Lost weight but gained body fat...

barbaraocuevas

I need some light!
I recently lost 1% of muscle mass and gained 0.3% of body fat. I do HIIT circuits (with bodyweight and kettle bells) 3x week + jogging 3X week + Yoga 1X week. What else can I do to pump up my muscle mass and lose body fat?
Tips? Exercises?
I am eating 40 - 30 - 30/ 1200 - 1400 calories a day.

Liftng4Lis

How are you determining these gains and loses?

skullshank

Liftng4Lis wrote: »

How are you determining these gains and loses?

interested in this as well.

the obvious answer to your question of maintaining LBM is lift.

_Terrapin_

You lost muscle mass and gained fat?!? How in the Wide World of Sports are you determining this?

Unknown

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SergeantSausage

1% and 0.3%

I call those : "measurement errors"

Noise in the chart.

There's a reason we have Error Bars, right?

jemhh

I will agree that if you're using a bio-impedance scale not to worry about it.

However, if you want to retain muscle, you should do a lifting program. It sounds like your kettlebell program is more cardio than strength in nature.

dllach

Agree with the above posters, any method of measurement you're using will be an estimate only and is not accurate to the degree you're assuming.

but here is a nerdy way to think about it:

Very strictly hypothetically speaking, even if there was a way of obtaining accurate data, you're talking about percentages, so if you lost weight and your body fat % went up, that could also just mean that your body fat mass is exactly the same (or actually decreased) but represents a higher percentage of your body now because you weigh less overall...

For Example
If you weigh 200 lbs and have 30.0% body fat, that equals 60 lbs of body fat total.
If you later weigh 192 lbs and have 'gained' .3% body fat, you would have 30.3% body fat, which equals 58.2 lbs of fat.

So you could lose weight (8 lbs total in the example), lose some fat (1.8 lbs in the example), and still have a higher body fat % than you started with.

barbaraocuevas

dllach wrote: »

Agree with the above posters, any method of measurement you're using will be an estimate only and is not accurate to the degree you're assuming.

but here is a nerdy way to think about it:

Very strictly hypothetically speaking, even if there was a way of obtaining accurate data, you're talking about percentages, so if you lost weight and your body fat % went up, that could also just mean that your body fat mass is exactly the same (or actually decreased) but represents a higher percentage of your body now because you weigh less overall...

For Example
If you weigh 200 lbs and have 30.0% body fat, that equals 60 lbs of body fat total.
If you later weigh 192 lbs and have 'gained' .3% body fat, you would have 30.3% body fat, which equals 58.2 lbs of fat.

So you could lose weight (8 lbs total in the example), lose some fat (1.8 lbs in the example), and still have a higher body fat % than you started with.

dllach wrote: »

Agree with the above posters, any method of measurement you're using will be an estimate only and is not accurate to the degree you're assuming.

but here is a nerdy way to think about it:

Very strictly hypothetically speaking, even if there was a way of obtaining accurate data, you're talking about percentages, so if you lost weight and your body fat % went up, that could also just mean that your body fat mass is exactly the same (or actually decreased) but represents a higher percentage of your body now because you weigh less overall...

For Example
If you weigh 200 lbs and have 30.0% body fat, that equals 60 lbs of body fat total.
If you later weigh 192 lbs and have 'gained' .3% body fat, you would have 30.3% body fat, which equals 58.2 lbs of fat.

So you could lose weight (8 lbs total in the example), lose some fat (1.8 lbs in the example), and still have a higher body fat % than you started with.

Thank you so much! I am new to this and struggling to understand a lot of things. I was obsessing about it that made me forget about basics of math. Thanks for making it simple and humble to explain this in a very accessible language (I mean math).

gmallan

The error margin for the majority of bf% measurement is about +/- 8% so basically if you're 20% you could be measured in the range of 12-28%. I would suggest sticking to the scale and measurements for tracking body comp.

If you want to retain or add muscle mass then cut back on the cardio and add in some heavy lifting. 2-3 full body workouts a week would be sufficient. Unless you're training for a race of some sort I would look at cutting at least 2 of your jogging session in favour of lifting and maybe one of you HIIT sessions. Leaving you with 2 HIIT, 1 jogging, 1 yoga and 2-3 strength.

gmallan

Keep in mind that at the end of the day, body fat %, like scale weight, is just another number. Hitting a certain number doesn't guarantee that you'll look a certain way or have abs etc. A lot of that is determined by genetics and the amount of muscle mass you are carrying