Why Muscle is an Important Part of your Weight Loss Plan

Apr. 13

As I’ve gotten older and improved my relationship with myself and my body, my priorities at the gym have changed from when I was in my 20s. I still want to maintain a certain body composition, but my focus is not to be skinny anymore. I want to maintain my independence and health as I age. I want to be able to carry my groceries and walk the beach when I travel. And for this, we need to maintain our functionality and our strength by prioritizing muscle growth and maintenance.

Will lifting weights make me bulky?

Having more muscle will support you through hormonal changes that come with stress, perimenopause and menopause. It is a myth that if you are a woman that you will get bulky when you start lifting weights. The average woman will not be able to become as muscular as a man. And to grow muscles at the level of a bikini competitor, you would have to invest a serious amount of time in training and diet. I have the body type that more easily gains muscle (and fat), I have been lifting weights for 15 years, intentionally eating and lifting in a way to build muscle, and I am not close to having the same muscle mass as my boyfriend (who is not as remotely strategic about building muscle!). In other words, it would take A LOT of effort to get bulky.

TL;DR: Maintaining and growing muscle is critical for health and quality of life as we age. Benefits of maintaining a healthy amount of muscle include:

Metabolism Boost: Muscle tissue is metabolically active, meaning it burns more calories at rest compared to fat tissue.

Blood Sugar Regulation: Muscle uptakes glucose from the bloodstream, which helps to control blood sugar levels and reduce the risk of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes and other chronic lifestyle illnesses.

Strength and Functionality: Maintaining muscle mass is essential for overall strength, mobility, and functionality, especially as we age. Strong muscles support proper posture, balance, and movement, reducing the risk of falls and injuries.

Bone Health: Resistance training, which builds and maintains muscle mass, also stimulates bone growth and density. This is particularly important for women, as they are more prone to osteoporosis as they age.

Hormonal Balance: Muscle mass influences hormonal balance, including insulin sensitivity and production of hormones like estrogen. Maintaining healthy levels of muscle can help regulate hormone levels, which is especially important for women going through perimenopause and menopause.

Longevity and Quality of Life: Research has shown that higher muscle mass is associated with a lower risk of mortality and better overall health outcomes as we age. Preserving muscle mass can contribute to a higher quality of life and independence in older age.

Why increase muscle mass?

Growing muscle is an investment in your health and future. It’s protective against insulin resistance and metabolic disease. Muscle is not just for strength and aesthetics; skeletal muscle is an endocrine organ, which means it makes and releases hormones into our body. Myokines are released and, based on current research, these myokines exert beneficial effects and are involved in body weight regulation, inflammation, insulin sensitivity and cognitive function.

With less muscle, our metabolism is slower, we age faster and our risk of becoming obese and developing type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis and cancer increases.

Building muscle should be a priority for anyone aiming to optimize their health and lose weight, here’s why:

Muscle protects us from aging and illness.

Studies have shown that the healthier our muscles, the greater the chance we’ll survive when we become ill or experience an injury. Falling over the age of 60 is one of the leading causes of injury death in this age group, and this is just one of the ways in which muscle acts as a body armour to protect us. A big reason why people struggle with age is because they do not have adequate muscle mass. Muscle is important for disease prevention through its impact on our metabolic health. It also acts as a reservoir of amino acids, meaning the body will pull nutrients from available muscle to repair and protect itself when you get sick or experience an injury, which will happen to all of us at some point.

Muscle burns fat.

Muscle is calorically expensive. If you want to lose fat sustainably, focus on being strong, not skinny. We all have a basal metabolic rate which means we burn a certain amount of calories at rest. Muscle increases this metabolic rate so we burn more calories just by having more muscle. So if you have more muscle mass, it’s easier to maintain a healthy body composition. In addition to this, you burn calories while you strength train and you experience an elevated metabolic rate for a few days after training which is huge for fat loss.

Muscle plays a pivotal role in maintaining healthy blood sugar levels.

