Gunt

Is it possible to make muscle gains (however small) whilst losing fat?

I've read so many different sources on this and a lot of them contradict each other. A recent one described a diet that encourages testosterone production so that muscle gains increase your metabolism and thus you burn more fat at the same time, and it suggests no CV work is needed at all. Other sources have suggested a low-fat, high carb and protein diet whilst lifting weights and doing CV work (when I say CV work I actually mean exercise within the fat burning zone) will produce gains and cut fat. Others contradict that by suggesting an increased intake of fat to avoid your body retaining what stored fat exists already, coupled with plenty of CV work and no weights at all, and that you have to either cut fat or try to make gains, you can't do both!

I'm sick of reading articles by people who may never have tried what they write, so I thought I'd ask you guys instead who are trying/have tried these things in person.

Can anybody help me put this to bed once and for all?

postie

currently having the same problem as yourself so can't wait to see any replys this post gets

Tatyana

Yes it is possible. Three ways

1. You have that lucky genetic freak thing, maybe 5% of the population, any other estimates?

2. You are new to training and serious dieting

3. You take anabolic steroids while dieting

I hope that answers your questions.

x

T

Captain Hero

yes it is possible

__________________

hackskii

I have had some pretty good success just not long ago on diet and fat loss.

For me, I myself tend to lose more body fat on low carb diets.
I do take in some carbs but not allot.

I lost 25 lbs and 6 inches on my waist doing that type of dieting and zero cardio.

If you want muscle you will have to do some form of resistance training.
Resistance training can (depending on intensity) raise natural HGH and testosterone levels.
Resistance training can burn fat for up to 3 days after you stop.
The more muscle you have the more requirement for fuel for that added muscle.

Long distance running can lower testosterone production.

Eating a bunch of carbs can raise blood sugars which in turn raise insulin and insulin is a storage hormone and in the presence of insulin GH production slows and fat burning stops.


Hmmmmm

Now, I have read many books on this subject and some out right contradict each other. Best book I ever read was a book called Enter the Zone by Barry Sears.

Almost every diet that I see has some kind of carbohydrate restriction of some sort.
Zone uses 40% carbs in the diet.
Atkins uses 30 grams or less of carbs.
South Beach uses lower carbs than the zone but those carbs are high in fiber.
Sugar Busters uses low GI foods and zero refined sugars of any kind.

So, as you can see they all have something in common but are completely a bit different.
What is the common denominator here?
Carbohydrates.
So, if you reduce carbohydrates and choose the carbohydrates that are lower in the Glycemic Index and also high in fiber, you will have better success when dieting.

Eat smaller meals more often, kind of like grazing.
Eat protein for every meal and choose good fats like avocado, nuts, fish, fish oils, olive oil, olives, etc.

If you are new to working out you will make gains quicker and also burn more calories so yah, just starting out it is possible to gain muscle and lose some bodyfat. It will be a slow process thought but we all start a journey one step at a time.

__________________
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." - George Carlin


Scott


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Ellis

tatyana said it right, either gotta be genetically gifted, a beginner or using AAS.

Tinytom

There's a massive difference to what I call dieting and what a non competitor would call dieting.

Now with my dieting for a show I would say it is impossible to gain muscle as you are in a calorie deficient state and constantly depleted. IN this instance AAS only serve to prevent catabolism and increase hardness and definition.

With a conventional person it is very possible to lose weight whilst gaining muscle because they will unlikely be at the low level of bodyfat that a competitive bodybuilder will be at.
Most people when they diet will be at 10-20% bodyfat which is an acceptable range to burn fat and build muscle. All that is normally needed is a clean diet and correct supplementation and proper rest and recovery.

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hackskii

Tom is correct.
The leaner you are when you diet the more muscle can be lost.

Fat guys that are lets say 30% bodyfat lose very high percentage of bodyfat compared to the leaner guys.

But the leaner guys will gain more muscle when bulking than their fatter counterparts.

John Bernardie(sp) did a really nice article on this and used some formula that used your percent of bodyfat and some other factors to determine bulking lean gains and dieting fat percentage losses.

I will see if I can dig that one up, it is a killer read.

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Scott


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icon

Hey, think this is my 1st post on here :P

Basically after ive finished my current bulking cycle, im looking to lose the fat around mainly my abs, as im pretty lean everywhwere else, my higher sets of abs are fine but its those dreaded lower abs giving me **** :P

Whats going to be the best way to lose this fat whilst keeping and relative muscle/size gains i will have made?

thanks
adam

BIG-UNC

diet!
training
good pct!

not necessaraly in that order!!

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hackskii

Diet.

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Scott


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wes

good stuff folks. i would lreally ike to read that article hackskii. hope you can find it.

hackskii

Here ya go wes.
My math sucks so the equation for dieting I could not figure out

Written by John M. Berardi.
It was really interesting and this is what I have felt from my own personal experiances in dieting and bulking.

