Targeted Fat Loss and your Basal Metabolic Rate

The importance of altering your fat to lean muscle ratio and therby raising your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) with targeted fat loss.

For a dietary supplement to be effective you must understand how your body works to be able to target fat loss while retaining muscle. One key to targeted fat loss is understanding the role of your base metabolic rate, Basal Metabolic Rate contrasted to your Body Mass Index (BMI). As you lose fat but keep the muscle, your BMR will increase! This is an obvious benefit because as your metabolism increases, your body will burn fat and calories more efficiently and quickly. This highlights the difference between your BMR and your BMI and is a key in the battle to turn off the fat switch.

Your basal metabolic rate is the daily energy your body burns (calories) to maintain its basic functions - temperature, digestion and metabolic functions.

Here is a good example that shows how important it is to understand just how our bodies work:

Take two individuals who both weigh 220lbs and are similar heights (and therefore similar BMI's). One individual is a body builder who is 95% lean and 5% fat. This individual requires 2422 calories to maintain their their BMR. Contrast this to the other individual who leads a sedentary lifestyle and who is 70% lean and 30% fat. This individual only requires 1882 to maintain their BMR. There is a BMR difference of 540 calories. This means it takes less calories for the individual with the lower BMR to accumulate fat which only adds to their problem of excess fat to lean mass. Simply measuring your BMI without taking into account your BMR can be fatal in the long-run.

Obesity is the abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat. The basic cause of obesity is consuming more calories than your body uses, resulting in a surplus of calories, which your body then has to store. Improving our diets, increased physical activity; including an exercise program, are all important, but frequently for many people its not enough. This is where an understanding of BMR so important.

So it’s not about losing pounds, its about losing fat! When you are trying to lose weight you want to lose fat, you do not want to lose muscle. Sometimes muscle is lost during a weight loss program and this is not healthy. Quite often the weight lost is 50% fat, 50% muscle and of course when the diet and /or exercise is stopped guess what comes back! You want to keep all of the muscle and lose the fat. Its not about how many pounds you lose - its about how much fat you lose and how much lean muscle you keep.

This may help to explain why the diet pills that work to boost metabolism do nothing to solve the problem in the long-run and the low-fat or low carb regimes provide no lasting correction to the ratio of fat to lean. In other words the BMR is not changed so the underlying cause is not addressed.

I trust that this gives you some keys as you explore the myriad of weight-loss programs out there and may help to explain why someone can feel reasonably healthy and yet still be carrying excess body fat.

The greatest health risks are associated with waist measurements greater than 40 inches/102 cm for men and 35 inches/88 cm for women.

By now you might be asking the question - what can be done to address this underlying cause of obesity. Without a doubt there is an important role for good dietary supplements given the highly nutrient deficient foods we are mostly eating (not mention the fast-foods and processed foods that surround us).

And yes a moderate exercise program make sense, like walking for 1/2 hour five days a week. So too we should be eating more low GI foods and as much fresh and raw fruit and vegies as is reasonable (without becoming a rabbit). You also need to be drinking enough clean water each day to help your body detox ( 6-8 glasses or 0.3 litres per 1 kg body weight).

Our research and most recent experience has led us to a synergistic blend of peptides that can switch your metabolism from an anabolic to catabolic, reduce angiotension and target fat-loss, not lean-loss.