Without question, body fat testing is Step One in any effort to lose weight, if you really want to have long-term success. And body fat testing is the difference that makes The Living Lean Program such a success.



People automatically assume that losing weight means losing fat. But the truth is, if you step on the scale and your weight has gone down, you've lost one of three things: water, muscle or fat. You gain and lose water all day, so it's a variable that changes constantly. Muscle is your friend, and you want to keep as much of it on your body as possible. Why? Not because it's good to be "muscular", but because muscle is metabolically active tissue - that means it burns calories all day long. Believe it or not, even sleeping burns calories! And the more muscle you have, the more calories it burns. Fat, on the other hand, is inactive tissue. It just sits there, increasing your waistline and decreasing your self-esteem.

When one of our clients loses five pounds, we always want to know, "Five pounds of what?" There is a way to make sure you burn fat instead of losing muscle - because losing muscle is a sure-recipe for putting all the weight you lost back on, and then some.

Thanks for reading even more - that shows that you've had enough of losing at the game of losing, and you're ready to learn how YOU CAN DO THIS, once and for all.

So we've established that muscle is your friend, and when you lose weight, what you really want to do is lose FAT.

Here's an example of the role that body fat testing plans in fat loss: Take a 180-pound person with 30% body fat. That means he has 54 pounds of fat on his body, and that roughly 70% of his body burns calories.

Now take 30 pounds of muscle off of him. On the scale, he's down 30 pounds. If he's a "scale person", he thinks things are great! But in reality, he still has 54 pounds of fat that's now on a 150-pound body. That means his body fat percentage has shot up to 36% - he's got more than half as much fat as he does muscle! Only 64% of his body burns calories now, so his metabolism is slower. He was actually better off before he lost the weight.

Go back to the beginning with the same guy, and instead take 30 pounds of FAT off. Scale still says he's down 30 pounds - still great! But now he only has 24 pounds of fat. His body fat percentage is down to 16% - he has more than 6 times as much muscle on his body as he does fat, and it means that 84% of his body is burning calories. His metabolism is faster, his overall health has improved.