Possible to lose weight & gain muscle?

brandij1705
brandij1705 Posts: 3 Member
edited November 2024 in Fitness and Exercise
I am still new to the workout thing; I am about 2 weeks in. My goals are to lose some weight and build muscle. I ha e been seeing things saying trying to do those at once is impossible and I've seen others say you can do it.
So my question is:
Is it possible to lose weight and gain at the same time? If so, are their any pointers? If not, should I focus on the weight lose first?

Replies

  • s2mikey
    s2mikey Posts: 146 Member
    edited June 2015
    Very, very difficult. One requires a calrie deficit and one requires a surplus. I suppose you could slooooowly do both but no way you'll be able to quickly do both. I personally found it easier to just lose the weight I needed to lose and then slowly add back muscle. Everyone is different though. Gotta hit the weights hard and I suggest a minimal calorie deficit to start. See how your body responds. Re-assess how its going and make small changes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  • slideaway1
    slideaway1 Posts: 1,006 Member
    If your new to lifting you can build muscle whilst eating in a calorie deficit (newbie gains). So technically you can loose fat and build muscle at the same time for a few months. You can probably build muscle at maintenance calories after that too (recomp). However, to general rule is you need to be eating in a calorie surplus (above your TDEE) to build muscle with adequate protein (1g of protein to 1lbs lean muscle mass). You can limit fat gains buy only eating a bit over your calorie goals for a longer period (slow bulk). This is how I have approached it. Your welcome :) .
  • brandij1705
    brandij1705 Posts: 3 Member
    slideaway1 wrote: »
    If your new to lifting you can build muscle whilst eating in a calorie deficit (newbie gains). So technically you can loose fat and build muscle at the same time for a few months. You can probably build muscle at maintenance calories after that too (recomp). However, to general rule is you need to be eating in a calorie surplus (above your TDEE) to build muscle with adequate protein (1g of protein to 1lbs lean muscle mass). You can limit fat gains buy only eating a bit over your calorie goals for a longer period (slow bulk). This is how I have approached it. Your welcome :) .

    So if I just focus on cardio and losing weight; would I still need to drink my protein shakes after a workout? I'm lost when it comes to this stuff, that why it's taking me so long to start. Too many different ways and tips and tricks coming from all ends.
  • WeaponXI
    WeaponXI Posts: 63 Member
    Honestly, you don't have to concern yourself on protein/supplement timing (that's for advanced athletes) and the benefits are marginal. As for if you should take protein shakes, that all depends on if you are meeting your protein requirements through your daily food diet.
  • TeaBea
    TeaBea Posts: 14,517 Member
    Focus on retaining lean muscle now. Adding back muscle you lost (later) is hard work.

    When you lose weight you lose fat+muscle. This is normal. However, you can reduce the amount of muscle lost by strength training, eating enough protein, and having a moderate deficit.
  • brandij1705
    brandij1705 Posts: 3 Member
    Jakeroden29 wrote: »
    Yes it's possible, here's my view. For losing fat, you need to eat at a deficit, but for gaining muscle, you need to eat at a surplus.you can do both at the same time contrary to popular belief. But your body doesn't really need that much extra calorie to build muscle. It is about 100 calories at most. For gaining muscle and losing fat, you really just need to eat at your maintenance or maybe 100 calorie above your maintenance and make sure you are taking in enough protein. Of course you need to lift very heavy in the gym (go to failure in every set), then you will definitely see muscle gain and fat loss. It will be slower than if you are at a 500 calorie surplus, but when you gain muscle fast, you might gain a bit of fat nothing to worry about though. You need to also get into a routine I can't stress this enough! be consistent! if you need help getting a routine check http://aestheticreview.com helped improve my gains 10 fold!
    Hopefully this helps!

    Thank you! I don't have a lot of weight I want to shake off, but it is there. I have been focusing on what I'm eating and how much. I think the more I go, the more I'll learn and recalculate things. As strength training goes, I'm just trying to get myself started. I'm just trying to learn on balancing both things I guess.
  • SueInAz
    SueInAz Posts: 6,592 Member
    edited June 2015
    OP, I think you'd get better results by eating at a deficit and lifting heavy. You'll lose weight a little more slowly but you'll maintain more of your current muscle mass and therefore most of your loss will be fat. Otherwise, you'll lose both and the greater your calorie deficit is the more it will be muscle you're losing. It's much easier to maintain the muscle you already have than to add some later because, as you can tell from other responses, it requires that you eat at a surplus which will cause you to gain both fat and muscle and then you'll need to lose the fat again.
  • pzarnosky
    pzarnosky Posts: 256 Member
    There's another long thread going around about this exact topic..

    So... I'm fresh (as in 2 days) out of a biochemistry class and would like to shed some light on metabolism, anabolism, and catabolism. First off, can't is a very strong word. The human body is an incredible machine that has an amazing capacity to overcome really crappy conditions. An average person can survive a month without food, an obese person, a year.

    Diets work by the CICO principle, if calories in are less than cals out, you lose weight. It's pretty simple. Under good well fed conditions cells make their energy from glucose. When conditions are really good, muscle cells convert excess glucose into glycogen, for energy storage. When your muscles start doing work and burn off the immediately available glucose, they go to their glycogen stores. When you run out, (that's what marathon runners refer to as "the wall") your body does gluconeogensis (in the liver), where it makes glucose (your brain is the only organ that must have glucose to survive) out of other non-carbohydrate sources (this is where your muscles get munched on, protein, or amino acids, are a source for this process). At the same time, beta-oxidation is happening of fat cells (this is the big energy pathway of the ketogenic diet), in which fatty acids are broken down to create metabolites that can be used to make energy. Both of these are stimulated by low glucose levels in the blood. This is what's happening during a diet, or starvation conditions, or when you work your body really hard. All of these sources still finish out the same way through two more steps known as the krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation.. except fast twitch muscles, which do a lot of lactic acid fermentation.

    What does it have to do with gaining muscle mass? So we're clear, lifting weights causes an increase of strength and mass because it tells the body "hey, i need to be able to pick heavy stuff up with this bicep, add more cells here." It's really all about signaling and stimulating specific things in the body. We all know that slow weight loss is healthy maintainable weight loss. If you eat at an extreme calorie deficit say 1300ish or less, and are only mildly overweight, and workout, you're likely not going to see gains because at that point you're so far below what your body needs for energy that stimulation of the muscles through weightlifting will not overcome the stimlulations going on by the rest of the body to fuel those organs (think brain, heart, lungs, etc) that are crucial for staying alive. If you eat at a modest calorie deficit, are mildly overweight, maybe bump your protein intake up a bit, and lift weights, you'll still be able to gain some muscle because you're only stressing the energy system of your body, not creating an energy emergency. You're not "creating something out of nothing" because there's lots of resources available in your body to build muscles from.

    Sorry to get super science nerd on this topic but i see this kind of thread so many times. My take away from biochemistry was that life is hard lol
  • Unknown
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  • AsISmile
    AsISmile Posts: 1,004 Member
    pzarnosky wrote: »
    There's another long thread going around about this exact topic..

    So... I'm fresh (as in 2 days) out of a biochemistry class and would like to shed some light on metabolism, anabolism, and catabolism. First off, can't is a very strong word. The human body is an incredible machine that has an amazing capacity to overcome really crappy conditions. An average person can survive a month without food, an obese person, a year.

    Diets work by the CICO principle, if calories in are less than cals out, you lose weight. It's pretty simple. Under good well fed conditions cells make their energy from glucose. When conditions are really good, muscle cells convert excess glucose into glycogen, for energy storage. When your muscles start doing work and burn off the immediately available glucose, they go to their glycogen stores. When you run out, (that's what marathon runners refer to as "the wall") your body does gluconeogensis (in the liver), where it makes glucose (your brain is the only organ that must have glucose to survive) out of other non-carbohydrate sources (this is where your muscles get munched on, protein, or amino acids, are a source for this process). At the same time, beta-oxidation is happening of fat cells (this is the big energy pathway of the ketogenic diet), in which fatty acids are broken down to create metabolites that can be used to make energy. Both of these are stimulated by low glucose levels in the blood. This is what's happening during a diet, or starvation conditions, or when you work your body really hard. All of these sources still finish out the same way through two more steps known as the krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation.. except fast twitch muscles, which do a lot of lactic acid fermentation.

