Muscle Gain in a Calorie Deficit (I just don't get it)

seanezekiel

I have heard that as well. My personal experience is that it just inst true. I cardio 4 days a week and strength train 3 days a week. When I strength train I eat 150+g of protein a day and still try to break 100 every other day. This keeps my muscles fed. I maintain a cal deficit every day. I most certainly have been putting on muscle and building strength.

pouncepet

bump for good read

astronomicals

He concludes that by manipulating your food and when you eat it, you can burn fat and build muscle at the same time.

Put quite simply, not all caloric deficits are equal, both in size and approach.


Ultimate Diet 2.0 or Bodyopus illustrate these methods... I think they are extreme and it would be too damn stressful for me. Not worth it IMO.


Id like to see some studies of such diets if they exist.

TavistockToad

Stupid body. Why doesn't it know what I want it to do? Just build a bunch of muscles and burn a bunch of fat... I don't see what's so hard about this. :grumble: :laugh:

I know, eh?

totally this!

great thread though!

neandermagnon

From an evolutionary point of view, the ability to build muscle at a deficit would not be selected for. I put scientific theories about human physiology to the "Homo erectus test" which basically means, if Homo erectus's body had worked like this, what would have happened.... if the answer is "they would die" then it's unlikely that Homo sapiens bodies work that way.

So why wouldn't building muscle while in a calorie deficit be selected for, when too much fat is bad for health and muscle is good for health?

In the palaeolithic era, if your are eating at a deficit, then it's for one reason only - there isn't enough food. If there isn't enough food, then your body needs fat a lot more than it needs muscle. The longer your fat stores last, the longer you can survive on insufficient food (0% body fat is dead). Muscle is a liability in a food shortage, muscle cells burn more energy than fat cells even when they're idle, in other words, muscle is a tissue that is expensive to maintain, and so idle muscle is jettisoned during a food shortage because it's using up energy without providing any kind of survival benefit, and it is in addition a source of fuel... i.e. the body will burn idle skeletal muscle in preference to fat during a calorie deficit, in order to survive the food shortage. Even when not eating at a deficit, the body will metabolise idle muscle. When body fat levels are low, then even skeletal muscle that's being used regularly will be metabolised, in preference to running out of fat and dying.

If there was a Homo erectus whose body was building muscle during a food shortage, and using up fat in order to do so, that individual would be the first to die during the food shortage, because he or she would run out of fat much sooner than the others. That would be the end of the genes that code for the ability to build muscle while eating at a deficit.

Okay... so what if a Homo erectus, by building muscle at a deficit, becomes strong enough to be a better hunter and gets more food? Well, this is a logical suggestion, but the human body can make huge gains in strength without adding to the amount of muscle mass while eating at a deficit. So it doesn't really make sense to actually build more lean body mass. Homo erectus can become a stronger, better hunter even during a food shortage, without needing to build lean body mass at a deficit, and so the above still applies, if his or her body is using fat to build lean tissue while eating at a deficit, then they will be the first to die in a food shortage due to being the first to run out of fat. Genes for getting stronger while eating at a deficit without needing to use up any fat to increase the amount of lean body mass, have clearly been selected for. The fact that a) the human body can do a huge amount of low intensity steady state cardio while eating at a deficit, and that loss of lean muscle mass due to lots of cardio + eating at a deficit does not prevent humans from running marathons, and b) Homo erectus most likely hunted using methods that involved a lot of low intensity steady state cardio, i.e. repeatedly chasing the same animal, tracking it each time after it escapes, until it is literally run into the ground and drops dead from a combination of heat exhaustion and whatever injuries you managed to inflict on it in the process, are almost certainly linked. In other words, the human body's main adaptation to being able to continue to hunt effectively while eating at a deficit, is that you can carry on doing ridiculous amounts of steady state cardio while losing lean body mass and eating at a deficit. We're adapted to run marathons during severe food shortages, in pursuit of food.

