Are you losing weight, getting leaner, getting tone, or does it even matter as long as you ARE losing something? This mentality becomes a hang up for so many people trying to lose weight. Getting leaner or becoming more "tone" doesn't have to mean scale weight loss.

For example, a Samoan participant on the highly watched TV show The Biggest Loser was eliminated because he only lost 4 "scale" lbs., while everybody else lost around 20 lbs. What mattered was that the Samoan lost 6" in his waist! The mistake: his trainer should have never let him lift weights as part of his "weight loss" regimen. Don't those Hollywood fitness experts get it? He's Samoan. He probably has the genetic propensity to put on muscle just by looking at weights or even doing 1 pushup. The point I am trying to make is that the Samoan guy probably added like 10 "muscle" lbs. while simultaneously lost 14 fat lbs., which would explain his 6" lost around his waist, because that's where most of anybody's fat is stored anyway. Poor guy, all that work and nobody recognized he was Samoan. I would have never let him touch a weight and instead had him run on the treadmill, he then would have scored better on the blinking scale.

Bottom line: getting tone means having less fat. You can lose 10 lbs. on a scale and have 5 of it come from muscle and 5 come from fat. But you aren't more tone. So if tone is what you want you must have muscle specific workouts with cardio specific workouts with high exertion most of the time. They go together, sort of like toothpaste and a toothbrush. Also, you have to eat with a lot of frequency, probably 5 -6 times a day. This keeps your metabolism flying along with the energy required to repair the muscle at the cellular level because of "high exertion" in your workout. This ultimately is the name of the "toning" game. Highest overall metabolic rate is the winner. If only scale weight matters then just under eat and over workout. You will lose weight but you probably won’t be more tone.

-Max, B.S.ACSM

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