The more lean muscle you have, the more energy it takes to fuel it. For every pound of muscle you gain, your resting metabolic rate goes up as much as 50 calories/day!!

The average woman burns about 10 calories/pound of body weight every day and men are around 11cal/pound/ day. So its easy to see how adding a little muscle mass can have a substantial increase in your metabolic rate.

You can’t build muscle without eating enough protein. More food (good

quality, high-protein food)=more muscle=less fat. You burn between

10-30% of your calories by digesting food (this can be closer to 30% with a higher concentration of fibrous carbs such as broccoli and cauliflower). This can also be increased by eating more

protein, about 25 calories burned for every 100 calories consumed!! Thats better than the other macronutrients, 10-15 calories burned per 100 caloris of fat or carbs. Another 10-15% of calories are burned by moving your muscles. And that can be increased by adding exercise, but that 10-15% is not as important as the 60-80% that

you burn durning the rest of the day by doing nothing at all, basal metabolism.

Changing your diet and workouts to maximize this portion of calorie expenditure will have the greatest fat-loss effects. Cardiovascular exercises like steady-state cardio will burn a lot of calories but they won’t build much if any muscle and your calorie expenditure stops when you stop jogging. The #1 factor for increased metabolism is increased muscle mass.

Muscle “eats” fat by using your fat stores to fuel it. Again, 1 pound of muscle burns an extra 50 calories/day. So, add 6 pounds of muscle (not

enough to give The Governator a run for his money) and suddenly you’re burning up to 300 more calories/day by just being. When you do steady- state cardio, you use up your glycogen stores first and then move into fat burning for fuel, but after that it turns to

protein…..so that means you begin to break down muscle for energy. Once you make it to that point, you can burn up to 5-6 grams of protein for every 30 minutes of ongoing exercise.

Early studies measured calories burned during weight training vs. cardiovascular exercise and the cardiovascular exercise burned more

calories…..DURING THE EXERCISE. But newer studies have went beyond and looked at total calories burned for up to 24 hours after doing cardio vs. weights and found that weight lifters burned far more calories. This is called “afterburn”. Aerobics afterburn lasts

for about 30-60 minutes compared to weight training which increased

metabolism for as long as 48 hours. Over the long-term both groups lost weight and perhaps the cardio only group lost more weight, but they lost muscle mass as well as fat whereas the weight training group’s weight loss was fat only!

Protein synthesis takes place all day, everyday. This can be increased by lifting weights since that tears down more muscle and in turn requires more energy to rebuild those injured muscles. A 2001 Finnish study found that protein

synthesis increases 21% 3 hours after a workout. A Danish study put 65 subjects on a 12% protein diet, a 25% protein diet, or no diet.

The low-protein dieters lost an average of more than 11 pounds but the high protein dieters lost an average of 20 pounds. More amazingly is where they lost the weight….they lost twice as much abdominal fat. One reason for this is that high-protein diets help

your body control its cortisol levels, which is a stress hormone that causes fat to converge in the abdominal region.

So, lift weights and eat your protein!!