While the evolutionary approach may seem to be very much a "round the houses" method of answering questions like these, the fact remains that we're the products of billions of years of natural selection, and the problem of obesity is one created by the modern world, which evolution hasn't had to deal with, because Homo erectus wouldn't have been able to get obese. All of the annoying things about trying to lose fat and increase lean body mass, come from the fact that we're adapted to survive food shortages in the palaeolithic era, not to be surrounded by processed food that's artificially high in calories while being sedentary.

Regarding concurrent fat loss and muscle gain in obese, sedentary people who are trying to get into shape... I'd say that's down to the fact that if you are sedentary, you probably have less muscle mass than you're genetically supposed to have. If you have lost muscle mass, you can regain it a lot more easily than muscle you've never had. If you have far too much body fat, then you're all set up to survive a food shortage anyway, so using some of that fat to gain muscle, so you can stop being sedentary and start hunting effectively would make sense. However, when it comes to obesity and being sedentary, I don't think natural selection has had much chance to operate, as our evolutionary ancestors were not sedentary, and would have found it extremely hard to become obese. Skinny-fat maybe (i.e. normal weight obesity) if they are subjected to frequent food shortages, i.e. keeping lean body mass levels as low as possible without compromising the ability to hunt, while storing as much fat as possible when there's not a food shortage, in order to withstand the next food shortage.... but the situation with very overfed, sedentary individuals, I don't see how that would have happened often enough for natural selection to operate.

What you can learn from all this is that if you only do cardio and eat at a calorie deficit for weight loss, you will sooner or later lose lean body mass, and if you repeatedly subject yourself to severe food shortages, your body will store more fat to survive the next one (i.e. yo-yo dieting). Using your muscles to their maximum capacity (i.e. strength training to failure) won't increase your lean body mass while eating at a deficit (sedentary people with high body fat percentages may be an exception) but it will prevent them from being lost, as long as you don't make the deficit too big or stay in a deficit for too long. And if you're using your muscles to their maximum capacity, then it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, that when food is plentiful again (i.e. a bulking cycle) the body will put on more lean mass, to hopefully be a better hunter during the next food shortage (cutting cycle).

tigersword

For those reading the studies:
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/1/19.short

It was concluded that weight training results in comparable gains in muscle area and strength for DPE and EO. Adding weight training exercise to a caloric restriction program results in maintenance of LBW compared with DO.
...
The increase of 0.43 kg in LBW for the DPE group is comparable to the largest increases reported in other dietplus-exercise studies. Zuti and Golding (5) and Lewis et al (27) report LBW increases of 0.5 and 1. 1 kg over 16and 17 wk, respectively.

In this article, they put 1 group on weight lifting plus diet, 1 group exercise only, 1 group diet only. In 16 weeks they developed 1/2 a kilo in lean body mass (muscle) (about 1 pound). They also cite a study where people gained up to 1.1 kg muscle in 17 weeks. These individuals were at a more modest calorie deficit consuming 1000 cal/day with TDEEs ranging from 2200-2500.
Full study here: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/47/1/19.full.pdf+html
Body composition was measured both with radiograph and physical measurement. In this both muscle size and mass increased.

(This study is consistent with the idea that obese people can gain muscle in a deficit but still does not explain why someone who is merely overweight wouldn't be able to. It doesn't say whether the individuals had previous training or not.)

One thing I need to point out. Lean body mass is not muscle. Muscle is muscle. Lean body mass is everything that isn't fat. A gain in lean body mass does not automatically mean a gain in muscle mass. It could be a gain in water weight, a gain in organ size, nerves, bone density, blood cells, or anything else in the human body. Unless a study is using muscle biopsy to actually check the size of the muscle fibers, there's really no way to actually conclude that an LBM gain was due to muscle.

WendyTerry420

Great thread!

Personally, I no longer worry about it. I'm no longer worried about whether or not I gain mass, so long as I am gaining strength. I am keeping my deficit small so I don't lose too quickly and focusing on increasing my strength.

mmapags

From an understanding the physiology point of view, this is an interesting discussion. From a practical, what should I be doing to get results point of view, these discussions always strike me as somewhat of a waste of time. The bottom line is, in deficit or even at maintenance, the muscle gains will be minimal. And, either way, if you want to keep the muscle tissue you have or build more, weight training is crucial. In the same article Lyle calls attempting to gain muscle while in a deficit "spinning your wheels".

