Losing weight is a very important issue to many people, however, what most of the people usually understand when they say “losing weight’ is in fact “losing fat”
The thing is, nobody is really keen to get rid of his/her lean body mass (except maybe for isolated pathological cases) and this holds especially true for bodybuilders.
The dilemma is, however, that every lost body-mass unit is made up 60% of muscle and 40% of fat. This ratio is simply not acceptable for anybody who wants to lose weight, and this is why it is so difficult to effectively lose fat.
Let us take the problem apart and analyze all of its elements separately, then try to come up with a solution.
First of all: what is fat? Fat (see basic nutrients section) is a form of cells in which the body stores energy for later use. Since the beginning of human evolution, individuals have been subjected to -sometimes harsh - nutrient scarcities. This led to the development of a system which allowed our ancestors to store energy for times when nutrients were unavailable.
Today, this scarcity in food no longer exists and the deposits that our bodies make anyway have grown to be regarded as unaesthetic.
What is needed to get rid of fat? The same thing our ancestors experienced in times of food shortage: caloric deficit.
Caloric deficit can be achieved through a variety of ways, from fasting, to cleverly dieting to keep the useful lean mass undisturbed.
An ideal reduction in caloric intake and an ideal caloric deficit can be obtained following these principles;
- Low fat diet.
- Eating sufficient protein to maintain muscle mass
- Reducing carbohydrate intake. But only to the level that the body doesn’t yet need to tap into the protein of the muscles for energy.
- Increasing physical activity, in order to increase metabolic rate.

Losing fat without losing any of the lean body mass is probably one of the most challenging high-wire balance acts there are. It is up to every single person to determine the finer variants of the equation (types of foods to eat, types of exercises to do) for him/herself through the good-old method of trial and error.