Burning fat while building muscle!!

millertime1026 wrote: »

Thank you sgt1372!!! Very helpful info!

You're welcome!

FWIW, while I pay close attn to my daily cals and macros, I do not eat exactly the same thing everyday and I eat/drink pretty much whatever I like whenever I like, including alcohol. It all just has to fit w/in my cal/macro goals OVERALL but there can be daily variations, both over and under.

In fact, I just came back from a 4 day wine tasting trip, where I visited 3-6 wineries a day and, apart from some packed snacks, ate "out" for breakfast lunch and dinner everyday. Just went over my 1900 cal limit by 10% on 2 of the 4 days.

I shared the wine tastings w/my GF which limited the alcohol and opted for smaller portions and "heart healthy" foods over fried & fatty.

However, I still ate 1/2 of a 12" pizza for lunch and drank 1/2 of a full bottle of sparkling wine w/dinner on 2 separate occasions during the trip. So, I definitely did not deprive myself.

More importantly, my weight didn't change much during the trip. I brought my bathroom scale with me and weighed myself everyday. Started at 157 and ended at 157.5 but my weight actually dropped to 155.9 during the trip.

So, don't let anyone tell you that you have to be on a boring and restrictive diet to maintain wt and/or recomp either.

Gotta go now. Time for dinner which will include 1/2# of a rare NY steak grilled in a cast iron pan on my stovetop. Homemade butternut squash soup and a navel orange complete the meal. Yum!

millertime1026 wrote: »

The recomp sounds more of what I'm looking for!! I'm looking for long term goals! So I'm not really looking for a quick fix! I know this will take time and hard work!

That's what I've been doing for the past 15-16 months. It's not easy. There are a lot of frustrations and finding the sweet spot is flipping complicated. In 2016 I spent most of the time from March to October spinning my wheels, gaining zero lean body mass (confirmed by DEXA), and only gaining fat. It was quite demoralising. All the while my strength was increasing massively with no gain of muscle at all... Gaargh!

A bit of tweaking, exact same calorie intake and balance, and now I'm gaining lean body mass and losing fat. Over the last 6 months I've gained 3kg of lean mass and lose a kilo of fat. Yeah, it's slow, but it's also liveable. It doesn't require you to eat uninteresting food, IIFYM and Recomp work quite well together. But make sure you're a data person, and have access to quality data. If I'd not had the DEXA scans to work off, I'd have mistakenly believed I was making progress last year when i was doing anything but.

Can someone explain to me how the high calorie diet for gaining LBM and losing weight work? I was told to do the same to eat around 3000 calories but my body only burns around 2100 - 2400 based on my calorie tracker. So will I lose BF% if im not in a deficit?