How To Lose Weight Fast But Gain Muscle

I don't pay attention to fat or carbs when I want to lose weight and gain muscle — here's what I do instead

Facebook Icon The letter F. Facebook Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email. Email Twitter icon A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting. Twitter LinkedIn icon LinkedIn Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url. Copy Link

Angle down icon An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down. Rachel Hosie before and after reducing her body fat. Rachel Hosie

Can You Burn Fat And Gain Muscle At The Same Time?

Whether your goal is to lose fat, gain muscle, or merely keep an eye on how you're fueling your body, tracking your macros can be a great educational tool.

All food is made up of three macronutrients (or macros): protein, carbs, and fat. Protein and carbs both have four calories per gram and fat has nine.

When I have a particular fitness goal, I loosely track my protein and overall calorie intake, but I let the carbs and fats fall into place without meticulously calculating them.

Sustainable Ways To Burn Body Fat

This technique has helped me lose fat and build muscle over the years, reducing my body fat percentage from 31% to 17%.

In my main fat loss phase in 2019, I lost 35 pounds. However, it was really important to me not to lose the muscle I'd built through weight lifting.

To maintain muscle, I made sure I didn't drop my calories too low, strength trained consistently, and ate a high protein diet, aiming for 0.8-1g of protein per pound of body weight each day.

How To Lose Weight But Gain Muscle Strength At The Same Time

Out of the three [macros], the one we're most interested in is protein, as a higher protein intake can assist with weight loss by helping to regulate your appetite and keep the hunger pangs away, sports nutritionist Scott Baptie previously told Insider.

Protein keeps you full and helps your muscles repair after a workout. It also uses more energy to digest compared to carbs and fat, which is known as the thermic effect of food.

Nothing drastic happens when I eat a low protein meal — the occasional low protein intake day won't have any impact on my progress — but I do notice I'm hungrier.

Bodybuilding Nutrition How To Build Muscle And Lose Fat Fast: Build Muscle And Lose Fat Fast. Bodybuilding Books, Bodybuilding Nutrition, ... Training, Weight Training, (nutrition Manual): Moller, George: 9781790494347: Amazon.com: Books

For weight loss, Baptie said tracking fats and carbs isn't really necessary if you have your protein and calories in check, and this has always been my experience.

If you're someone who feels better eating more carbs, you should do that, personal trainer Ben Carpenter wrote on Instagram. And if you prefer eating higher fat, you should do that.

Rather than striving for a specific ratio, keep in mind that long-term results are always bottle necked by personal adherence, so it makes sense to opt for personal preference, he said.

Why Do I Gain And Lose Weight Quickly?

I prefer to keep a moderate balance of my carb and fat intake. Some days will be higher in one or the other, but I don't notice any huge difference in my mood or fitness performance either way.

Tracking food works for me and it's a tool I come back to when I want to lose fat, but I don't do so religiously. I use the free app, MyFitnessPal.

If you want to lose weight, the most important factor is your calorie intake — if you haven't hit your protein target by the end of the day but you've eaten all your calories, all the fitness experts I've spoken to agree it's best not to eat more.However, as I mentioned in the intro, you’ll often hear that losing fat while gaining muscle is impossible. The argument goes that you should just focus on one or the other, because doing both at once is destined to fail.

How To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle At The Same Time

To appreciate the nuance here, let’s get into some specifics on losing fat and gaining muscle separately, and then we’ll combine them.

When your body needs more calories than the amount you are eating, you are in a “caloric deficit.” Your body doesn’t have the calories it needs as fuel, so it’ll start breaking down parts of itself for its energy requirements.

The hope is that your body will mostly pull from fat stores, though depending on how you are training it will also break down muscle too.[2]

Be Your Online Coach To Build Muscle Or Lose Weight Fast

Said again: when you are eating a caloric deficit, your body will pull from both its fat stores AND existing muscle for energy.

From a physique and health standpoint, obviously we’d prefer that your body doesn’t break down muscle when in a caloric deficit, and instead really focuses on using fat stores instead.[3]

By reducing the total fat on your body, OR increasing muscle mass, you’ll end up with a lower body fat percentage (it’s just a simple ratio of fat to everything else).

