Losing Weight vs. Losing Body Fat: Know the Difference

There are a lot of weight loss programs, diet foods, and health tips out there, all promising to help you lose weight and look your best. But while many of these programs help with weight loss initially, they often result in weight gain when you stop following them. The reason is that many of these programs don’t help you lose weight in the form of fat only, but in the form of water, muscle, and fat.

Losing weight is not the same as losing body fat. And the aim shouldn’t be to lose weight, but to lose body fat! You want your weight loss to be due to loss of fat, not muscle or water. Even though these programs may help reduce the number on the scale, they can cause you to lose essential muscle, which will lead to weight gain (fat gain) later in the future.

Body fat testing

When you are on a weight-loss program, it’s crucial to determine whether you are only losing fat or a combination of water, muscle, and fat. For instance, if you are a woman weighing 150 lbs and have 35% body fat, you are carrying over 52 pounds of fat in your body. Typically, a healthy woman should have about 25% body fat or around 37 pounds of fat. This delta means that you have to lose 15 pounds of fat to get to a healthier body fat percentage.

Let’s say you dropped 20 pounds overall, but just 10 pounds of it was from your fat stores. You would still have an unhealthy 32% fat left in your body. To get to your ideal body fat level of 25%, all 20 pounds you lose need to come from fat.

Now the question remains – how do you know your weight loss is a result of burning fat?

Body fat testing (through body composition analysis) is an excellent way to determine the amount of fat loss. Here is a chart showing the ideal body fat percentages for men and women.

Body Fat Percentage Chart
Body Fat Percentage Chart

Dehydration is not weight loss

Dehydration is sometimes mistaken for weight loss as it also lowers the numbers on the scale. And this is one of the common tricks used by weight-loss programs and products out there.

If your weight loss is due to dehydration, you have only lost water, and the lost weight will definitely come back in no time.

Don’t ever think that the pounds won’t return!

Your percentage of body fat remains the same. When you are dehydrated, the muscle will shrink up because water makes them plump and robust, so you become lighter but at the expense of losing strength or energy.

Muscle loss slows down body metabolism

Although losing weight other than fat is inevitable, muscle loss will have a rebound effect, which will result in weight gain.

Muscle is a metabolically active tissue that keeps your metabolism fast and burning calories. The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn, even when just sitting down on the couch. Clearly, muscle loss slows down your body’s metabolism and makes you regain the weight you have already lost.

Weight loss targeting fat loss

New weight-loss programs will keep cropping up, promising to help you lose weight. But while many of these programs will surely assist with weight loss, it will probably only be for the short term and put your health at significant risk. There is no way you can continue taking weight-loss pills, shots, or medications or eating just a small selection of food that tastes like grass.

If you want to specifically target fat loss without losing lean muscle mass and water, then you need to adjust your carbohydrate intake. Generally, carbohydrates increase the levels of sugar in the blood, and excess amounts of carbohydrates raise insulin levels. Insulin is a protein hormone that helps store fat, boosts cholesterol production, and increases the arterial walls’ thickness, resulting in high blood pressure (hypertension).

When you are trying to lose only fat, you need to measure your lean body mass, body fat percentage, and water mass/ hydration to make sure you are really losing just fat. All these measurements can be carried out using a body composition analysis (BCA) device at BioIntelligent Wellness.

BioIntelligent Wellness’s weight loss program

Our Ideal Protein weight-loss program is specifically designed to help you lose body fat, and we have been able to assist thousands of clients in their weight loss journey.

Ideal Protein is a clinically-developed, three-phase program that focuses on fat loss while maintaining muscle. It’s not a high protein diet; instead, it’s adequate-protein, supporting your muscle mass, which maximizes your weight loss rate while on the diet and prevents weight gain once you hit your goal.

One more interesting thing about Ideal Protein protocol is that it is a low-carb, ketogenic diet. This approach allows the body to tap into its fat stores and is also low fat, allowing you to burn the fat in your stored fat cells rather than just the fat in the foods you eat.

While results vary over the last ten years, our patient’s outcomes have been consistent and remarkable. On average, we see men lose between 3 to 7 pounds per week, and most of our female clients lose an average of 2 to 5 pounds every week.

At BioIntelligent Wellness, we not only aim to help clients get the weight off, but we also focus even more on assisting them to leverage science to help keep the weight they’ve lost off. If you would like to learn more about our program, please contact us today to schedule a complimentary consultation.

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