What 15 studies say about how you can lose fat without losing muscle Part 1
Every day, millions of people ask Google some of the most pressing questions and I've made it my mission to answer some of them. Today I'm going to answer nine of the most frequently asked questions about fat loss without accompanying muscle loss.
1. Can you lose fat without losing muscle?
Yes, you can lose fat without losing muscle at the same time. Some people will even be able to go one step further and even build muscle while losing fat.
However, this is a phenomenon that is generally limited to people who are very overweight and have never trained with weights before in their lives or people who are starting to train again after a long break from training and where muscle memory comes into play.
If you need to lose a large amount of fat, then fat loss without accompanying muscle loss is relatively easy. On the other hand, if you are already very lean and trying to get even leaner, it will be progressively harder to maintain your existing muscle mass. If we were to take two people - one with a high body fat percentage and one with a fairly low body fat percentage - and put them both on the same low calorie diet, the leaner person would see a greater proportion of their total weight loss come from muscle tissue (1).
In other words, this would mean that if we took a group of obese subjects with a body fat percentage of 40 to 50% and put them on a very strict diet, while at the same time exercising with weights three times a week, these subjects would be able to lose fat without losing significant amounts of muscle.
In fact, this is exactly what happened in a study conducted at West Virginia University in which 20 obese men and women lost over 30 pounds of fat while showing almost no muscle loss (2). During the 3-month study period, the subjects consumed just 800 kcal per day.
Let someone with a body fat percentage of only 15% follow the exact same diet and the risk of muscle loss will increase greatly.
Here's something else that's very important.
Your ability to lose fat without losing muscle is heavily influenced by two things that are under your direct control: the type of exercise you do and the type of food you eat.
However, there are also genetic factors that will help determine how much of the weight you lose is fat and how much of the weight you lose is muscle, which are outside of your control.
There are no two people in the world who will respond in the same way to an identical exercise and nutrition program. A person with "good" genetics will automatically maintain more muscle and lose more fat, while a person with "bad" genetics will lose more muscle and less fat.
In other words, you can have two people follow the same diet and exercise program and one of them will usually achieve better results than the other. And barring the use of pharmaceutical aids or genetic manipulation by a mad scientist, there won't be much you can do about it.
2 How do I know I'm more likely to lose fat than muscle?
First, let's clarify what the term "losing muscle" actually means. When they talk about losing muscle, most people are referring to a breakdown of muscle protein. However, there is much more to your muscles than just protein.
Take a look through a microscope at a slice of muscle tissue and you will see stored carbohydrates in the form of glycogen, fat stored between and in the muscle fibers and also water.
When you go on a diet, the amount of water and glycogen stored in your muscles will decrease. During the first week of a diet you will often lose glycogen and water faster than fat.
Taking into account the fact that some of the material stored in your muscles is lost, we could say that you have lost muscle - especially because your muscles have achieved a slightly flatter appearance as a result. However, your muscles have achieved a flatter appearance because there is a little less 'stuff' stored in them than before.
Remember that you have not lost any muscle protein. You've just lost some of the substances that were stored around those proteins, which can be quickly replaced.
When I talk about muscle loss, I am referring to a sustained loss of muscle protein over a period of weeks or months and not an initial loss of glycogen and water.
A quick search on Google will bring up numerous methods that can supposedly measure your body composition and give you reliable feedback on whether your diet and exercise program is working or not.
However, the only "real" way to measure your body fat is to remove it, put it on a scale and weigh it. This method is highly accurate. The only downside is that you have to be dead to do this.
Body fat analysis scales are largely a waste of time and money. Skinfold calipers can be useful in certain circumstances, but they too have their problems. Even high-tech devices like DEXA and Body Pod can't really be trusted.
So what should you do?
I would recommend two simple criteria - your weight on the scales and your performance in the gym. The argument against using the scales to monitor your progress is that any loss of fat can be masked by any gain in muscle mass. For example, if you lose 5 pounds of fat and gain 4 pounds of muscle, the scale will tell you that you've only lost 1 pound of weight.
While this may sound good in theory, it doesn't always work that way in practice. Once you get past the overweight beginner stage of development, you won't build muscle nearly as fast as you lose fat. Even if you can continue to lose fat and build muscle at the same time, it won't happen at the same rate.
The best most people can hope for is to build a relatively small amount of muscle while losing significantly larger amounts of fat. For example, you might lose 6 pounds of weight over the course of a month. In reality, you may have lost 7 pounds of fat and gained a pound of muscle.
So even though the scale may not be 100% accurate when it comes to tracking your progress, it will tell you if you are moving in the right direction.
I would also recommend that you weigh yourself every day and not just once a week or month. At the end of the week, calculate your average weight for the week. This will even out daily weight fluctuations and over a period of several weeks you will be able to recognize a trend. If this trend does not go down, then you will know that you need to change some aspects of your diet or training.
Provided your training program is set up correctly, your performance in the gym is also a good way to gauge your progress.
If you reduce your carbohydrate intake, it is not uncommon to see a decrease in performance on certain types of exercises. Your performance in this "reduced glycogen state" will then serve as a benchmark against which you can compare your results.
If your performance in the gym improves, then there is a good chance that you can at least maintain your existing muscle mass - or even build new muscle mass. By an improvement in performance, I mean more repetitions with the same weight or the same number of repetitions with a higher weight.
