MFP's most common user pitfall to avoid

I dont want to shoot this off topic...however I am a bit confused about this topic of muscle mass vs fat mass. I would like to say first off that I have been lifting weights as I go arms, legs, & abs so that when I do lose the weight I am not flabby still...Should I be doing that? I have to admit I am starting to see the muscles and I havent since HS...I think its awesome :blushing: However...Since muscle takes up way less room I am finding it hard to wrap my head around the fact that I can weigh 155 and be all muscle, and not look like a dude. I hope I am stating that right. I have always thought myself to be one of those people with big muscles naturally, so I am worried seriously worried that my thighs will still be huge, just be all muscle make sense?

it's fine, I think answering this question benefits more than just you so it's not selfish to ask.

How to wrap your head around it. Hmm. Well first remember, muscle doesn't have to grow in actual size to be heavier. In other words the key to STRONG lean muscles that aren't bulky like a weight lifter is DENSITY. Muscles can grow stronger by becoming larger, or by just decreasing the space between muscle fibers.

think of muscle like this:
Take a bunch of rubber bands, cut them so they are rubber strings instead. now hold them loosely between your two hands. THIS is essentially a muscle at rest. There are two ways to make this muscle stronger, add more bands to the outside, keeping the same number of bands in the middle, or shove more bands in the middle, it makes the whole string harder, but not wider, and even though it's the same size, it'll still be stronger (harder to stretch). This is exactly how muscles work.

when you make muscles denser, you're not actually shoving more muscle fibers to the middle, you're just making the fibers in there stronger without increasing the overall volume of the muscle. So that's how muscle can get heavier without getting bigger.
NOW
Women are NOT genetically and biologically predisposed to have large muscle bulk. So unless you try REAALLLLY hard, you're probably not going to bulk up (there are genetic exceptions, but you'd know it if you were one), so essentially you could do the exact same routine as me (ratio wise) and eat the exact same food as me (again proportional to your body) and mirror our habits exactly for 3 months, and where I might bulk up and look far bigger, you would probably lean down and look more cut. Because men bulk up much easier than women, and we have different muscle mass ratios in different parts of the body, we also have different ratios to muscle fiber types (a whole different topic).

I don't know if I made it any clearer or just confused you more. But essentially, muscle can either get thicker or bulkier, if you make it thicker, it's heavier without being bigger, that's what women generally do (to a point, at some point you HAVE to increase bulk because there's no more room to increase density, but that's pretty far down the road for most women).