gaining muscle.. not losing fat?

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kdbell
kdbell Posts: 37
in Health and Weight Loss
I NEED SOME ANSWERS. i honestly dont think i have lost a single pound, but i work my body until i cant breath and im shaking! i eat under food calories... and i see a difference in my body i see definition, but the scale is not moving and if it is its moving upward. yet what i see is way different than a month ago. and how i feel is even better. so tell me... am i losing weight and gaining muscle or just gaining muscle and staying the same... and is that possible?

Replies

  • MattySparky
    MattySparky Posts: 771
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    totally possible.
  • kdbell
    kdbell Posts: 37
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    which one? lol or both
  • MattySparky
    MattySparky Posts: 771
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    Well naturally if you are gaining muscle then you will be losing fat to some degree but that doesn't mean you are losing weight. You could actually gain weight. You do realize that, by volume, muscle is more dense and heavy than fat right?
  • Ryhenblue
    Ryhenblue Posts: 390 Member
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    Do you measure? You could be losing inches even though you aren't losing weight. I would start measuring every 2-4 weeks. It will be more accurate than the scale for you at this point.
  • freedMan
    freedMan Posts: 68
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    If your body is in a calorie deficit, you have to lose weight. That fact is scientifically proven. Also, while on a calorie deficit, it is almost impossible to gain muscle. Some people think that their muscles are bigger, when in fact they are, but this is due to inflamed muscles(water retention) postworkout. If you could gain muscle and lose weight at the same time, you would be a genetic oddity.

    Body builders eat a calorie surplus to gain muscle size, then eat a calorie deficit to lose that fat they may have gained during this surplus. If they could gain muscle and lose fat at once, believe me, they would be doing that.

    If your calories are set to have a deficit, then I would say something might be wrong. I would suggest wearing a heart rate monitor to accurately track your calories burned. But there is a side note to this you should keep in mind.

    If your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR - calories your body burns just to maintain weight/bodily functions) is 2400 calories(use the tools on MFP pal to find yours) that means that by doing nothing, you would have burned 100 calories in an hour. If you excercise for an hour and it says you burned 500 calories, which would be correct, but when logging it, you need to subtract the 100 calories that you body burned naturally during that hour to get the actual calories burned, which would be 400.

    Be very precise with your logging, no guesswork. You need to rule this out. It is very important that you eat your calories the MFP recomends. Personally, my BMR is 2700 calories and I set my life as sedentary(I am, other than when i workout-desk job).My goal is 2lbs per week, which means I need to have a calorie deficit of 7000 calories to lose two pounds. That works out to 1000 calories a day I need to eat less my BMR - So my goal calorie intake is 1700 calories, then if I workout and add that 400 calories I burned. This makes my alloted caloric intake 2100 calories.

    It is very important that you eat consistantly throughout the day as well. If feasible, try to eat 5-6 evenly caloric meals a day. In my case 6 meals at around 350 calories each. Remember, the example I gave of 100 calories your body burns an hour if your BMR was 2400? So if I eat 1000 calories in a sitting, my body can only effectively burn 200-300 of those calories while it is digesting. All those excess calories, will be stored as fat..

    If your food and excercise numbers a on target, it may be a medical issue. Consult your doctor and mention your struggles, whow the doc your record of food and excercise and they may check your thyroid!

    Finally, avoid sodium! It retains water like you cant believe. Plus drink at least 64 ounces of water a day because when you burn fat, it has to leave your body and urine is one of two exits out :)
  • MattySparky
    MattySparky Posts: 771
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    ^^ this guy sounds like he's repeating what he's heard a million times!!
  • tkrall
    tkrall Posts: 109
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    ^^ this guy sounds like he's repeating what he's heard a million times!!

    Yea, But he's right!! So let him keep saying it!! Any help is good help!- Thank you for all of the very helpful information!
  • kdbell
    kdbell Posts: 37
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    If your body is in a calorie deficit, you have to lose weight. That fact is scientifically proven. Also, while on a calorie deficit, it is almost impossible to gain muscle. Some people think that their muscles are bigger, when in fact they are, but this is due to inflamed muscles(water retention) postworkout. If you could gain muscle and lose weight at the same time, you would be a genetic oddity.

    Body builders eat a calorie surplus to gain muscle size, then eat a calorie deficit to lose that fat they may have gained during this surplus. If they could gain muscle and lose fat at once, believe me, they would be doing that.

    If your calories are set to have a deficit, then I would say something might be wrong. I would suggest wearing a heart rate monitor to accurately track your calories burned. But there is a side note to this you should keep in mind.

