Becoming Leaner: Your Most Important New Year's Resolution for Fitness

As the New Year rolls around, many people's thoughts turn to resolutions of self-improvement and new beginnings when the calendar turns. For many Americans, these resolutions revolve around fitness goals, such as losing weight or simply "getting healthier." For most folks hoping to improve fitness next year, though, getting leaner is generally a much better and more specific goal. Here's why.

When you set out to lose weight at all costs, the methods usually include drastic calorie reductions and a marked uptick in aerobic activity. This strategy will certainly get the scale moving downward, at least for a time, but it is also fraught with health and fitness perils. When the body is thrown into starvation mode and asked to do lots of "light" (aerobic) work, it will grab energy from anywhere it can. This includes the food you eat, fat stores, and, problematically, muscle stores. The result is that you generally end up losing nearly as much muscle as you do fat, which is undesirable for many reasons.

Muscle is the body's most active tissue, responsible for locomotion and all other types of bodily movement. From an energetics standpoint, muscle burns calories even when you're just sitting on your duff, so loss of muscle tissue lowers your basal metabolic rate. Losing weight through muscle loss will leave you smaller, yes, but weaker than you were before. You'll also be burning fewer calories at rest, which means it's much more likely that you'll gain back the fat that you HAVE lost, and more, when you stop dieting. This is the genesis of the classic yo-yo syndrome and can lead to a fat and weak body as you age. Importantly, the less muscle mass you have in your elderly years, the more likely you are to face a loss of mobility and all of the ills that accompany such a condition.

The first step toward achieving a fitter body, then, is to lose the mindset that you need to lose "weight." For most everyone who is currently overweight, the goal should be to lose adipose tissue, or fat, while maintaining as much muscle mass as possible. Even better would be to gain a bit of muscle and strength in the process. Besides enhancing mobility, extra muscle can help improve insulin sensitivity and other biomarkers that are associated with diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Clearly, body composition, not bodyweight itself, should be the focus of most fitness regimens.

So, how do you go about becoming leaner and stronger? A consultation with your physician should always be your first stop on the path to better fitness, but we'll outline some of the principles to improving body composition in future articles. Until then, don't think thin: think lean!