If you’re totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don’t instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics––your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting. 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. What does current research suggest?
It’s true that studies show that you may lose some fat-free mass while in a deficit. In fact, according to the “one-quarter FFM rule” often cited in research, about 25% of the weight lost during a fat loss diet comes from fat-free mass (FFM). While a paper by Heymsfield and colleagues in 2014 pointed out that this rule is an approximation at best, its existence nonetheless suggests that at least some degree of FFM loss appears to occur in many weight loss studies. Importantly, “fat-free mass” includes muscle mass, but also water, organ, bone, connective tissue mass, and the non-fatty components of adipose tissue, or body fat. So, if a study shows a certain amount of “fat-free mass” loss, not all of that is necessarily muscle. Moreover, the interventions used in studies reporting FFM loss don’t always include two crucial elements that can help you maintain muscle: resistance training and an adequate protein intake. When a weight loss intervention does involve both elements, the fat-free mass loss is always attenuated compared to studies that focus solely on a calorie deficit. In addition to that, we have research demonstrating that it’s possible to build muscle in a deficit. I’ve experienced this first-hand in my own fat loss phases, and the majority of my clients make gains in a deficit, too. So, while the risk of muscle loss is real and established in many studies, there’s more nuance to this topic than the extreme positions described above would have you believe. Who’s more at risk for muscle loss? Carrying more body fat “protects” you against muscle loss while dieting because body fat is stored energy and a calorie deficit is an energy deficit. When you have a surplus of stored energy, your body will use up the excess instead of muscle mass. On the other hand, when you’re already lean and therefore don’t have as much stored energy, there’s a greater chance that your body will turn to muscle. Therefore, the risk of muscle loss increases the leaner you are. Moreover, maintaining and building muscle gets harder the more experience with training you have, because a more well-trained body requires a greater hypertrophic (muscle-building) stimulus––generated by your resistance training program––in order to both maintain the growth already achieved and make additional gains. For this reason, overweight people and individuals with obesity who are also new to resistance training are in the best position of us all: they’re the perfect candidates for body recomposition, the process of building muscle and losing fat at the same time, even in a deficit! To learn more about body recomposition, you can listen to this podcast I recorded with bodybuilding coach and natural bodybuilder Chris Barakat. To minimise the risk of muscle loss and maximise the chances of growth or at least maintenance during your next fat loss diet, be sure to apply the following six tips: 1. Avoid aggressive deficits for prolonged periods of time. When having excess body fat, a relatively aggressive, short-lived deficit is unlikely to result in significant muscle loss, especially if you’re overweight or live with obesity and you resistance train at the same time. But what constitutes an “aggressive” deficit? First, it’s important to note that, the more body fat you carry, the more aggressive your diet can be. For example, losing 1.5% of your bodyweight per week could be too aggressive––and thus cause muscle loss––for a well-trained individual who’s in the last few weeks of getting unsustainably lean for a photoshoot or bodybuilding competition, but it could be fine for someone with 50 lbs to lose who’s just starting their fat loss journey. As a rule of thumb, I suggest aiming to lose 0.5 to 1.5% of bodyweight per week on average. If you have more body fat or want to take a more aggressive approach for a short period of time, you can be closer to the top of this range, and vice versa. For most people weighing between 100 and 200 lbs, this usually means losing anywhere from 0.5 to 3 lbs per week on average. To work out your calorie deficit based on your desired rate of loss, you can refer to the calculations in this article. If you have severe obesity, you could push this rate of loss as far as 2% of bodyweight per week at the beginning of the diet. However, how well you can handle the deficit required to achieve such a rapid rate of loss is a major factor to consider, as more aggressive diets are also more challenging due to the greater degree of discipline, the increased likelihood of being excessively hungry, and the smaller calorie budgets involved. In general, I wouldn’t recommend losing more than 2% of bodyweight per week regardless of current body fat levels, unless it was under the supervision of an experienced coach or medical professional and, again, done for a relatively short period of time. When choosing the size of your deficit, establish your priorities: are you more interested in fat loss or muscle gain right now? According to this meta-analysis and meta-regression, the rate of muscle gain slows down as the size of your deficit increases. Therefore, if your main priority is fat loss, you may decide to aim for a faster rate of fat loss and accept a slower rate of muscle gain. On the other hand, if maintaining and ideally growing muscle is more important to you, stay closer to the lower end of the suggested range, aiming for around 0.5% of bodyweight lost per week. 2. Resistance train enough. As previously mentioned, resistance training is one of the most effective tools against muscle loss in a deficit. But how much training is “enough”? You need more volume to continue adding size than to simply maintain it. So, if growth is your goal, you’ll need to perform the amount of volume––that is, sets close to failure––required for you to stimulate additional hypertrophy. If you were training and making progress with a certain amount of volume before deciding to get into a deficit, I’d continue following the same program, at least at the start of the diet, then modify it as needed as you lose more and more fat. Covering how to tweak your program as your fat loss phase progresses isn’t within the scope of this article, but I recorded a podcast on what to do if you hit a training plateau here. While volume requirements differ from person to person, research suggests that 10 to 20 sets per muscle group per week is a reasonable rule of thumb in order to stimulate hypertrophy. I wrote an article on this topic here. You can maintain muscle on less volume than you need to keep growing, but we don’t have enough research for me to state with confidence exactly how much less you can do. 3. Avoid the calorie deficit performance trap. The calorie deficit performance trap is a mind game that I made the mistake of playing in one of my earliest fat loss phase. I’d tell myself, “I’m in a deficit, therefore I’m more tired and hungry than usual, therefore it makes sense for my performance to be worse.” As a result, I ended up justifying training less hard. In turn, my progress in the gym did slow down, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t capable of it due to the deficit; it was because I was self-sabotaging. By the way, I discussed how hard you need to train for hypertrophy in this article. Don’t be like younger me. Step into the gym with the resolve to at least attempt to beat your past performance over time. You may not always be able to add more reps or more load, but this mindset will make it more likely. 