    If your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR - calories your body burns just to maintain weight/bodily functions) is 2400 calories(use the tools on MFP pal to find yours) that means that by doing nothing, you would have burned 100 calories in an hour. If you excercise for an hour and it says you burned 500 calories, which would be correct, but when logging it, you need to subtract the 100 calories that you body burned naturally during that hour to get the actual calories burned, which would be 400.

    Be very precise with your logging, no guesswork. You need to rule this out. It is very important that you eat your calories the MFP recomends. Personally, my BMR is 2700 calories and I set my life as sedentary(I am, other than when i workout-desk job).My goal is 2lbs per week, which means I need to have a calorie deficit of 7000 calories to lose two pounds. That works out to 1000 calories a day I need to eat less my BMR - So my goal calorie intake is 1700 calories, then if I workout and add that 400 calories I burned. This makes my alloted caloric intake 2100 calories.

    It is very important that you eat consistantly throughout the day as well. If feasible, try to eat 5-6 evenly caloric meals a day. In my case 6 meals at around 350 calories each. Remember, the example I gave of 100 calories your body burns an hour if your BMR was 2400? So if I eat 1000 calories in a sitting, my body can only effectively burn 200-300 of those calories while it is digesting. All those excess calories, will be stored as fat..

    If your food and excercise numbers a on target, it may be a medical issue. Consult your doctor and mention your struggles, whow the doc your record of food and excercise and they may check your thyroid!

    Finally, avoid sodium! It retains water like you cant believe. Plus drink at least 64 ounces of water a day because when you burn fat, it has to leave your body and urine is one of two exits out :)

    Im a little confused about what a calorie deficit is... il lay it out there im 19 weigh 5'7 weigh 160 and mfp gives me 1740 calories a day.. i work out 5 or more days a week p90x plus running at about 9.5mph for 20-30 min at least 2days a week?
  • planetcitygirl73
    planetcitygirl73 Posts: 57 Member
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    I have no scientific studies to back me up, but I've lost weight, or fat if you want to call it that, while building muscle. As my body mass decreased from being on a "diet" of reduced calories, I started to see the muscle I developed underneath. It just takes a while for your body to adjust to all these changes, and it won't show up on the scale very quickly if you are doing weight lifting. It could take weeks or months to see a bigger change. But it does happen. You might also be dealing with a calorie reduction, but consuming more sodium and/or sugar. One can make you retain fluids and the other might still be turning to fat if you have too much and don't burn it through your daily activities and exercise. So there's that to consider.
  • nolan_84
    nolan_84 Posts: 31
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    Perhaps, you need to lower the carbohydrates and increase the protein... each by 5 to 10 percent. And if you are seriously working as hard as you say, you maybe burning so many calories that your body is in more of a starvation mode than a calorie deficit.

    Despite what people think, you can lose fat & weight while building muscle. It may not be A LOT of muscle in the bulk, the way that most people think of building muscle, but rather you are gaining Lean Body Mass... its a little bit of muscle all over your body basically. I'm doing P90X and I've gained about 5/6lbs of lean body mass, lost 15 lbs and lost over 6 inches off my waist @ the navel. Muscle burns fat, which in most cases equals weight loss as well.

    The reason I suggest that you increase protein by 10 percent and decrease carbohydrates by 10 percent is because your body uses the carbohydrates first when burning fuel for energy, then fat, then muscle. Decreasing carbohydrates will allow your body to get to the fat sooner and/or you won't have the extra carbohydrates left over to turn into sugar and be stored into fat. Increasing the protein will help new muscle growth & will speed up your body's metabolism.

    The ratio I'm using now is 40/40/20. 40 percent carbohydrates, 40 percent protein, 20 percent fat... play with the ratios until you find one that works for you. The standard one they give on here gives you unneeded carbohydrates, at least in my opinion. 45% is plenty high enough for the majority of people. Don't give up whatever you do, it's only a matter of time before you figure out the right combination of eating and exercising that will get you to your goals!!!
  • thumper44
    thumper44 Posts: 1,464 Member
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    Im a little confused about what a calorie deficit is... il lay it out there im 19 weigh 5'7 weigh 160 and mfp gives me 1740 calories a day.. i work out 5 or more days a week p90x plus running at about 9.5mph for 20-30 min at least 2days a week?

    You should have mentioned this from the original post. If your doing P90x, you should be reading some of the P90x Forums. This is a very common thing among people who start P90x. The first 3-4 weeks you might not lose much if any weight.
    Are you following the nurtion for P90x?

