Building muscle AND losing fat at the same time!

exwilson

SideSteel wrote: »

Bodyweight will go down assuming you are in an energy deficit. Your strength should go up for quite a while until you get quite lean and/or quite experienced with lifting. Your muscles will probably appear larger assuming you are only losing fat and not LBM. Initially you will likely retain some additional fluids/glycogen which may also make your muscles look larger.

I don't think this took so I'm posting again.

Question - I've figured a TDEE-20% to go at a caloric deficit to drop my overall weight. Generally, I'm less interested in building muscle than I am in losing fat although I'm trying to ensure I minimize loss to LBM through a higher protein to fat macro ratio (30/25). I figure once I'm down to a size/weight/look I'm hoping for, I'll move to a slight surplus to build muscle at that point. So here's my expectations:

- In the calorie deficit, I'll lose fat leading to a leaner look and the illusion of muscle definition.
- As I switch to a calorie surplus using a similar protein/fat ratio, I'll build LBM while keeping BF to a similar level.

Are these reasonable expectations or should I adjust my thinking? I estimate my BF now to be somewhere between 18 and 23% and I weigh generally around 160 lbs. My exercise routine is focused on triathlon training with at least one swim, one bike, one run and two resistance workouts per week.

I'm pretty new to thinking about all this critically so any help you can provide is appreciated.

skittlebitz

artd9312 wrote: »

Thank you! You had sometime previously posted a link to a different article on this site that led me to finding a bit of a Q&A that enormously reduced my stress over my slow weight-loss (17 months to lose 50 pounds). I took the advice on the site and started a spreadsheet that showed me how I am on an incredibly predictable pattern. Seems simple but I would never have thought of it in this way. Thanks to both you and Sara for helping us by giving great resources - I would guess a lot of people are like me, and pretty intimated to reach out to folks on here who are in such good shape, thus causing us to not say "thanks" - but truly, thank you.

Below is what helped me so much:

And while the above applies to both men and women fairly equally, women have an additional issue which is the changes in water balance throughout the month due to the menstrual cycle. As I discussed in Body Composition Recommendations, some women can shift fairly significant amounts of water over the duration of their monthly cycle. That will tend to overwhelm all but the most extreme rates of fat loss.

Trying to measure fat or weight loss in women on a week to week basis is often a futile endeavor and females may have to measure only once per month (ideally at the same point in the cycle) to get any sort of consistent or comparative measures. Women should generally pick a specific point in their cycle and make all measurements then to track changes month to month.

Another option is to measure weekly but only compare the same week of the cycle each month. So week 1 of the cycle would be compared to week 1 of the cycle a month down the road, week 2 is compared to week 2, you get the idea. What doesn’t work is comparing week 1 to week 3 because the body may be holding a ton of water during one of the weeks and not during the other making comparison impossible.

This is actually a super good idea, never thought of it like that before. Will definitely be trying that!