4. Eat enough protein. When paired with training, a high-protein diet has been proven to reduce or even prevent muscle loss in a deficit. For best results, I’d recommend eating 1.6 to 2.2g of protein per kilogram of “normal BMI” bodyweight per day. Therefore, if your current BMI is in the overweight or obese category, you’d calculate your protein requirements based on the bodyweight you’d need to achieve in order for your BMI to be within the “normal” category. For reference, in the UK, the “normal BMI” range goes from 18.5 to 24.9. For instance, if you’re 1.7m (5ft7), a BMI of 24 would correspond to 69 kg. Based on this bodyweight, your ideal protein range is 110-152g per day. There are some caveats and side notes to this suggestion, which I covered in great depth in my comprehensive guide to protein for muscle growth. If you want to eat more than 2.2g of protein per kilogram of “normal BMI” bodyweight per day, and you don’t have any medical condition for which this would be contraindicated, there’s no research I’m aware of to suggest that this would be harmful. Out of personal preference, I usually eat about 2.7-3.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day regardless of caloric intake, which amounts to 140-160g of protein per day at a bodyweight of around 50 kg. Moreover, some research suggests that higher protein intakes may improve your chances of building muscle and losing fat at the same time. For example, this paper demonstrates the superiority of eating 2.5g of protein per kilogram per day over 0.9g of protein per kilogram per day. In the study, the researchers divided the participants into two groups, who followed the same resistance training program for eight weeks. The group eating 2.5g of protein per kilogram per day lost about 1 kg of fat mass and gained about 2 kg of fat-free mass. On the other hand, the group eating 0.9g of protein per kilogram per day didn’t lose any fat mass and increased fat-free mass by around 0.6 kg. 5. Prioritise your peri-workout meals. At maintenance calories or in a surplus, your caloric intake across the day is typically sufficient to fuel training. So, while I wouldn’t recommend training fasted unless absolutely necessary, I also don’t think it’d be the end of the world. However, in my view, prioritising your peri-workout meals––that is, what you eat before, during, and after a workout––becomes more important in a deficit. Since you have fewer calories available, clustering a large part, if not the majority, of these calories around your sessions, can help you more easily preserve and continue to improve your performance whilst ensuring adequate recovery for future workouts. However, the degree of importance depends once again on your current body fat levels. If you have a lot of extra fat, you don’t have to worry about this as much as a lean individual dieting to get even leaner. As a general guideline, in a deficit, do your best to “sandwich” a training session between two main meals or between a main meal and a snack. If that’s not possible, try to have at least one main meal beforehand or as soon as possible afterwards. If you can’t eat first and you’re training after an overnight fast, consider drinking a protein shake and/or a carbohydrate-containing intra-workout beverage. As a final option, if you can’t eat before or during the workout, have a meal as soon as possible afterwards. Aside from this early morning training scenario, I wouldn’t go longer than three to five hours without eating after your pre-workout meal. In addition to the negative impact that this prolonged fast may have on training performance and recovery, it can spike your hunger to an uncomfortable degree, which will compromise your ability to stick to your deficit. For example, if you eat breakfast at 7 am and train from 8 to 9, I’d suggest having at least a small snack before or by 11 am. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of peri-workout nutrition, I have a podcast and a blog post on it. 6. Sleep as well as possible. Some research shows that, if you’re sleep-deprived and in a deficit, you can lose a greater percentage of weight as fat-free mass than if you were to lose the same amount of weight when not sleep-deprived. No bueno. So, while sleep always matters, like adequate peri-workout nutrition, it matters even more in a deficit. If you’re interested in learning more, I wrote an article on sleep and recorded a podcast with Dr. Greg Potter. This is all well and good, but how do you know you’re not losing muscle? This is a hard one. To my knowledge, we don’t have easily accessible, particularly accurate ways to measure muscle mass. As far as I know, the best proxy is training performance. If it’s staying the same or going up over time, then you’re at least maintaining, if not actually gaining, muscle. However, rather than thinking of performance in absolute terms, consider it in relation to your bodyweight. For instance, let’s say you can deadlift 100 kg for 10 reps and you currently weigh 100 kg. In other words, you can deadlift your bodyweight for 10 reps (or your bodyweight times 1). After 12 weeks of dieting, you now weigh 90 kg and can still deadlift 100 kg for 10 reps. While your absolute performance hasn’t changed, your relative performance has gone up, because 100 kg is now your bodyweight times 1.1. An improvement in your relative performance is a likely sign you’ve not just maintained, but actually increased muscle mass throughout your fat loss diet. If you want to learn more about preserving performance while dieting, I recorded a podcast on this with nutritionist Mackenzie Baker. In summary, to avoid losing muscle in a fat loss phase:
Thanks for reading. May you make the best gains. To receive helpful fitness information like this on a regular basis, you can sign up for my newsletter by clicking here. To learn how to develop an effective mindset for long-term fat loss success, you can sign up for my free email course, No Quit Kit, by clicking here. To learn from my podcast as well as from my writing, click here.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Nikias TomasielloWelcome to my blog. I’m an online fitness coach with a passion for bodybuilding, fantasy, and bread. Want to work with me? Check out my services!Archives
September 2024
Tags
All
|