    Are you eating all 1700 calories every day? or have you left 100-200 calories not used up?
    Some people can burn avg 600 calories doing a P90x workout, plus you do jogging, burning more calories.
    Which might leave you in daily calorie intake of 1200 or less.
  • SylvieJacques
    SylvieJacques Posts: 113 Member
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    Just wondering. Are you eating enough for the exercise you do ? The body is a funny machine that will adapt to what you give it. If you put your body in starvation mode, it will learn to adjust and save every single bit of energy you eat and you will not see much of a weight loss even if you exercise and don't eat much.

    Bottom line, try to eat lower to what your body need on a daily basis and setup your profile for a weight loss between 1 to 2 lbs per week. Then eat the recommended calories from healthy food and be careful of salt and fat and drink the water.

    good luck
  • kdbell
    kdbell Posts: 37
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    Im a little confused about what a calorie deficit is... il lay it out there im 19 weigh 5'7 weigh 160 and mfp gives me 1740 calories a day.. i work out 5 or more days a week p90x plus running at about 9.5mph for 20-30 min at least 2days a week?

    You should have mentioned this from the original post. If your doing P90x, you should be reading some of the P90x Forums. This is a very common thing among people who start P90x. The first 3-4 weeks you might not lose much if any weight.
    Are you following the nurtion for P90x?

    Are you eating all 1700 calories every day? or have you left 100-200 calories not used up?
    Some people can burn avg 600 calories doing a P90x workout, plus you do jogging, burning more calories.
    Which might leave you in daily calorie intake of 1200 or less.

    I originally decided to try this first because this seemed to make sense but now that i think about it it would probably be wise to use p90's calculation for me but that would say that my body needed 2520 calories based on their calculations which seems like alot!
  • kdbell
    kdbell Posts: 37
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    and how would i make that agree with mfp calories or would i?
  • kwardklinck
    kwardklinck Posts: 1,601
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    I did cardio only while I was dieting. Now that I've lost the weight I want to, I'm working on the muscle. That's what works for me.
  • nolan_84
    nolan_84 Posts: 31
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    A fellow P90Xer... nice! I'm on week 11 right now, so nearly finished. And as another poster said, sometimes the weight doesn't come off right away. I'd suggest not doing the extra cardio that you are doing. With p90x, it's quite unneeded.

    Another thing to consider is this... rather than think about the scale, think about the number that really matters, Body Fat %. This is the number that gets overlooked by nearly everyone, but is actually just as, probably more important than the weight itself! If you've ever seen a professional football player, like a running back, you know how they look. They are usually about 5'10 to 6'1 and weight 210-235 lbs!!! For us regular folks, we'd be looking chubby and be unfit but because they have low body fat and high muscle mass, their weights don't tell the whole story and neither do ours. Beachbody.com has a body fat calculator. If I was anyone, I'd pay more attention to the that than to the number the scale says. Both matter, sure, but Body Fat is what tells the real story about what your body looks like, feels like and is.

    Here is the link for the body fat calculator. It's for EVERYONE! And yes, it is accurate, I checked multiple times...

    http://teambeachbody.com/eat-smart/nutrition-tools/body-fat
  • freedMan
    freedMan Posts: 68
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    Im a little confused about what a calorie deficit is... il lay it out there im 19 weigh 5'7 weigh 160 and mfp gives me 1740 calories a day.. i work out 5 or more days a week p90x plus running at about 9.5mph for 20-30 min at least 2days a week?

    I myself am doing P90X, but only count the workouts as 400 calories compared to what the book says you might burn(600 calories) I have found that using a Heart Rate Monitor that I am closer to 400 (after i subtract 100 burned naturally).

    Make sure you are eating all these excercise calories back. If I were you do this. Mark you lifestyle as sedentary. Since you are 19, I am assuming you are in class the majority of time, but if you work as a waitress, bump it up to the next category. I have found marking myself as sedentary and just manullay logging my excercise proves to be way more accurate.

    On MFP it will give you your calorie intake automatically based on your settings and weightloss goal. Plus, when you excercise, you must eat the burned calories back. This is because you are already at a calorie defecit and not eating them back will screw up your metabolism and you may gain the weight back later.

    I noticed on your profile you are set to lose a total of 11lbs, When you get closer to your goal it is hard to lose 2lbs per week, if thats your setting. Set your goal to lose .5 lbs per week and you will get there!

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