Losing weight can be frustrating, especially if you are dieting. It’s easy to find yourself yo-yo dieting and never gaining any long-term results. Your dream is to take the pounds off and keep them off but it doesn’t usually work that way, and even worse if you do lose weight are you loosing muscle, water, or fat? It matters! So what is the secret to losing and staying trim? Glad you asked!

It’s very important that you don’t lose muscle mass and you can if you are dieting. Losing muscle is very bad because muscle burns a lot of calories. Every pound of muscle will burn 35 calories every day. That means if you lose muscle mass you’ll be burning less calories and if you are burning less calories you could actually find yourself gaining weight on a diet. Which is why you need to not only be doing aerobic exercise but also weight training.

Too often, when we talk about wanting to lose weight, we are told that it’s important that we do cardio exercise or aerobic exercise to burn fat, when in fact, weight training, and muscle development is very important. Why? Well for just the reason we said about – muscle will burn more calories and that means the more muscle, the easier it will be burn fat.

Aerobic exercise includes walking, running, cycling, and aerobic cardio workouts. The number of calories burned depends on the exercise but on average, you will burn 300 calories per hour, if it is a strenuous cardio workout. This won’t happen in the beginner stages. Your RMR or resting metabolic rate will stay elevated for a couple of hours after you are done exercising.

Now let’s look at weight training, also called strength training. With weight training, your RMR will be permanently elevated and since RMR is responsible for about 65% of your calorie expenditure for the day, which means even a small increase will land up burning more fat.

A study done in the early 90′s, found that over a three-month period of participating in a basic weight training program the participants gained 3 pounds of muscle and lost 4 pounds of fat, while eating 15% more calories per day.

Aerobic exercise will not increase muscle mass. In fact, too much aerobic exercise with not enough calorie intake will cause loss of muscle mass. It’s easier to loose muscle than fat. Another common mistake is to see the number on the scale increase and then panic. Muscle weighs more than fat, so you could see your weight go up but your body fat go down.

When we talk about weight lifting, we aren’t talking about heading off to the gym and lifting a 100 pounds, or having to develop big muscles. This is a common misconception. First, most women’s bodies do not have enough testosterone to get big bulky muscles, so stop worrying. Your weight lifting program need only include the basics and even resistance training works great as weight training.

Weight training is key to losing weight and keeping the weight off your body. Aerobic exercise should be part of your weight loss program just as proper eating should be. Why not use a weight training and fitness program that works and works for your entire life? So go for it and keep your body and mind fit and healthy, and enjoy all the benefits this brings.