Between holidays, BBQs, and parties, calorie-tracking in the summer sometimes is about as practical as eating pizza with a spoon.

How likely is it that you’ll lose muscle during a fat loss diet?

According to some people in the more fear-mongering corners of the internet, it’s pretty much inevitable. In fact, as soon as your workout performance drops by a couple of reps… Gasp! You’re losing muscle.

For this reason, some will even say you shouldn’t go into a deficit at all if you hope to gain muscle, even when you carry excess body fat.

I disagree with these extreme positions.
 
So let’s delve into what the research seems to show and my six practical tips to give yourself the greatest chances of minimising muscle loss and maximising growth.

​Do you ever feel like you have a harder time losing fat than other people?
 
First and foremost, you’re not broken.
 
The rules of energy balance still apply to you.
 
These rules state that eating more energy than you consume over a prolonged period of time will cause fat gain, and the opposite will produce fat loss.
 
However, there are certain factors that can make the consistent application of these rules in your daily life more challenging.
 
Some of these factors can influence your physiology, psychology, or both, in a way that makes adhering to a diet legitimately more difficult than it is on average.
 
Other factors can slow down or mask fat loss. So, although you’re getting results, you may not be able to detect them on the scale within the timeline you expected, so you could convince yourself that you’re doing something “wrong” when that isn’t the case.
 
In this article, I’m going to cover four of these factors and what you can do about them, if anything.
 
Importantly, they make fat loss challenging, but not impossible. Even if you can’t change them, you’ll still be able to achieve your goals with consistency, patience, and the guidelines I’m going to offer.
 
Let’s get started.