Keeping a good muscle tone and retaining your muscle mass is a major issue with weight loss in women. Particularly with starvation or calorie-restrictive diets what most women find is that they lose muscle mass in addition to fat and water. You may think that muscle mass is more important for men than it is for women and you’d be wrong – muscle tone is much more important for women. This is partly because women have much less muscle to start with – once you start losing even a small percentage of it, you get the ‘flabby’ or ‘skinny-fat’ look we certainly don’t want!
How to fix this?
One way is to keep your protein intake high. Many women who try to restrict calories in order to lose weight (which we do not advocate) naturally lower their protein intake and focus on eating fruit, vegetables and whole grains. Unfortunately, the protein content of those foods is very low, which is a major reason why most vegetarians are slim and skinny. Put calorie restriction on top of that and you’ll find that you start to lose muscle mass instead of fat.
Meat and eggs are your friend here – if you are a vegetarian you can also try increasing your lentils/other beans intake in order to eat more protein. However, I would strongly advice that you include at least 50 grams of protein in your diet in order to keep good muscle tone.
Muscle tone is responsible for looking good and having a sexy body in women. Once you start losing muscle mass AND fat the results may not be as pretty as you expect. Fortunately, this can be easily reversed by increasing your protein intake and reducing carbs.
Stay fit,
Angie