How to Lose Weight: Treat Muscle Gained as Passive Income

Passive Income: Compensation received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it.

Eating healthy should be at the top of anyone’s list on how to lose weight, but the topic I am going to talk about is how gaining muscle helps you lose weight. When you gain muscle, it works for you like passive income by burning calories. It takes extra effort to build initially, but doesn’t take much effort to maintain once you build it. After you’ve gained muscle, the pay off is a faster metabolism and free calorie burning. Here are two parallel stories to illustrate this.

Story 1: Joe and Tom

Joe and Tom are both health-conscious men who have goals of losing weight- each of them go to the gym four times per week. Joe’s workouts are solely concentrated on losing weight. He does 30 minutes of cardio at a consistent speed during each of his work-outs. Tom has decided to take a different path- he would like to lose body fat, and gain muscle, so for two of the days, he does 30 minutes of cardio at a consistent speed. On the other two days, Tom does sprinting and lifts free weights.

Weekly Workout Routines: Joe (goal is to lose weight), Tom (goal is to lose body fat and gain muscle)

Story 2: The Pipeline

The other story is about income, and is based on the book The Parable of the Pipeline. There are two workers who both carry buckets of water to their village. One of the workers is investing in building a water pipeline to his village as a side job, while he was still carrying buckets of water. He later becomes wealthy due to the passive income stream he has built with his pipeline business. The other man does not invest in pipelines so he does not become wealthy, and continues carrying buckets the rest of his life.

So where do the stories parallel, and what does muscle have to do with passive/residual income? Tom, the health-conscious man who decided to lose body fat and gain muscle, is similar to the worker who decided to build a water pipeline to his village instead of continuing to carry buckets each day. After you build muscle, it doesn’t take much effort to maintain, and the more the muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate tends to be. Every 1 pound of muscle burns 35 Calories per day, while every 1 pound of fat burns 2 Calories per day.

The Long-Term Results of Gaining Muscle

Look six months into the future of Joe and Tom’s exercise. They have both kept up their routines, and are both healthier because of it, but Tom has gained six pounds of muscle (an average of 1 pound of muscle gained per month). This means that his body is now burning 210 more calories per day, automatically! This is Passive Exercise– even on days he doesn’t exercise, Tom is burning 210 more calories than Joe.

When you exercise, what are your long-term health goals? Are you carrying buckets of water to your village, by solely trying to lose weight and stay healthy? Or are you creating a pipeline, by building muscle at the same time you are trying to lose body fat and stay healthy?

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