When you eat carbohydrates, they are broken down into glucose, which enters the bloodstream, raising blood sugar levels. In response to increased blood sugar level, the pancreas releases insulin, a hormone that assists in regulating blood sugar levels by helping blood sugar enter the body’s cells so it can be used for energy. Insulin takes that glucose from our bloodstream and puts it into our liver primarily, where it’s stored as glycogen. However, the liver is pretty small. So when it’s full, insulin sends the glucose to our muscles and when those are full, it’s sent to our adipose (fat) tissue. Where, yes, it’s stored as fat. Over time, this doesn’t only lead to weight gain, but it increases our fasting blood sugar levels and sets the stage for type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

An analogy I heard from Kelly Levesque is the best way to summarize this; think of your liver like a gas tank and the muscles like a trunk. You cannot control the size of the gas tank, but you can control the size of your trunk. Would you prefer to own a mini cooper or a suburban with a huge trunk? We can buy that suburban-size trunk by lifting weights and eating an optimal amount of protein.

In addition to this, when your muscles contract during activity, your cells are able to take up glucose and use it for energy, without insulin’s assistance. This means having more healthy muscle mass results in more glucose being removed from your blood, without the need for insulin. Less insulin is a good thing as too much can lead to insulin resistance which is inflammatory and increases our risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Building muscle in perimenopause and menopause

The majority of women gain fat in this phase of life. And while you need to be more strategic and targeted to maintain your body composition, fat gain is not a given. Your ability to lose fat is NOT a lost cause, regardless of what you’ve heard.

You gain fat through perimenopause and menopause due to a combination of hormonal shifts and less energy expenditure. Diet dogma tells you that you need to move more and eat less to lose weight. Most of my clients are in perimenopause or through menopause and they’re eating 1300 calories or less when they join and they’ve either plateaued or are gaining weight. They’re running hours a week to lose weight, or feeling guilty about not running. The perspective needs to shift from doing more cardio, and eating less to eating MORE, primarily protein, and growing muscle, not getting smaller.

Estrogen is protective for both bone and muscle health. We experience a rapid degradation of collagen when our estrogen drops with menopause. On average, women lose up to 10% of bone mass within the first five years of menopause. Getting ahead of this is critical for healthy aging, and we can do that by prioritizing muscle maintenance and growth in these phases of life.

In addition to this, you become naturally more insulin resistant as estrogen and progesterone. It becomes harder with hormonal deficiencies and less resilience to stress, but you can help to counter this through your diet choices, like prioritizing protein, healthy fats and low starch fiber-rich veggies, adding in strategic cardio and strength training. Walking is the most underrated form of exercise for fat loss. Zone 2 and potentially HIIT training can be great add-ins. And hitting the weights with an intelligent progressive lifting program is critical. If you are new to lifting weights, this is the best time to start! You will likely be able to put on muscle faster than someone who has trained for years.

How can we maintain and gain muscle?

Stop focusing on what you’re removing, and focus on ADDING. By eating an optimal amount of protein and resistance training we can gain muscle at any age, even in our later decades. Sarcopenia (the loss of muscle tissue, size and strength) is not just a disease that happens with age, it can start in our 30s! Being sedentary, having low grade inflammation, a diet low in protein and insulin resistance all increase our risk of sarcopenia.

To maintain and gain muscle, we need a certain amount of training volume, we need to train close to failure and to trigger muscle protein synthesis through out diet. This requires the right amount and combination of amino acids from our dietary protein. And if you are over the age of 30, you may want to consider adding in a high quality essential amino acid supplement, read more about why here.

It’s never too late to start working on your muscle health. You can still build muscle in your 40s, 50s and 60s. It just gets harder and you need to be more strategic. You need to eat an optimal amount of high quality protein and consistently lift weights.

Can you build muscle just by increasing your protein intake? If historically your diet was low in protein and you have not lifted weights, it is possible.

In summary, muscle is crucial for weight management, fat loss, blood sugar regulation, and overall health, especially for women aged 35 or older. Incorporating strength training and other forms of resistance exercise into one's fitness routine is essential for maintaining and building muscle mass throughout life.