage to notice it as well, including in my clothes’ size; it’s just that I’ve gained muscle, but still with a good layer of fat on top of it. This is what made me think of this old fear of “turning fat into muscle”; people get bulkier, true… for a while only, until they shed off more fat.

Why all of these thoughts, why writing about them here? Because it’s a shame that such myths are still flying around, and that some people don’t want to accept that building muscle is part of a good weight loss as well as of its maintenance. It’s not funny to do, in the beginning - for some, it’s never funny at all, as we don’t all have the same tastes in sports. It’s not easy to start, feeling weak as a kitten and ridiculously lifting pitiful a 5 kgs plate because we just can’t do more. It’s not easy either to squeeze it into a day of work and family tasks. It’s however a necessity, if only because muscles need more calories to maintain themselves, and this simple fact can help a lot if we’re trying to not eat more than our bodies really need.

Let’s get realistic… We’re trying to lose weight, not train for a weight-lifting challenge. We don’t need to go to such extents that we’ll automatically look like these pictures of women that we’ve all seen, as dry as men and bulked up from everywhere. These are the extremes. We nevertheless can build a nice musculature, be fitter, with our bodies looking better and more chiseled than if we were “only” losing weight.

There’s no point in becoming thin, if it’s to be thin and completely flabby, right?

- Kery

• Picture of muscle vs. fat
• Train Like A Woman!