This may or may not apply to anyone in this forum but this has been bothering me for a long time...
There is a huge misconception among girls/women about the whole idea of losing weight... losing weight and losing fat are two different things, and women are so caught up with losing weight that they'll do anything... when the real issue is not the weight that's being lost, but rather the fat.
Weight comes from several places:
1) Muscle Mass... which is typically the largest contributor to weight
2) Bone... some people are big or small-boned, so everyone's different
3) Fat... which is really what everyone's concerned about, they just confuse fat with weight.
My ex-girlfriend used to be so excited when she found out she had lost a pound or two... when in reality she hadn't exercised in a month and looked basically the same as she always had. She had most likely lost muscle mass, and had hurt metabolism in the process, so calories are less easily burned by her body and more quickly stored as fat... exactly what she didn't want.
A lot of this misconception comes from the ease with which we can measure weight, but the comparative difficulty and inaccuracy of body fat measurements. There are increasingly cheap and accurate body fat scales now, such as Tanita scales, but most people still rely on the brute method of weighing yourself as a gauge of overall fitness. This is simply ridiculous and leads to a lot of unhealthy behaviors to try to lose weight.
Please help spread the word among your friends... what's really important is not the weight you've lost, but rather the fat you've burned. The more people that know, the less we'll see girls starving themselves to try to reach a certain weight. Thanks for your help.
Aaron Smyth
GymTicket Support
There is a huge misconception among girls/women about the whole idea of losing weight... losing weight and losing fat are two different things, and women are so caught up with losing weight that they'll do anything... when the real issue is not the weight that's being lost, but rather the fat.
Weight comes from several places:
1) Muscle Mass... which is typically the largest contributor to weight
2) Bone... some people are big or small-boned, so everyone's different
3) Fat... which is really what everyone's concerned about, they just confuse fat with weight.
My ex-girlfriend used to be so excited when she found out she had lost a pound or two... when in reality she hadn't exercised in a month and looked basically the same as she always had. She had most likely lost muscle mass, and had hurt metabolism in the process, so calories are less easily burned by her body and more quickly stored as fat... exactly what she didn't want.
A lot of this misconception comes from the ease with which we can measure weight, but the comparative difficulty and inaccuracy of body fat measurements. There are increasingly cheap and accurate body fat scales now, such as Tanita scales, but most people still rely on the brute method of weighing yourself as a gauge of overall fitness. This is simply ridiculous and leads to a lot of unhealthy behaviors to try to lose weight.
Please help spread the word among your friends... what's really important is not the weight you've lost, but rather the fat you've burned. The more people that know, the less we'll see girls starving themselves to try to reach a certain weight. Thanks for your help.
Aaron Smyth
GymTicket Support
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