A picture of your thinspiration. What features do you like about this person?

CIARA. I think her body is absolutely amazing. I look to her for thinspiration for a million reasons, but mainly because her frame and height are similar to mine, so trying for a body like hers is actually an attainable goal. What I like most about her body is that there’s so much muscle. I believe muscles on girls are absolutely beautiful, and it shows that you worked hard to get to where you are physically. People may be naturally skinny, but people don’t naturally have rock hard abs and beasty thighs that would scare Chuck Norris. That’s what I want will have.

I’ve been hearing about how you burn a calorie for every two jumping jacks, so 1000 per day is the equivalent of a pound each week. Exercise is typically my forte, but I’m gonna need a little motivation for this one. So for every new follower I get, I’ll do 100 jumping jacks and check out your blog! (:

Ladies, this is for you. Whenever I go to the gym, I feel like I’m entering a middle school dance. On one side there’s girls gossiping and hair flipping in the cardio area. On the opposed weight lifting section there’s the macho men flexing their biceps and bragging about the girls they probably didn’t really hook up with last night. Some from each side like to mingle in the middle with the legs and abs machines; but the truly fearless soldiers are the ones who march all the way to other side and put a middle finger up to the stereotypes. Girls, especially. Women always wonder why men can lose weight so much faster than them. Maybe it’s because they unlocked a secret that most girls are too pansy to unlock themselves: WEIGHT TRAINING. Whenever random people see me lifting, they assume I’m training for a sport or some type of fitness competition. My friends don’t understand why I got these muscles for no reason. On the contrary my friends, I have my reasons. First, muscles are effin sexy. Millions of girls are thin with no effort at all, but I’ve never seen a girl born with a six pack. If you can work hard and care for your body to the point where you’re constantly being mistaken for a superstar track athlete, then you deserve every double take or drooling mouth your muscles cause. But secondly, and most importantly, “The more lean muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn.”

Research has shown that those who followed a strength training program for two months burned, on average, about 200 calories more per workout than those whose exercise regimen did not include strength training.

Also, strength training benefits your resting metabolic rate immensely. It’ll allow your metabolism to stay elevated longer after your workout, even when you’re inactive. Who wouldn’t want to burn more calories just by sitting? Resistance training not only helps control weight, but also: reduces risk of osteoporosis and injury, boosts your stamina, and helps with managing chronic conditions. Sounds too good to be true, right? So why don’t most girls do it? “Ew, I don’t want to look like Vin Diesel. Muscles are for boys, duh.” (No this is not a dramatization. I’ve actually gotten this line before.) Ladies, stop inhaling nail polish remover; you’ll only look like the Incredible Hulk if you bench 400lbs and have like 10 protein shakes every hour. But you don’t have to listen to me, hear it from the professionals.

Let’s take a moment to cover that myth here. Let’s say you’re a woman and you have more body fat than you want. You’re trying to decide, “Should I engage in strength training as part of my weight loss program?” Some women say, “No, because I’ll bulk up and it’ll make me look fatter.” That’s a complete myth; it’s totally false.

When you have a high percentage of body fat, that body fat is stored not only in the tissues that are obvious — such as your hips and your midsection, your arms and legs and so on — it’s also stored intramuscularly, which means it’s stored within the muscles of your body. It’s sort of like the marbling of beef from a cow. If you slice a muscle from a cow, there’s some fat inside the muscle — that is the same kind of fat that’s in our muscles when we have a high percentage of body fat.

That fat takes up a lot of space in the muscle, so it actually makes the muscle look bigger, because there’s fat inside. When you start losing body fat, even if you’re engaged in strength training, that intramuscular fat will begin to vanish. So even if your muscle mass begins to grow — which, again, is very difficult for women to accomplish — your overall muscle size is probably going to be smaller when you’re at a lower percentage of body fat. The net change in your muscle size is going to be almost nothing, unless you really start to do strength training on a regular basis for a period of a year or two, and then you might actually begin to put on a little bit more muscle.

Moral of the story: you have to lift weight to lose weight. Make pushups and 10lb weights your new best friend.

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