Females only - lifting/weight training results?

I do not have any proper before pics as I was very very camera shy due to the weight I had gained. However, I did find one taken on holiday just before I started on MFP at the age of 44.




I lost 37lbs through a reasonable caloric deficit and lifting over the course of a year. Since then I have done a bulk and a cut and am now reversing back up ready to bulk again. A couple of my most recent pictures, now at 46 years old:

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Hungry skeleton mode-February

Curl bro mode (tfw no legs :frown: )

Nice.....
Got some guns on you.

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This is how I calculated all that:

A pound of fat has about 3500 calories, and a pound of muscle has about 600 calories. So, if you know your weight loss and calorie deficit from TDEE, you can calculate the amount of muscle and fat that are gained or lost. There is only 1 way for the calorie deficit to make both the weight loss and calorie deficit work. So (3500 x lbs of fat) + (600 x lbs of muscle) will equal the total calorie deficit. And the (lbs of fat lost) + (lbs of muscle lost) has to equal the total weight loss. So then you have two equations. If X = lbs of fat lost and Y = lbs of muscle lost, you know ( 3500x + 600y = total calorie deficit ) and ( x + y = total lbs loss ) You can then solve those two equations to find where they are both true at the same time, giving your amount of each that were lost.

For example, here is my equation for this month:

I lost 8.4 pounds. My calorie deficit is 34199 (which is my TDEE - net calories)

x+y=8.4 and 3500x+600y=34199

x (fat)= 10.0548
y (muscle)= -1.65483

So I lost 10 pounds of fat and gained 1.6 pounds of muscle this month. But again, do whatever you feel comfortable with!

Except calorie counting is still highly inaccurate no matter how perfect we try to be. Packages are allowed to be off 10%, so unless you ate only fruits, vegetables and lean meat that you weighed perfectly you have a 10% margin of error (assuming you weigh and measure every bite, lick and taste too). TDEE is an estimation, even if you are using a Fitbit or other tracking device.

Also, for a woman to gain 1.6 pounds of muscle in a month on a deficit is nearly unheard of. I managed to gain 1.5 in a month while bulking and training hard. Unless you were using an accurate method to determine body fat your calculation is wrong. Even then, gaining lean mass does not mean you gained muscle because some methods of body fat calculation end up counting water as lean mass.

Worry more about the tape measure and mirror.