Someone who is very overweight and just starting to train with weights will find it relatively easy to build strength while losing fat. As you get leaner, however, the rate at which you build strength will slow down.
Eventually you will reach the point where the best you can hope for is to maintain your existing strength. It's not uncommon for competitive bodybuilders to lose strength while preparing for a competition.
What this means is that you need to adjust your expectations as your body composition changes. If everything else stays the same, you will find it easier to build strength while losing fat as you move from "overweight" to "lean" than if you move from "lean" to "hard and defined".
Of course, this doesn't mean that you should stop trying to get stronger. But it's not something you should necessarily expect - especially if you're past your beginner phase of training.
Muscle size and strength don't correlate 100% and there are other factors (such as your nervous system getting better at using the muscle fibers available in a muscle) that contribute to strength gains. But for our purposes, this connection is strong enough. If you are building strength, then you are on the right track. Even if you can simply maintain your performance in the gym while losing weight, this is a good sign that what you're doing is working.
Checking your waist circumference or even a subjective assessment of how well your clothes fit you or how slim you look in the mirror can also be useful.
None of these methods will help you quantify actual changes in your body composition, but they will tell you if you are moving in the right direction. And in most cases, that's all you really need to know.
3 What should I eat to lose fat and not muscle?
To lose fat and not muscle, two things are necessary. First, you need to make sure that your diet puts you in a calorie deficit. Secondly, you need to eat enough protein, which plays a key role in maintaining muscle mass. Without adequate amounts of protein, you will end up losing both muscle mass and fat.
To lose fat, the only thing you need is a calorie deficit.
To lose fat, you don't need more than a calorie deficit. You don't need to eat clean, follow a ketogenic diet, use coconut oil, practice intermittent fasting or eat 5 to 6 small meals a day.
Nor do you need to avoid sugar, wheat, gluten or [INSERT ANY FOOD HERE THAT THE NUTRITION POLICY SAYS IS BAD FOR YOU THIS WEEK].
No matter which diet you follow - a calorie deficit is the only necessary prerequisite for weight loss.
What exactly is a calorie deficit?
You are in a calorie deficit when you are consuming less energy through food than your body needs to move, pump blood through your body and do all the other things associated with keeping you alive.
This ultimately means that there is a discrepancy between the amount of energy your body needs and the amount of energy it gets from food. Because of this discrepancy, your body starts to look for alternatives.
In an ideal world, this alternative source of energy would be the fat stored in your body. However, your body will pull stored energy from any place it wants - including the muscle tissue you've worked so hard to build over the last few years.
If your deficit is too large, meaning you eat too little, then you increase the risk of losing muscle tissue as well as fat. On the other hand, if your calorie deficit is too small, your rate of fat loss will be lower and you will have to diet longer until you reach your goal.
A deficit can be defined as small, medium or large depending on how much you restrict your daily calorie intake. Both a small, medium and large deficit have their advantages and disadvantages. Each of these is justified at different times and for different people.
Factors such as initial body fat percentage, the rate at which you want to lose fat and how well you cope with a very restrictive diet will help determine the size of the deficit you ultimately decide on. In most cases, however, a deficit that is around 20 to 25% below your maintenance calorie level is the right choice.
Let's say, for example, that you are currently burning a total of 2500 kcal per day. You decide on a deficit of 20%, which corresponds to a deficit of 500 kcal (20% of 2500 kcal = 500 kcal). This means that your daily calorie intake will be 2000 kcal per day (2500 kcal - 500 kcal = 2000 kcal).
In other words, you will consume 500 kcal less per day than your body needs. And your body will draw the extra energy it needs from your fat stores.
By the way, if you lose muscle, you will lose weight faster. This is because a pound of muscle provides about 600 kcal, while a pound of fat contains 3500 kcal of stored energy.
Let's say, for example, that you create a daily calorie deficit of 500 kcal. In other words, you burn more each day than you eat. This adds up to 3,500 kcal per week (500 kcal x 7 = 3,500 kcal).
If all these calories came from fat, you would lose about one pound of weight per week. If all of those calories came from muscle tissue (which is a very unlikely scenario, but I'm using it to illustrate my point), you would lose almost 6 pounds.
In other words, 100% fat loss equals one pound of weight loss, while 100% muscle loss equals 6 pounds of weight loss. This in no way means that the composition of your diet doesn't matter - because it does.
A candy bar (mostly carbs and fat) and a chicken breast (mostly protein) may provide the same amount of calories, but your body will need more calories to digest and metabolize the chicken breast than it does the candy bar.
A handful of nuts may provide the same amount of calories as half a dozen sugar cubes, but unlike sugar, your body won't absorb all the energy in the nuts (3). Some of the calories will be excreted undigested.
The effects that a given diet has on hormone levels, appetite and energy expenditure will influence how quickly you lose weight, where most of the lost weight comes from (i.e. muscle vs. fat) and how easy it is for you to stick to that diet.
In other words, you can't ignore the macronutrient content of a diet and expect to see identical changes in body composition based on calorie content alone.
In the second part of this article, we will discuss other aspects such as cardio training, strength training and proper protein intake.
Source: https://muscleevo.net/how-to-lose-fat-without-losing-muscle/