Why You Might Be Losing Muscle Mass
Your body has certain regulating features which ensure your survival. For example, if you were starving, your body goes into emergency mode and slows down your metabolism. It also starts to give up things that require the most amount of energy for the body to maintain. By saving your energy and slowing down your metabolism, it will extend your rate of survival.
It takes the body more energy to maintain muscle tissue than it does to maintain fat tissue. So if your body needs to go into survival mode, the first thing to go is muscle tissue. In other words, it will burn muscle mass.
There are a number reasons that your body will do this. The main culprit for losing muscle mass is a calorie intake deficiency. In other words, you are not consuming enough calories in your daily diet.
People who try to go on a diet usually make this mistake. They decrease the amount of calories they consume. This allows them to lose weight. Unfortunately, they do not lose fat, but muscle. This is a problem because muscle is the easiest way to lose fat.
A pound of muscle at rest will burn a tremendously larger amount of calories than a pound of fat at rest. So in other words, after you’re done working out, your muscles will continue to burn calories. The trick isn’t to decrease your calorie intake so much as it is to increase your muscle mass, which will in turn help you lose fat.
There are some instances where you’re getting an adequate amount of calories and you’re still losing muscle mass. The two main causes here are lack of protein and lack of carbohydrates. Your body needs protein to build muscles. If you exercise with the best personal trainer and perform the best workout routines, but you do not consume any protein, you will not build any muscles.
Carbohydrates help the body facilitate converting protein into muscle building material. Therefore, it is not enough just to get protein to build muscles, but you need carbohydrates to best utilize those proteins.
Finally, if you do nothing to overload your muscles, then they have no reason to grow. If you’re dieting, and only working out with aerobic exercises, you’re doing nothing to stimulate muscle growth. Therefore, you are putting yourself at an increased risk of losing muscle mass.
