The diet and fitness marketing world largely functions on fear based marketing. The basic template is to throw some science-y sounding terms at you that make you believe there is an absolute right and absolute wrong way to go about losing bodyfat and gaining muscle mass.
You might describe Greg Valentino as having a pathologically high level of lean body mass.
Even though millions of people on a daily basis gain muscle and lose bodyfat doing it their own way, the marketing will have you believe most of them are doing it wrong and that the consequences are dire.
One of the most pervasive marketing induced fears is the fear of losing muscle mass when you decide to diet down and reduce bodyfat. This message has been trumpeted for years and now it is taken as common knowledge that when you eat less calories you will automatically lose muscle mass.
This is an illogical fear as anyone who has gained muscle in the past knows that muscle mass is not a constant state, but is more correctly viewed as a transient state based on multiple factors including your hydration status, your current training status, your age, use of drugs or not, genetic predisposition, injury/sickness status (ie: do you have a broken bone, tendonitis, a sprain, the flu etc).
Somewhat ironically fat mass is more stable on a day to day basis, but can be changed quite rapidly by simply increasing or decreasing your calorie intake. Muscle mass can appear different on a day to day basis based on hydration status and some of the other aforementioned factors, but it takes years to build it up.
Diet and fitness marketing is training us all to always look at the cup as half empty. When we lose bodyfat, we’re told that we’ll just ‘gain it all back when we got back to eating normal’. Conversely when we lose some lean body mass (and potentially some muscle mass) while dieting we’re lead to believe it is gone forever and we can never again build that muscle mass back up again.
We’re taught that almost any action we take is a lose-lose situation.
Losing and gaining lean body mass is at the root of the fear based marketing directed at men who are working out trying to build muscle and reduce body fat.
This fear mongering has to stop, and in today’s podcast Brad Pilon and I try to put a stake in the heart of this message once and for all to help clear your mind and remove any mental roadblocks that might be holding you back from getting into your best shape.
We’ll review some research explaining the concept of pathological increases in lean body mass, and the fact that being obese might actually bring with it too much lean body mass that must come back down to physiologically normal healthy levels before you can truly have the body you want.
We’ll also discuss the difference in perception of gaining and losing muscle mass vs fat mass, and how the human eye can detect very subtle changes in your body shape that can play tricks on your mind if you’re not prepared to deal with the visual changes that come with dieting and training.
John
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About Allen Elliott