weight loss and building muscle

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Hello, and welcome!

As context, I'm a 165cm (5'5") 160kg (132 pound) woman.

I lost around 23kg (51 pounds) back in 2015-16, and kept weight in a healthy range since, after being overweight/obese for around 30 years pre-loss. I have more muscle mass than typical for my demographic. Therefore, I have some relevant experience. I also earned some coaching certifications in my strength/short-endurance sport. Other than that, I'm like any other random idiot on the internet, about whom you should feel skeptical.

But I won't try to sell you anything.

As background, your goals of gaining muscle and losing fat are somewhat in tension with one another. If you shoot for both at once, you're trying to gain one type of body tissue (muscle) while losing another (fat). I'm not saying that's impossible, but it's a bit of a balancing act. (I had a different goal, having started very overweight, to lose fat and keep my existing muscle, which was already decent-ish. Objective athletic performance metrics suggest I did keep my muscle mass during fat loss.)

I'd suggest you have two possible reasonable choices of path, given your situation:

1. Pursue both muscle gain and fat loss at the same time.
2. Pick one of the two goals as most important, then start on the other when the first goal is achieved or nearby. If it were me, doing that strategy, I'd go for the muscle gain first, given your current situation. But I'm not you!

Doing strategy #2 would allow you to focus on one thing at a time, and not worry quite so much about the balancing act. Your call, though.

As someone who (highly likely) has relatively excess fat to lose (as you say, just a bit of "love handles"), I'd suggest your best choice in either of the above scenarios would be a quite slow weight loss rate, like a quarter kilo weekly at most.

I did that to lose a few pounds of up-creep that had happened within a healthy range over around my first 4 years of maintenance.

Plus side: It was pretty close to painless. I admit, it helped that I had a very clear idea of my personalized calorie needs (not just calculator/tracker estimates, which are averages of superficially similar people), and high trust in my calorie tracking, all of that based on several years of steady calorie counting experience at that point.

Minus side: It can take multiple weeks for that fat loss to show up clearly on the scale. In healthy bodies, water retention can fluctuate by a kilo or more from one day to the next, even one week to the next, and in women who have menstrual cycles maybe a full cycle. Also, waste in the digestive tract varies over a day or few by more than the body fat changes. Those things can conspire to play peek-a-boo on the bodyweight scale with fat loss for a surprisingly long time. It takes patience and faith. But it can work.

One thing that may help would be a weight-trending app. Examples are Happy Scale for Apple iOS, Libra for Android, Trendweight (requires a free Fitbit account, but not a Fitbit device), Weightgrapher on the web, and probably others. Last I knew, all of the ones I mentioned explicitly are free. These are not a magic crystal ball, either, though. What they do is use statistical estimating methods to try to suss out the fat loss weight changes hiding underneath the larger water/waste weight swings. They can still be wrong, they're just a bit more informative/probable in their projections than watching the scale and trying to guess.

If you have statistics knowledge and spreadsheet skills, a personal spreadsheet is also an option. Basically, you want some type of weighted moving average smoothing/projection algorithm. I'll leave it at that.

When it comes to muscle mass gain, what I can suggest are generalities. It's not really my wheelhouse. I know some generalities, plus some specifics about strength training for my sport, the latter probably not useful to you. There are people here who can say more detailed, nuanced things about strength training than I can, for sure.

The generalities:

* Get overall good nutrition, especially but not exclusively ample protein. You can find science-based information and a "protein calculator" from a sound, neutral site here: https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/
* If you want to gain muscle mass, it's more likely and will happen relatively faster if losing weight quite slowly - if losing at all.
* You ideally want to find a well-designed, progressive strength training program, and follow it consistently and closely. Other MFP-ers share their ideas for sources in this thread: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10332083/which-lifting-program-is-the-best-for-you/p1
* Correct form is really important, perhaps most significantly for injury avoidance, but also for maximum success. An ideal way to get there is to hire a well-credentialed, experienced personal trainer for this, preferably one you can see locally and in person, for at least a few sessions. Some will also design a program for you. (The "well credentialed" part is important: Some of the so-called "trainers" at chain gyms are just people who went to the chain's one-weekend (or shorter) trainer-training session, if that, then were just set loose on victi-, errrr-um, customers of the chain.)
* Another thread here that can be helpful in the mix, as you get going, is this one: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10920257/how-to-set-up-a-weightlifting-routine
* Be patient and persistent. Muscle gain takes time for anyone, and tends to be slower (in pounds/kilos terms) for us women, in part because we tend to be smaller in the first place. You don't mention your age, but muscle gain also tends to be slower when older, too . . . but not impossible at all. (Me, I'm old - 69 now. Pretty much any above-average muscle I have for my demographic was gained in middle age and older. It can happen.) Genetics also matter. But it's achievable for anyone, especially any beginner to strength training.
* Gaining strength usually happens before gaining muscle mass. They're related, but not exactly the same thing. Early strength gains - useful in everyday life for many reasons - come mostly from better recruiting and using existing muscle fibers (neuromuscular adaptation, or NMA). That strength gain can start and proceed pretty quickly (gratifying!). Once NMA is close to tapped out, that's when mass gain is likely to ramp up, but it tends to be slower. There can potentially be some appearance improvement just from the strength gain and progressive workouts, like maybe some nice tautness and a bit of a more-pumped look from water retention in the muscles for repair.
* Which reminds me: High odds scale weight goes up when you start, from that water retention for muscle repair. Don't let that worry you. It's not fat gain. It'll sort itself out over time.

That's about all I've got. I hope it may help.

Personally, based on years of experience here on MFP, I wouldn't trust anyone who might come along after this and post something like "DM me for more information" or "DM me your email address". Anyone who has useful information they truly want to share, IMO, will put it out here in public where it may help anyone who reads the thread.

Too often - though probably not always - the "DM me" folks are going to try to sell something (or just trying to get your eyeballs over to their advertising-funded web site or similar, both of which are against the Community Guidelines that apply here in regular Community posts). No one needs that, IMO. If you want to pay for help, do it, but go to people who are honest and open, not sneaky. I hope no one will do that on this thread, but one never knows. It does happen.

I'm sorry, that was a long ramble. I'm like that.

TL;DR: Optimize nutrition, don't try to lose weight fast if you want to add muscle, don't lose faster than sensible for your current weight in any situation, follow a good progressive strength training program, find a way to get proper lifting form dialed in to avoid injury, watch out for sneaky marketers.

Best wishes for success!

SuzanneC1l9zz wrote: »

@AnnPT77 I'm pretty sure you're NOT 160 kg... what???!

@SuzanneC1l9zz: LOL! No. Thank you for pointing that out. :flowerforyou:

I'm bad at arithmetic (despite knowing that pounds divided by 2.2 is roughly kg), but that was a typo.

I weigh about 60 kg right now, 132 pounds . . . not 160 kg, 352 pounds! I'm close to OP's size.

I'm not criticizing anyone who does weigh 160 kg/352 pounds, but for sure at 5'5", that would not be my choice of maintenance weight! 😉🤣

Again, thank you!