Losing Fat Without Losing Muscle
Perhaps one of the trickiest parts of bodybuilding, and where most people screw up big time and lose a ton of muscle is when they try to lose fat. If you want to ensure this doesn’t happen to you, and you get it right first time by losing the fat but keeping your hard won muscle, then read on.
The basic way to lose fat is to reduce calorie intake, but how far?
As you may already know, when you reduce calories to below your basal metabolic rate (BMR), your body needs to compensate for the shortfall, and does so by burning fat and muscle. There is nothing that can be done to absolutely stop all muscle from being burned, but fortunately, there are ways to drastically minimize the muscle lost whilst continuing to lose good amounts of fat.
Follow these several tips and they ought to help you get it right:
#1: Aim to lose no more than 2lb of fat a week
Fat is the bane of every bodybuilders life, and it’s a hellish thought that our muscle building progress has to be temporarily halted for a good while in order to lose fat (since both can’t be done at the same time). But, the biggest mistake you can make is to try and go balls-out by losing rapid amounts of fat every week by reducing your calories by too much!
Doing so will put your body in such a big shortfall, that it will begin burning muscle as well as fat, making all of your hard work be for nothing. You’ve got to diet slowly. Ideally, you should aim to lose 1 – 1.5lb per week to keep muscle loss to an absolute minimum.
#2: Give your body a reason not to begin burning muscle
Eating a large amount at any one time is not good for fat loss nor muscle gain. In either instance, should you not keep a constant flow of nutrients coming into your system, muscle tissue is at risk of being burned. Ideally, you should eat every 3 hours. This leads me onto the next point: protein.
You should try keeping your protein intake high, at 1 – 2 gram per lb of bodyweight. Because the body tries to burn stored fats and protein in muscle tissue for energy when your calorie intake is below your BMR, you can prevent your muscles from being burned by ensuring there is a high and regular supply of protein in your system to be used instead. But… because the overall calories are still lower than needed to maintain the same body weight, it will then burn fat rather than the muscle, because it has all the protein it needs, anyway.
#3: Lower your carbs
Our bodies love carbs, they are the primary source of energy our body uses. When, and only when, our bodies lack carbs, will they then go in search of other nutrients to use for energy – such as stored fats.
It just so happens that carbs are where most of our fat gains came from in the beginning.
Lowering carbs obviously takes some common sense. Eliminating them altogether from your diet is not advisable, because at certain times you benefit from them immensely – such as breakfast time, pre-workout and post-workout. But, as for other times of the day and other meals, cut the carbs down.
It is very, very important that you eliminate sugar / simple carbs as much as possible. It may be acceptable to have some small amounts, but please remember that of all carbs, simple carbs are the ones that really put fat on your body fast if they aren’t burned off pronto.
Also, don’t forget that most fruits contain a lot of simple carbs… so don’t get caught up in thinking eating a ton of fruit will help you with your fat loss efforts.
#4: Instruct your body to retain muscle by continuing to lift
If you don’t continue to lift as much as you can whilst losing fat, your body will certainly begin to lose muscle. While frustrating in how it works at times, the body is remarkable… it’s like it’s thought of everything we could possibly need, and all we need is the instruction manual to work it.
Anyway, all you have to do is basically continue training the way you were whilst making your muscle gains. It’s that simple. What you are doing is telling your body that the muscle you have is still crucial to your ‘survival’ and that it should lay off cannibalizing the muscle tissue for energy because you need it to survive (lift).
Conclusion:
As you can see, the entire process is about ‘tilting’ things in our favour. By coaxing our body into doing what we need it to do by manipulating things. We want to burn fat, and retain muscle.
In the end, the key to cutting is both retaining muscle and losing fat, and eventually when you begin bulking again, building muscle and negating fat, and this is achieved by taking things steadily and keeping your body in a state of homeostasis.
Homeostasis means the body likes to keep things just as they are. When dramatic changes occur, there are side effects. Attempting to build too much muscle at once and eating too many calories will lead to fat, and by dropping calories too much to lose fat you will end up burning muscle, too. Let your body work for you: don’t upset the balance and you’ll always benefit, no matter what your goal.
