How You Can Build Muscle While Losing Weight
This is pretty much the Holy Grail of diet and exercise, is it not? If only there were some way that you could get both leaner and stronger at the same time!
Well, there is. You can lose body fat and build muscle and significantly change your appearance. The short answer is eat a little less than your body burns and do strength training.
As always, there’s a little more to it than that. The strategies we’ll go over below will explain the how and whys.
A good friend asked me about this a little while ago, so I figure it’s a good topic to cover.
First, let’s talk about fat loss. Losing weight and losing body fat aren’t the same thing. We mostly say losing weight when we mean losing fat. When you step on the scale, the reading is a measurement of Earth’s gravity on you. That’s all of you, the bones, the muscle tissues, organs, water, everything.
You could cut off your feet and lose weight. I’m guessing that’s not what you’re after, right?
Nope. You want to shed the body fat. Perhaps it’s in your belly region or your hips, or somewhere else. But the bones and organs and muscle? You probably don’t want to lose those.
How do you lose body fat?
The answer is simple but not necessarily easy. You need to be in a calorie deficit for a sustained period of time. A calorie deficit is a term that describes when you’re eating fewer calories over a given time than you’re burning.
There’s a baseline amount of calories your body needs in order for to keep your body running. Even if you lay on the sofa all day watching movies your body still needs energy (a.k.a. food or calories) to keep your organs going.
Then there’s the amount of energy your body uses when you ask it to do something like work or walk or think or play or exercise. All of those activities burn calories too.
Add the energy your body needs just to keep the machine running with what you need to do all your activities and you get something called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. All that living and moving burns energy and so your body sends hunger signals to make you eat.
If you eat back the same amount of food as you burn then you’re not in a calorie deficit or surplus. You’re eating at maintenance, and as that implies, your body weight will remain the same.
If you eat more than your TDEE over time, then your body will start storing the excess energy as body fat. This is eating in a calorie surplus. To be clear, this is a process. It’s not as if you eat a candy bar and your body immediately transforms it to body fat and adds it to your belly.
It’s not what you do once, it’s what you do consistently.
If you consistently eat more than you burn, you will put on body fat.
So, to burn body fat, you need to be in (say it with me now,) a calorie deficit. That is, you want to eat less energy than you burn. Again, this is a process that takes time.
Your TDEE burns a certain amount of energy. You’re eating less than that. So your body makes up the difference by converting stored body fat into energy. In fact, that’s essentially what body fat is - stored energy.
If you’re reading this you probably have access to food pretty much whenever you want. It wasn’t always like that. Back before there were grocery stores, bodegas, and even refrigeration, humans were much more likely to experience times of famine.
Your body evolved to pack on body fat during the plentiful times as a hedge for the inevitable lean times to come. When the food was scarce, your body could use its stored body fat as fuel to keep you up and running.
In the modern era we don’t usually need to do this. But the constant availability of food makes it difficult not to eat more than necessary. The body still thinks there's a famine coming even if your mind knows that's highly unlikely.
Difficult perhaps, but it’s certainly not impossible.
To lose body fat all you need to do is consistently eat less energy than you burn. So how do you know much to eat?
Here's a way you can get a pretty good estimate. Take your current body weight and multiply by 12 to get a starting point for how many calories to eat per day.
For instance, if you’re 200 lbs. now and you want to lose fat, your daily calorie target would be (200 x 12=) 2400 calories per day.
It’s an estimate, so the next step is to do a little experiment. Eat roughly 2400 calories per day for a week. As long as you average 2400 per day, you should be fine, so don’t worry about being slightly over or under.
If you’re not consistent you won’t have good information. But if you are, then at the end of that week you should see the scale moving in the right direction. If you’ve been consistently hitting the target but the scale reads the same, now you know your estimate was too high. Reduce your calories by about 100 per day and stick with that for a week. Simply repeat it until you get the scale moving in the direction you want.
One important thing to keep in mind is you want to eat as much as possible while still keeping the scale trending.
That’s right, eat as much as you can while still moving towards your goal.
It’s easy to think if some is good, then more is better, but it’s a trap. Eating as little as you can would give you a bigger calorie deficit but it really causes more problems than it solves. You will be ravenous, moody, and lethargic.
Imagine eating as little as you can get away with for one day. Go ahead, take a moment to really picture it. How do you feel? Now you might be able to use willpower to grind for a few days.
You’ll start to think of nothing but food as your body will release hormones essentially telling you, “Yo! I’m hungry. We need to eat. We are starving!”
Your body doesn’t know the difference between a diet and starving. So it’s going to sound all the alarms.
Eventually you will cave in and overeat in response. Then what happens?
You feel like you failed.
You either say, screw it and continue overeating and the overall attempt to lose fat goes bust, or you swing back to under-eating. Swinging between massively under-eating and overeating will have you spinning your wheels in terms of losing body fat. More importantly, it sets the stage for an unhealthy relationship with food.
That’s why you don’t want to eat as little as you can get away with.
Eating as much as you can while still being in a calorie deficit means you won’t swing between extremes. You will experience some hunger, that’s just reality, but it won’t be ravenous. You’ll still be able to enjoy all the foods you like, in moderation, which makes this process more sustainable.
Won’t that mean you lose body fat too slowly?
A sustainable rate would be losing around 1%-2% of body weight per week. It doesn’t sound like much, but for that 200 lb. example it would be around 2 to 4 lbs. per week. That’s an average.