How To Lose Weight And Gain Muscle

We’ll discuss tips on keeping and growing your muscle while in a calorie deficit later in this guide. For now, remember you need fewer calories “in” compared to calories “out” for weight loss to occur, from either fat stores or muscle.

Numbers will help tell the story: though this is a gross oversimplification – let’s use the ‘widely accepted’ starting point of “3, 500 calories equals roughly one pound of fat.”[4]

If you want to lose one pound – or half a kilogram – of body fat in a week (a worthy, sustainable goal for some), you need to create a caloric deficit of 500 calories per day.

Meal Plan To Lose Fat Gain Muscle

As Time magazine controversially pointed out – with tons of cited studies – “exercise alone won’t make you thin.” It’s too easy to add more calories in, and requires too much work to effectively influence “calories out.”

Here at Nerd Fitness, we are firm believers that 80-90% of the fat-loss equation comes down to diet (check out Rule # 4).

These foods are very nutrient-dense and often low in calories compared to their processed counterparts. Which means you get filled up without overeating.

Why Is It Easy For Me To Gain Muscle But Hard For Me To Lose Fat?

Have you ever seen the difference between 200 calories of broccoli and 200 calories of a bagel? WiseGEEK does a great job of displaying this, so we’ll borrow a couple of their photos.

Most people can eat an entire bagel, no problem. Plates of broccoli, with all of the fiber, are much tougher to overeat.

We lay it all out in our Beginner’s Guide to Healthy Eating. It’ll provide tips on how to gradually create habits that get you to a “REAL food” way of eating, including proper portion sizes, tips on batch cooking, and a cameo from Winnie the Pooh.

How Many Calories Should I Eat If I Want To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle?

It’s a strategy we work closely with our coaching clients on: small nutritional adjustments they feel comfortable making. It’s how some of them have been able to lose 50-100 pounds!

If you want to build muscle, you’ll have to lift heavy things and ensure that your body has enough calories and protein to adapt by building more muscle.

When you lift an object (or your own bodyweight) enough times, your muscles reach the point of failure. This causes your muscles to tear and breakdown.

How To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle The Quickest

Because your muscle needs to be rebuilt after exercise, the calories are gonna need to come from somewhere. I’ll talk a lot about proper diet in the next section (with a Harry Potter analogy), so I won’t spend too much time on it here.

Your body rebuilds itself while you sleep, so make sure you get plenty of rest each night. I’m talking 7-8+ hours. This will help ensure your body has the time it needs to grow stronger.

If you’re strength training and only getting 6 hours of sleep a night or less, you’re really doing yourself a disservice. Go to bed!

Tips On How To Build Muscle And Lose Fat

Let’s narrow in on our second point, “Eat a diet based on your goals .” It’ll become very important when balancing both losing body fat and gaining muscle.

To answer the question of losing body fat and gaining muscle at the same time, I’d like to introduce an analogy from the world of Harry Potter.

Your body operates on a VERY similar operation: every day it receives new calories (when you eat), and it needs to decide what to do with them!

How To Burn Stubborn Belly Fat And Gain Muscle At The Same Time: Here's The Complete Workout Plan

You eat a chicken parm sub with fries and a 20-ounce soda. Your body then has to know where to route all those calories.

There’s a number of calories your body needs each day just existing: to keep your liver functioning, your heart pumping, your brain operating, to regulate your body temperature, and so on – it burns a good chunk of calories just keeping the lights on.

This is where the problems arise: When you overeat calories and your body doesn’t need anymore to fuel itself, it takes those extra calories and stores them as fat.

The Gym Starter

This means your body can pull from “Store as Fat” to make sure all the work still gets done, including your daily functions as a human and rebuilding the muscle you tore apart.

If you have fat stores (and we all do), you do not need to be in a “caloric surplus” to rebuild muscle. The calories stored in your fat cells act as this required energy.

However, if you want to skip all the experimentation and trial and error, you can have a Nerd Fitness Coach do all the heavy lifting for you (not really,

Week Training Schedule To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle!