Burn the fat, feed the muscle...

aWildFlowere

Hi! What is wrong with me? I am so hungry today too!!! Maybe I am not getting enuf calories when I workout so hard. My goal is to only eat 1500 but bodybuilding.com said I should eat 1871 to lose fat but 2839 to gain muscle. I am so confused by feed the muscle when I am trying to lose fat. How do I do that simultaneously & effectively?

TheHobbit2017

I was told that you can’t do both unless you are really unfit and overweight. Your best off either eating close to maintenance to try to get close to achieving both but that is a long process. Otherwise focus on one or the other.

aWildFlowere

Oh goodness that is not good news for me.

TheHobbit2017

One way I look at it is that even if your not eating surplus to build muscle, working with heavy weights (for you) is the way to keep and improve what muscle you do have. Otherwise just doing cardio burns muscle and leaves you looking skinny but no tone.

krokador

It *is* posible, to a certain degree, which is dependent on how much muscle you already have, and how much fat you have to lose.

The more muscle and the less fat you have, the longer the process will be. Which is why people get caught up in bulk/cut cycles, even though they tend to suck when thinking of longevity and lifestyle changes.

Your profile does not say how tall you are, and there is no clear indications of how much you have to lose, so I'm eyeballing from your profile picture and the BB.com estimates vs typical averages: 5"5' and around 200lbs?

If you are barely active, your BMR would be in the range of 1500-1700 calories per day, I believe. If you weight train for about an hour, we're adding 3-500 calories onto that number. If you walk 30 minutes during that day, another 100 cals. That lands us in the 2200-2300 calories per day to maintain.

If you look at that, it's no wonder you feel hungry at 1500 cals.

I seem to remember general guidelines when focusing on fat loss alone is to cut in layers of 250-500 calories per day. (Same with building muscle). You average out and watch your weight over a period of a few weeks (2 to 4). If you're going in the right direction, don't fix something that is not broken. If you're going in the opposite direction CONSISTENTLY, then shift 250 calories further. If you plateau for a while, shift again. Your BMR will go down as you lose weight, and that's perfectly normal. Your activity level may increase as you feel better though, so sometimes it balances out.

UNLESS you need to lose 20lbs in the next 3 months or something super drastic, I'd be tempted to say: slow and steady is the way to go.

There are other options, and depending on your personality and lifestyle, they may be more appropriate for you (like cutting really hard for a certain amount of time, then having a day of maintenance before cutting some more, or using a wave-like method where you have a week of low cals, a week of maintenance, a week slightly above maintenance, a week slightly under maintenance, rinse and repeat).

The bottomline being: the more towards an extreme you go, the less you can accomplish in the other direction.

I personally find eating for performance rather than fat loss or muscle building tends to work better. Feed yourself to fuel the workouts, while keeping things controlled enough to lose some of the fat.

Wee, I wrote another novel! lol