"Which is why a lot of the approaches advocated for ‘gaining muscle while losing fat’ aren’t very effective. In fact, I’d tend to argue that most people’s attempts to achieve the above results in them simply spinning their wheels, making no progress towards either goal. Because invariably they set up a situation where neither training nor diet is optimized for either fat loss or muscle gain. Calories are too high for fat loss and too low to support muscle gains and outside of that one overfat beginner situation, the physiology simply isn’t going to readily allow what they want to happen to happen."

Recommendation? JUST WORK OUT!

fitnessbuilding

This is a interesting and informative thread. I will follow your guide for maintaining the fitness.:):)

NaBroski

Muscle hypertrophy involves an increase in size of skeletal muscle through an increase in the size of its component cells. Hypertrophy can be broken down into two types of categories: myofibril and sarcoplasmic.

myofibril is an increase in muscle fibers.
sarcoplasmic is the fluid that increases in the cells(carbs).

Myofibril is still debatable, supposedly it doesn't occur in humans. This implies that protein synthesis for muscle growth is inaccurate.

You're confusing microfibrillar hypertrophy (an increase in the SIZE) of the microfibril cells with hyperPLASIA. The latter is questionable in humans, the former is not.

determinedbutlazy

Black magic.

BurtHuttz

Because science. Next question?
(aka "bump")

RatherBeFishing

I can post some bodpod results that show my weigh loss and muscle gain over the last 4 months. Where I went from 234 pounds (33% body fat) to 213 pounds (21.4% body fat) while adding 13 pounds of lean body mass. While people say it's impossible I strongly disagree. I think it has to do with some other things where in obese or people with higher body can do both.

Also if you watched the biggest loser you will she Danni gained 20 lbs of muscle while drop over 100 lbs for weight. This was verified using DEXA scan

MercenaryNoetic26

Bump

LBNOakland

in before the lock

lacurandera1

Tagging to read later

dixiewhiskey

bump

CristinaL1983

I can post some bodpod results that show my weigh loss and muscle gain over the last 4 months. Where I went from 234 pounds (33% body fat) to 213 pounds (21.4% body fat) while adding 13 pounds of lean body mass. While people say it's impossible I strongly disagree. I think it has to do with some other things where in obese or people with higher body can do both.

Also if you watched the biggest loser you will she Danni gained 20 lbs of muscle while drop over 100 lbs for weight. This was verified using DEXA scan

Interesting. I had a couple DeXA scans done 3 months apart. They showed a gain in LBM of 2 lbs. Considering that my pre-scan behavior was not scientifically controlled, 2 lbs was definitely within the margin of error.

Congratulations on your success!

JoanB5

Good questions and discussion. And very respectful. Great thread.

I keep reading that "Abs are made in the kitchen" . I have to really think about that...a LOT. It's not just calories anymore...it's what kind.

There is an oft quoted article here that got me spinning in some new directions. Here is the link: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/912914-in-place-of-a-road-map-3-2013 The inward links in that article has helped me reformulate new goals for "the last leg". Seemed like something you may enjoy chewing on as well. One little line in it suggests a short-term drop below EDEE to accomplish the last 5-10 pounds--perhaps this is to compensate for less internal insulin, as one contributor here noted above suggested. Good food for thought.

RatherBeFishing

I can post some bodpod results that show my weigh loss and muscle gain over the last 4 months. Where I went from 234 pounds (33% body fat) to 213 pounds (21.4% body fat) while adding 13 pounds of lean body mass. While people say it's impossible I strongly disagree. I think it has to do with some other things where in obese or people with higher body can do both.

Also if you watched the biggest loser you will she Danni gained 20 lbs of muscle while drop over 100 lbs for weight. This was verified using DEXA scan

Interesting. I had a couple DeXA scans done 3 months apart. They showed a gain in LBM of 2 lbs. Considering that my pre-scan behavior was not scientifically controlled, 2 lbs was definitely within the margin of error.

Congratulations on your success!

Thanks!