Help! Too much muscle

FitnessasmyWitness wrote: »

Okay I have a few more questions then:
1- How long should I wait till I start seeing loss again?
2- I run about 3-4 miles on the off days as cross training- does that help/
3- Is it just fact that I lose muscle if I'm eating at a deficit? There's no way for the body to say "okay, fat time"?

1. It depends. Personally, I went up 4lbs or so and stayed there for a whole month before I started seeing scale losses. I didn't even see much in the measuring tape. But the pictures, I could see losses in places you don't measure, my face, the area between my hips and waist, etc.
2. Any type of exercise will affect glycogen stores. If you increase training, you will increase glycogen store.
Does it help you - it does increase the calories you burn, so it can help to create a deficit but that also goes hand in hand with keeping track of what is coming in.
3. Yes, losing weight inevitably will mean losing some muscle. How much depends on a number of factors including genetics, your diet, your exercise, etc. If you are eating a decent amount of protein, weight training, and don't have a huge calorie deficit, you are doing the best you can to minimize it.

When you start resistance training, your body has to store glycogen to be able to fuel the workouts. 1 gram of glycogen is stored in 3 grams of water in the muscle. You have gained glycogen and water, not muscle. Keep going and the body will stabilize how much glycogen you store and the fat loss will catch up with the glycogen and water gain, and eventually you will start losing. I tell my clients all the time that we don't weigh for at least 6-8 weeks because I know they are going to go up on the scale before they go down on the scale. The scale doesn't matter when you are losing body fat and storing the right fuel for the workouts, anyway. Trust me, I've been doing this for a living for 19 years. When you are doing it right, you will gain on the scale first. Embrace it and look forward to that fat loss. ;-)

FitnessasmyWitness wrote: »

Phew, that's makes me feel GREAT! "doing it right, you'll gain first". That's a hugh weight off my shoulders... ha.
So another quick question- I'll be away from facilities for about a month. Will hard core body weight exercise help maintain it? Or will I be bound to lose some progress.

Depends on how hard core. Generally, body weight exercises are more cardiovascular than strength building because you do a lot of repetitions and not as much weight as when you do more traditional weight training. So you will keep up the fat burning, but may not keep the glycogen stores needed for the resistance work you've been doing. Which means that you will probably lose on the scale during that month dramatically but then put some weight back on in glycogen and water when you start weight training again. That glycogen and water storage is necessary though before you can ever hope to actually gain muscle fibers or muscle fiber density.