confused-- need a real explination

cmbneeley

so. when i started out, i noticed that i was gaining weight, but losing inches. i was frustrated, but i was told and ever read articles on other fitness sites that it was just because i was "building muscle" and losing fat and that "muscle weighs more than fat" (though I'm pretty sure that really mean that equal weight of muscle takes up less volume than an equal weight of fat). so i took measurements, and calculated my BF%age, and sure enough my body fat %age had gone done by almost 2%. After doing the math, my "fat weight" had gone down but my "everything else weight" (muscle, bone, organs, skin, water, etc) had gone up. (take total weight multiplied by BF% for "fat weight," then subtract "fat weight" from total weight to get "everything else weight")

I was in a family challenge to lose weight. I posted my success story on the family challenge blog, and was shot down by others saying that it is impossible to gain as much muscle weight as I thought I had. they backed it up with articles that explained that it takes body builders a year to gain 5-10 lbs of muscle mass. that to gain muscle you must eat more calories than you burn, and to lose weight you must have a calorie deficit. ultimately, telling me it is impossible for me to gain muscle while losing weight.

i've read articles on both sides. so what's really going on here? did i really lose fat and gain muscle? is that impossible and i'm doing the math wrong somewhere? i've finally started to lose weight AND inches... but I just want to know what's been happening. i can't find any articles that can reconcile these two ideas. if you have one-- please post it. thanks!

rgunn02

I can't explain it, but I'm in the same boat. Inches lost - but the number on the scale hasn't dropped as much as I would like.

Rebecca

foxxybrown

Taking measurements will tell you inches lost but not an accurate count of body fat percentage.

ChefJenn

ditto.. for the last month i just keep floating between the same 5 pounds on the scale but I did lose a few inches.
I even challenged myself to burn 3500 calories in a week and I didnt lose anything.
its so depressing

lutzsher

Truthfully at your weight you would have not gained enough muscle for this to be correct. There was something that you needed to tweak in your plan as you should have lost and not gained for sure.
You would have lost some fat for sure but would not have gained muscle at a higher rate than fat loss at your current weight.

Ensure your calories are coming from healthy sources, even distribution of your nutrients, and also ensure you are getting in at least 10-12 glasses of water each day. The more you weigh the more water you need. I started my journey at 217 pounds and was consuming 10-12 glasses of water each day, as my weight has come off I have tweaked my water and calories.

SHBoss1673

ok I'll explain it. This might get a tad long though.

oops, hit the button by accident.

OK here we go.

First, the articles are essentially correct, there's two states the metabolism can be in, anabolic (growing) or catabolic (shrinking)

These two states correspond to being over your maintenance calories (anabolic) or being under (catabolic).

OK, now, that being said, you can't be catabolic and gain significant muscle mass. That's just a fact of life. It CAN NOT be done.

BUT
That said, there's some things that can happen that will mimic muscle mass gain. Especially for the person new to exercise.
Our bodies, and specifically, what we call muscles, are actually groups of tightly woven muscle fibers that connect at either end of a bone. Those muscle ends have nerves that attach to the brain. When you use a muscle the brain decides how much force you should use. A single fiber of a muscle can either contract or it can't, it can't apply a percentage of it's force, it's an all or nothing deal. So the brain decides how many muscle fibers to activate for a given activity in a given muscle. For example, take your biceps muscle, to pick up a golf ball and curl it in your arm, it takes very little force, thus you may use about 2% of the total fibers in your biceps muscle, but a 30 lb barbel may take 80% of the total force available, so your brain would activate 80% of the fibers.
NOW, when a muscle is not used at it's maximum potential for a long time, some of the fibers become dormant. The brain shuts them down to save energy and so it doesn't waste the water, calcium, and nutrients needed to keep that muscle fiber vital. The fiber is still there, but it's essentially sleeping. When you start a new workout routine, or increase the intensity on an existing routine, before your body will determine that you need MORE muscle mass, it will continually re-activate dormant muscle fibers. This takes anywhere from a few weeks to two months. to do depending on the intensity, duration, and muscle type. this is why initial strength gains from new weight training individuals are so dramatic, it's also why many weight lifters hit the "8 week wall" as some call it (ask one, they'll tell you about it) where strength increases go down dramatically.

OK, so now you may ask, but if that's true, why did I gain weight? AHHA! good question. The answer is simpler than it may seem. Muscle fibers do not work in isolation, they require nutrients (glycogen) and other trace elements to work correctly (calcium for example, you can be the most muscular guy in the world, but if you don't have any calcium at a muscle, you won't be lifting that weight, trust me!). All this extra stuff goes away when a muscle is dormant, but quickly is replenished when the body decides to use a dormant fiber. so more glycogen is delivered, and glycogen is HEAVY (it's mostly water and sugar). So there's your weight gain without muscle gain. This is also why people "look" bigger without gaining muscle, and it's why you shouldn't wait to many days between training a specific muscle group, the body will not wait that long in catabolism before retrieving unused glycogen.
Oh also, added to this, when you exercise you're forcing bone and connective tissue to become stronger. For bone and connective tissue stronger means more dense, and more dense means heavier. these are small increases, but add them to what I wrote above, and there's your extra. Also when you exercise your body tends to store more water.

Buckeyt

Unless you had your body fat % calculated using water displacement, your % probably contains enough margin of error to explain why you've appeared to gain so much muscle

Honestly it is very difficult to add muscle and lose fat at the same time. Even more so for women as the ability to add muscle is much harder than men simply due to chemistry.

I'm male and have been struggling with trying to add muscle for the last 4+ months, I'm doing that by eating 3,000 calories or more a day. Even then it's been difficult to add appreciable mass.

myofibril

Read this:

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/adding-muscle-while-losing-fat-qa.html

Generally no, in some instances yes.

cmbneeley

thanks all for the helpful input. especially SHBoss1673. that made a lot of sense! I really appreciate the time you took to explain that!

atomdraco

BUMP

smilebhappy

BUMP