Weight training: A low carber's secret weapon

You probably know someone who has lost a lot of weight on a low-carb diet. Maybe even you have found success with a low-carb diet. You don't have to go far to hear one of the many low-carb success stories -- just eavesdrop on conversations in restaurants or grocery stores and you'll hear about how someone's brother-mother-sister-or-friend lost a gazillion pounds by forgoing bread, fruit and pasta. Unfortunately, many of these success stories come with the same unhappy ending -- you or your brother-mother-sister-or-friend gain all the weight back and then some because you or they didn't stick to the low-carb lifestyle.

Judging yourself by numbers
So begins the vicious cycle of low-carb yo-yo dieting. …show more content…
What if I told you there was a way to eat more carbs throughout the day (including bread and fruit), eat fun carbs on the weekend (read: pizza and chocolate), and all the while you're losing more weight and inches faster than you ever though possible -- and keeping it off for good! Sound too good to be true? It's not -- every low-carb dieter has a secret weapon at their disposal that will help get the kind of dramatic results that last forever.

You probably guessed exercise. And you're probably rolling your eyes. I know, I know -- part of the appeal of a low-carb diet is that you can lose weight without exercising. It's true -- you can lose weight on a low-carb diet without exercising. But, you can't keep the weight off permanently without exercising. All the popular low-carb diets encourage exercise as part of a successful diet -- we usually just skip over that part.

Exercise doesn't have to mean training for a marathon. It doesn't even mean you have to exercise six days a week for an hour at a time. If you exercise properly and with enough intensity, you can fit in all your exercise in 40 minutes, three times a week. I'm talking about weight-training.

When most people decide to start exercising, cardio activity is what they turn to -- walking, biking, aerobics, etc. While cardio is all well and good, and certainly has its place, it doesn't produce the same results as …show more content…
The low-carb-plateau can be very scary, because not only do you stop losing weight, in some instances you may actually start to put weight back on without even changing your diet at all! (Yikes!)

Weight-training will help combat this problem. Weight-training builds muscle and nothing speeds up your metabolism like lean muscle. (And women -- there's no need to shy away from weights anymore. It's now understood that we can't bulk up like men. But more importantly, muscle takes up three times less space than fat! That means a brand new wardrobe, just in time for spring!)

Weight-training will ensure that you never hit that awful plateau -- or if you've already hit it, weight-training will be the one thing to help you get to the other side of the plateau so you can start losing again.

If that wasn't enough to go do some bicep curls right now, there's even a better reason for low carbers to weight-train. Because you're speeding up your metabolism and using a lot of fuel for your workouts, you actually need to eat a bit more carbs to keep getting