Doing both aerobics and weight training is optimal way to lose more fat and gain more muscle. If you are trying to lose weight, studies show that weight loss increases by 56 percent with aerobic and strength exercises combined. Muscle may weigh more, but when you increase your muscle composition, body is able to burn more fat, even when you are resting, because your metabolism is higher. A pound of muscle will use 350 to 500 calories per week to survive, while a pound of fat only needs about 14 calories per week. New studies have shown that building muscle helps your body fight disease better, too.

Strength training benefits everyone, no matter what age or sex, and is becoming recognized as an important component of fitness. Research is indicating that muscle loss found in elderly people doesn’t come from age, but lack of activity. Even a young person who doesn’t get enough exercise can lose muscle mass and strength. Strength training, such as lifting weights or performing weight-resistance exercises, as little as twice a week can help maintain or increase muscle mass.

Strength training involving several sets of many repetitions using moderate weights will not result in huge muscles. Instead it builds bone mass, increases metabolism and tones and firms muscles, giving a leaner look.

Time has shown us that diets that restrict all fats fail in terms of weight loss. Since end of World War II, Americans have been told that they need to restrict saturated fat in their diets. So we switched to margarine from butter, and did what we could to restrict fat. We have been constantly told that reason for our health problems is that we still eat too much fat, especially saturated fats.

Since Americans have been told to eat a low fat diet to lose weight, results are that nearly two thirds of adult Americans are now classified as overweight and more children are overweight now than ever before. Obviously something is wrong. That is because we need special kinds of fats in our diets that we are not getting.

If you are like me, you grew up being told that vegetable oils were good oils and saturated fats were bad ones. Now we are finding out that it is just opposite. Diets that are moderate to high in “good” saturated fats and oils such as coconut oil and olive oil are actually very good for us. They raise good cholesterol levels and lower bad cholesterol, blood glucose and blood pressure. As a matter of fact, people who started adding at least 4 tablespoons of coconut oil to their diets every day, have found that they can now lose weight when they could not before on a fat restricted diet. Sometimes addition of these oils even helps with their health problems.

It turns out that bad guys are polyunsaturated oils, which carry toxic fatty acids (long chain fatty acids or LCT’s). These LCT’s tend to produce fat in body. Polyunsaturated oils are vegetable oils we commonly see in grocery store, such as soy, corn, cottonseed, rapeseed and safflower.

We have been told that they lower cholesterol, but they way that they do is not healthy, as it ends up collecting in liver. These oils are easily oxidized and damaged by free radicals. When cooked they become rancid in a few hours, even in refrigerator. This causes damage to our body at a cellular level, end results showing up as problems like diabetes, cancer, hypothyroidism and heart disease. And if that is not enough, these oils help us to get fat, lower metabolic rate in our bodies, help suppress thyroid function and cause our skin to age quicker.