    What does it have to do with gaining muscle mass? So we're clear, lifting weights causes an increase of strength and mass because it tells the body "hey, i need to be able to pick heavy stuff up with this bicep, add more cells here." It's really all about signaling and stimulating specific things in the body. We all know that slow weight loss is healthy maintainable weight loss. If you eat at an extreme calorie deficit say 1300ish or less, and are only mildly overweight, and workout, you're likely not going to see gains because at that point you're so far below what your body needs for energy that stimulation of the muscles through weightlifting will not overcome the stimlulations going on by the rest of the body to fuel those organs (think brain, heart, lungs, etc) that are crucial for staying alive. If you eat at a modest calorie deficit, are mildly overweight, maybe bump your protein intake up a bit, and lift weights, you'll still be able to gain some muscle because you're only stressing the energy system of your body, not creating an energy emergency. You're not "creating something out of nothing" because there's lots of resources available in your body to build muscles from.

    Sorry to get super science nerd on this topic but i see this kind of thread so many times. My take away from biochemistry was that life is hard lol

    You need to make a new thread with this so it can be pinned/stickied.
    (In my opinion).
  • 68myra
    68myra Posts: 980 Member
    AsISmile wrote: »
    pzarnosky wrote: »
    There's another long thread going around about this exact topic..

    So... I'm fresh (as in 2 days) out of a biochemistry class and would like to shed some light on metabolism, anabolism, and catabolism. First off, can't is a very strong word. The human body is an incredible machine that has an amazing capacity to overcome really crappy conditions. An average person can survive a month without food, an obese person, a year.

    Diets work by the CICO principle, if calories in are less than cals out, you lose weight. It's pretty simple. Under good well fed conditions cells make their energy from glucose. When conditions are really good, muscle cells convert excess glucose into glycogen, for energy storage. When your muscles start doing work and burn off the immediately available glucose, they go to their glycogen stores. When you run out, (that's what marathon runners refer to as "the wall") your body does gluconeogensis (in the liver), where it makes glucose (your brain is the only organ that must have glucose to survive) out of other non-carbohydrate sources (this is where your muscles get munched on, protein, or amino acids, are a source for this process). At the same time, beta-oxidation is happening of fat cells (this is the big energy pathway of the ketogenic diet), in which fatty acids are broken down to create metabolites that can be used to make energy. Both of these are stimulated by low glucose levels in the blood. This is what's happening during a diet, or starvation conditions, or when you work your body really hard. All of these sources still finish out the same way through two more steps known as the krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation.. except fast twitch muscles, which do a lot of lactic acid fermentation.

    What does it have to do with gaining muscle mass? So we're clear, lifting weights causes an increase of strength and mass because it tells the body "hey, i need to be able to pick heavy stuff up with this bicep, add more cells here." It's really all about signaling and stimulating specific things in the body. We all know that slow weight loss is healthy maintainable weight loss. If you eat at an extreme calorie deficit say 1300ish or less, and are only mildly overweight, and workout, you're likely not going to see gains because at that point you're so far below what your body needs for energy that stimulation of the muscles through weightlifting will not overcome the stimlulations going on by the rest of the body to fuel those organs (think brain, heart, lungs, etc) that are crucial for staying alive. If you eat at a modest calorie deficit, are mildly overweight, maybe bump your protein intake up a bit, and lift weights, you'll still be able to gain some muscle because you're only stressing the energy system of your body, not creating an energy emergency. You're not "creating something out of nothing" because there's lots of resources available in your body to build muscles from.

    Sorry to get super science nerd on this topic but i see this kind of thread so many times. My take away from biochemistry was that life is hard lol

    You need to make a new thread with this so it can be pinned/stickied.
    (In my opinion).

    I know nothing about threads being pinned/stickied. However, that's the best post I've ever read on the subject and I want to stick the info on my forehead! Lol
  • AsISmile
    AsISmile Posts: 1,004 Member
    edited June 2015
    68myra wrote: »

    I know nothing about threads being pinned/stickied. However, that's the best post I've ever read on the subject and I want to stick the info on my forehead! Lol

    The first two threads on the forum page are stickies. They stay there. This one should at least go in the must read post. So please start a new thread with a good title Pzarnosky :heart:

  • icemaiden37
    icemaiden37 Posts: 238 Member
    AsISmile wrote: »
    68myra wrote: »

    I know nothing about threads being pinned/stickied. However, that's the best post I've ever read on the subject and I want to stick the info on my forehead! Lol

    The first two threads on the forum page are stickies. They stay there. This one should at least go in the must read post. So please start a new thread with a good title Pzarnosky :heart:

    flovoo6jgvzj.jpg
  • pzarnosky
    pzarnosky Posts: 256 Member
    Aww thanks :blush: I get nervous posting stuff like that cause sometimes it is not well received. You guys rock :) It's a really common topic and I just felt like sharing what I've learned
This discussion has been closed.

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