You will not lose weight in a perfectly linear fashion no matter what. That’s okay. If you stay consistent you will get there.
Some of the benefits of this more moderate approach:
Less extreme hunger, easier to stick to
Hold on to more muscle
Less restrictive, you can still favorite foods
When you’re in a calorie deficit remember your body perceives this as a famine. You’ll burn body fat for energy, which you want. If you’re not careful your body will also shed lean muscle tissue also. Your body is interested in keeping you alive, not how good you'll look at the beach.
Muscle tissue requires protein and calories to maintain. When you’re eating in a deficit your body is going to cut back on using those calories on keeping muscle. That is, unless you signal your body to keep that lean tissue.
We’ll get to how you force your body to spare the muscle in a moment.
But let’s take a quick look at what happens when you don’t. Your body burns both fat and lean tissue. You lose weight. But what does that mean for your body composition and what you see in the mirror,
In the mirror, you’ll look smaller because you’ve lost weight.
Your body composition won’t have changed much. If you were a bit doughy before, you’ll still be doughy even though you do weigh less. You can think of your body composition as the relative amounts of what it’s made of.
You’ve lost both fat and muscle so the relative amounts of both have remained the same even though you weigh less.
Your proportions will essentially be the same as before. In other words, you’ll probably look in the mirror and think, “it’s nice, but I expected to look better.”
This is why it’s imperative to spare the muscle. You already know that which is why you asked how to build muscle while losing weight, right?
The simple answer is to do resistance training.
Whether you use your bodyweight as resistance, or you use bands, free weights, or machines, this is how you build muscle.
Whichever method of resistance training you use is totally up to you. There are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. So go with your preference and what you have access to.
The principle remains the same: you want to train to get stronger over time.
You want to be stronger at pushing, pulling, squatting, and carrying over time. That’s true no matter what program or implements you use.
Resistance training signals your body that it’s going to need to be able to perform strength exercises. In order to do that, it will need to spare the muscle tissue.
When you challenge your body to get stronger by doing exercise, you create microscopic tears in the muscle tissues. With time and nutrition your body is able to build and repair them so they’re more durable. The next time you challenge them, they’re more resistant to tearing under that same stimulus.
That’s the essence of getting stronger. What once tore the fibers won’t tear them anymore. You will need an increased stimulus to make that happen. That’s just a fancy way of saying something you already intuitively know.
When you start working out, your body’s not used to it. It’s difficult and you may be sore for a couple days after. But the next time, that same workout isn’t as hard.
You don’t have to kill yourself every day working out. If you are consistent and commit to working out 3-4 times per week you can definitely make muscle gains. Keep each session to an hour or less.
Your body takes protein you eat and breaks it down to use as raw materials to repair and build muscle. It’s vital you make sure you get enough protein in order to give your body a chance to do its thing here. This is why you need recovery days where you don’t do strength training. Give your body the chance to repair/build the muscle.
How much protein is enough?
Take your goal bodyweight in lbs. and eat that number of grams of protein per day. So if you currently weigh 200 lbs. and you want to weigh 150 lbs. your target would be 150 grams of protein per day.
This will ensure that even though you’re eating in a calorie deficit, your body has enough protein to keep the muscle.
This is how you change your body composition. You’ll lose the body fat and keep the muscle. The number on the scale goes down. When you look in the mirror, you’ll see muscles start to pop.
Now, a quick dose of cold lotion.
If you’re a beginner or relatively new to strength training, you will likely be able to build muscle even if you’re in a deficit. Similarly, if you used to consistently strength train but you took a long break (several months), you may be able to build muscle as well.
For everyone else, realistically, your goal is to maintain as much muscle as you can. As you lose fat your objective strength may be somewhat reduced (mass moves mass), but your relative strength (your pound-for-pound strength) can still increase.
That’s not to dissuade you, you should just understand that’s part of the process. As you shed body fat, you retain most of your muscle, the scale will go down and the mirror will still love you.
You may be wondering how you got this far without reading the word “cardio”. The reason is it is absolutely not necessary to do cardio for the purpose of fat loss.
Cardio does burn calories and could technically be used to create a larger calorie deficit. But that’s not cardio’s primary benefit. And as I said above, it’s not necessary to do for the purpose of fat loss.
Rather than trying to use cardio to burn calories, you could just stick to your planned deficit. There’s a huge temptation to think “I burned a ton of calories so I can eat some more food”. The hole in this logic is that you aren’t going to be able to accurately calculate how many calories you burned, no matter what the machine tells you.
Put it this way, your target from the example was 2400 calories per day. The treadmill or rower tells you that you kicked ass and burned 400 calories. You’re thinking, “sweet, I can actually eat 2800 calories today and be in the same calorie deficit.” Except, the machine is wrong. You may have actually only burned 250 calories while you rowed your little heart out. Eat back those 400 calories and you’ve actually reduced your calorie deficit for the day by 150. It’s an easy way to spin your wheels and build frustration.
Now, cardio is great for keeping your heart and lungs healthy and strong. That is the main benefit of cardio. That’s why you should do it. Or if you just enjoy it. I recommend it for either reason. But for fat loss?
If you want to lose body fat and build muscle follow these steps:
Eat in a moderate calorie deficit consistently
Eat 1g per pound of goal bodyweight per day
Strength train consistent
Be patient
That’s all you need.
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