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Can you turn fat into muscle?

Fat and muscle are two completely different tissues. So, the claims that you can covert one into the other is impossible. You can increase or decrease one or the other, but you cannot convert one to the other. Everyone has around 650 named muscles in their body give or take one or two. So, the idea that we can create more through the conversion of fat is ridiculous.

Unfortunately, our fat cells don’t completely disappear when we reduce our fat mass, they merely shrink. Because we retain the same number of fat cells, it is easy to regain weight if we slip back into bad habits. When we start to lose weight through regular exercise and healthy eating it may appear that it converts to muscle. But in actual fact, the reduction in fat mass and increase in muscle mass allows the muscles to become more visible.

When trying to reduce our fat mass, we need to address our current eating habits and physical exercise.

Our diet is extremely important, if we don’t get this right we will find it very difficult to lose weight. The American College of Sports Medicine recommend reducing current caloric intake by 500 to 1000 calories. We like to keep nutrition simple. Eat from a wide variety of sources such as vegetables, lean meats, good fats, fruit and eliminate processed foods.

Unfortunately, there is no magic exercise to shift the unwanted fat mass from a specific region of the body. It is a collective effort of all the calories burnt, in comparison to what we have consumed through diet. Guidelines for weight loss recommend completing greater than 250 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week.

So what type of exercise to choose? You can’t go wrong with a combination of aerobic and resistance training. Aerobic exercise provides a larger calorie burn in one session in comparison to resistance training. But resistance training will have a larger effect on our muscle mass. The larger muscle mass we have the greater our metabolic rate. This means we will expend more calories at rest.

If your struggling to lose weight please speak with your Accredited Dietician and Accredited Exercise Physiologist.