“Won’t I get bulky by lifting weights?”
Raise your hand if you have had this discussion with a “skinny-fat” friend (usually a woman, as it turns out). Skinny-fat women might look nice in a v-neck, but they’d sooner crawl into a hole than expose an upper arm or leg.
The descent into the skinny-fat state is the number one problem for most people as they age, according to Art De Vany. They are not aging so much as they are losing their body composition and strength; with that, their metabolism goes south and they suffer the skinny-fat syndrome or what is technically known as sarcopenic obesity.We have covered in the past why the BMI is bogus for CrossFitters. The common wisdom is that if you are overweight you are unhealthy, and if you are thin, you are healthy.
But new research points to just how dangerous being skinny can be if you are a “skinny fat” person:
Why is this so pertinent to women? Mark’s Daily Apple sums it up well:
Skinny-fatness strikes women a lot more than men. I think this is mainly because men aren’t afraid of lifting weights to lose weight (and, to be fair, men naturally do have so much more muscle and far less fat).
Whoever said women were bad at math has never met a woman two weeks before her high school reunion or two days before a date!We women, on the other hand, evidently prefer inventing bizarre and complicated diet regimens revolving around arcane preparation rituals, subsistence on one food group or arbitrary calorie limits ….
The less muscle you have, the less work your bones have to do, and they begin to shed that incredibly valuable osseous material: your bones, which are, in fact, living tissues directly related to your blood, immune system, strength, longevity – even your mood.
You know how coral reefs are actually living organisms that provide all sorts of vital and irreplaceable functions to the fish and plants and water surrounding them? Your bones are your body’s coral reef.
You have to feed them, and weight-bearing activity = food for bones.
But lifting weights will make me “bulk up,” right?
Cody Rice of CrossFit South Bay addresses some key misconceptions about how the body works:
- You cannot “tone” a certain portion of your body. Your body will not lose fat in one spot at a time, it will only lose fat. Thus, you must reduce your overall body fat percentage to see results in the area you want. This is why the “ab-(insert attention-grabbing verb)” you see on TV won’t work to help you get a better midsection.
- Lean – having little to no surplus fat. Thus, to look “lean,” you need to have low levels of body fat.
- Toned – seeing muscle definition on a human body. Thus, to look “toned”, you need to have low levels of body fat combined with having enough muscular development that you can see the shape of the muscle under the skin. This is usually accomplished at below 20% body fat on women, and below 10% on men.
- You will never “bulk up” overnight, except from maybe an ice cream and beer binge (guilty). You will never wake up one morning, look in the mirror, and realize that you just built bulky muscles in your sleep.
So you can have a large amount of muscle without looking bulky. Bulky = fat, and being “skinny fat” (having a large amount of fat while having a very small amount of muscle) is the real problem, both from a health and an aesthetics perspective.