Sorry for the long post:

Q: One big debate in bodybuilding is whether one should bulk up first and
then cut down, or whether one should cut down first and then bulk up?
Which do you think is better?
A: Most popular opinions on this topic suggest that the best way to get
the ideal physique (big AND ripped) is to bulk up first and then try to
diet down. The proponents of this strategy suggest that in bulking up, you
will be adding muscle mass. They further state that this muscle mass will
be helpful, metabolically speaking, when you go to diet down. Since muscle
is the engine that burns fat, doesn’t it make sense that with a bigger
engine you will burn more fuel and will get leaner much easier?
Well, although it makes sense intuitively, I’d like to present some data
and an argument that may lead you to rethink this strategy. I pretty much
want to propose that the simplistic idea of bulking up before cutting down
is a relatively useless one. It doesn’t take into account how much muscle
and fat you have already. I mean, what if you’re 15-20% body fat but only
weigh 160 at a height of 6 ft.? This is a relatively low ratio of lean
body mass to fat mass. So should you still "bulk up" to gain some muscle
and metabolic power before you try to get lean? The answer to this
question and a few more will be addressed below.
Before I talk about this issue though, I want to clearly state that I
doubt there ever will be a legitimate research study examining this
question in healthy male and female weightlifters. I just can’t picture
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) throwing big research dollars at a
project designed to figure out how to make already muscular men and women
bigger and more ripped. They tend to fund studies that aim at curing
cancer and heart disease and stuff like that. So this question will
probably never be answered scientifically. But using some other
literature, we can come to some pretty cool conclusions.
The data I’m about to present isn’t really new. However, for some reason
this information hasn’t trickled down into the bodybuilding community as
of yet. And I’m not sure as to why. I guess it’s probably due to the
dogmatic approach of most weight lifters who are guided by tradition
rather than objective science. Geez, I’m starting to sound like the late
Mike Mentzer, aren’t I?
Anyway, while ignored in weight lifting, researchers have known for years
that one of the biggest determinants of your muscle loss to fat loss ratio
(when dieting) and your muscle gain to fat gain ratio (when bulking up) is
your initial level of body fatness. Basically the amount of body fat that
you have (percentage and total pounds of fat) will be a major determinant
of how your body responds to over eating or under eating.
Several studies have been done to explore this phenomenon and G.B. Forbes
has compiled the results of these investigations into one review article
(Ann N Y Acad Sci 2000 May;904:359-65). For organizational purposes, I’ve
split the results up into a weight loss experiment section and a weight
gain experiment section.

Weight Loss Experiments
In several experiments, subjects were underfed to varying degrees in
order to produce weight loss. Here are the results of these experiments
Subjects were given the following three hypocaloric diets to produce
weight loss:
Diet #1 — 0-450 kcal/day
Diet #2 — 500-1000 kcal/day
Diet #3 — 1000+ kcal/day
The interesting results of this study show that:
1. At the same calorie levels, the fatter subjects kept more muscle
and lost more fat.
Let’s look at the numbers:
Initial Body FatCaloric IntakeLean Mass Lost
(% of Weight Lost) Fat Lost
(% of Weight Lost)
20 kg (44 lbs)Lowest60%40%
20 kg (44 lbs)Higher20%80%
60 kg (132 lbs)Lowest35%75%
60 kg (132 lbs)Higher10% 90%

I hope it’s clear from this table that eating a diet too few in calories
causes a substantial LBM (lean body mass) loss, while eating a higher
calorie (but still hypocaloric diet) preserves more lean mass. In
addition, it’s especially interesting to note that the fatter subjects on
both the higher calorie and the lower calorie diets have a remarkable
shift in the muscle loss to fat loss ratio toward more fat loss and less
muscle loss. This shift is especially striking in comparison to what
happens when their leaner counterparts diet.
Several other studies show that this phenomenon is not exclusive to
humans. It is also present in fasting and hibernating mammals:
Initial Body Fat Caloric IntakeLean Mass
(% of Weight Lost) Lost Fat Lost
(% of Weight Lost)
10% fatNone80%20%
30% fatNone40%60%
50% fatNone18%82%

Since all of the above studies were done in non-exercise trained humans
and mammals, further studies were done to determine the effects exercise
on weight loss. If exercise is used in place of, or in addition to calorie
restriction or fasting, more lean body mass is preserved than if there was
no exercise. However the same trends are evident in that the fatter
individuals preserve more lean mass while the leaner individuals lose more
lean mass.
Now that you’ve seen these data, I think that the take-home message for
dieting should be as follows.
1. Always use exercise in conjunction with diet to promote loss of fat
and preservation of lean mass.
2. Always consider your initial body fat before deciding how severe your
diet should be.
3. When starting a diet with a high level of body fat, your diet can be
more restrictive and/or severe since you will lose the fat
preferentially.
4. As you diet and get leaner, you should adjust your calorie deficit so
that it is actually smaller. So if you start a diet eating 1000 calories
below maintenance, as you get leaner, your daily deficit should decrease
to 500 calories per day.
5. If you don’t decrease your calorie deficit as you lose fat, you will
begin to lose an unacceptable amount of lean mass.

Weight Gain Experiments
In several experiments, subjects were overfed to varying degrees in
order to produce weight gain. Here are the results of these experiments
These studies have shown that when overfed, initial body fat level is
also important:
Initial Body FatCaloric IntakeLean Mass Gained
(% of Weight Gained) Fat Gained
(% of Weight Gained)
10 kg (22 lbs)Overfeeding70%30%
20 kg (44 lbs)Overfeeding30%70%
40 kg (88 lbs)Overfeeding20%80%

These striking differences in the ratio of LBM gained to fat gained
illustrate the need to start an overeating phase while lean. In the
leanest subjects, there was a 2 1/3 pound muscle gain for every 1 pound of
fat gained. However, for the fatter subjects, 4 pounds of fat were gained
for every 1 pound of muscle gained.
From these overfeeding studies, it’s clear that lean individuals gain less
fat and more muscle when overfeeding when compared to their fatter
counterparts. Since these subjects were not exercise trained, adding
exercise would have probably lead to a shift toward more muscle gain with
less fat gain. Exercise has a nutrient partitioning effect, shuttling
nutrients preferentially toward the lean tissues. As such, you’d expect
more lean gain during exercise training and overfeeding. However, either
way, the trends would probably remain and fatter subjects would gain more
fat during overfeeding than lean individuals.
One of the coolest things about this article is that a predicative
equation was generated that allows us to calculate the amount of muscle
and the amount of fat that we can expect to gain, based on our initial fat
weight. Check it out.

__Lean Mass Gain__
Weight Gain =_______10.4_______
10.4 + initial fat weight (kg)

In addition, this very same equation is valid when dieting for the
prediction of muscle loss and fat loss.

__Lean Mass Loss__
Weight Loss=_______10.4_______
10.4 + initial fat weight (kg)

While not flawless, these equations are handy tools for estimating how
much LBM and fat you may gain or lose when underfeeding or overfeeding. In
addition, they allow us to decide whether it’s a good time to try to bulk
up or not.
Therefore, for someone who is 92 kg (200 lbs) and 5% body fat (4.6kg fat),
about 70% of the weight gained during an overfeeding phase can be expected
to be lean body mass (10.4 divided by 10.4 plus 4.6 is equal to 0.70),
while the remaining 30% is expected to be fat weight. However in someone
who is 92kg and 10% body fat (9.2kg of fat), 53% of weight gained will be
lean body mass.
Keep in mind that the opposite is also true. If you’re 92 kg (200 lbs) and
5% body fat (4.6% fat), about 70% of the weight lost during a dieting
phase can be expected to be lean body mass.
So perhaps a good idea is to only overfeed when relatively lean and to
diet hard only when over fat. If you’re 200 lbs and around 10-15% body
fat, these equations predict that about half the weight you gain will be
fat and half will be muscle. If you try to gain when fatter than 15%, much
of the weight you gain will be fat mass.
I must offer a word of caution, though. Remember that these equations were
mostly generated using diet alone. The addition of weight training and
cardio would have changed things up a bit. In addition, these numbers may
be different if supplements are used. Some supplements change nutrient
partitioning parameters (alpha-lipoic acid, fish oils, presumably
Methoxy-7, etc); others preserve lean body mass when dieting (ephedrine,
caffeine, etc); and others increase protein synthesis (anabolic steroids
and androgens). Any of these factors can change the exact ratios.
However, as I said before, the basic principles remain. When dieting, the
leaner you get, the less your calorie deficit should be or else you’ll
lose more LBM than necessary. And, when bulking up, your best bet is to
start lean, as most of the weight you gain will be LBM. If you start fat,
much of your weight gain will be fat gain.
Although this was a roundabout way of answering your question, the bottom
line is that it looks like it is better to diet down first then bulk up
rather than the other way around.

__________________
"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." - George Carlin


Scott


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Tatyana

4. As you diet and get leaner, you should adjust your calorie deficit so
that it is actually smaller. So if you start a diet eating 1000 calories
below maintenance, as you get leaner, your daily deficit should decrease
to 500 calories per day.

5. If you don’t decrease your calorie deficit as you lose fat, you will
begin to lose an unacceptable amount of lean mass.


Remember when I told you I was eating up to 2900 kcals/day to maintain my bodyweight at 10 % bodyfat.


x
x
x

T