Realistic combined levels of fat loss and lean mass gain
Discussion
Back in 2012, I dumped a load of weight. I did it through diet and a lot of cardiovascular exercise, using MFP to target a net daily calorie intake of 1200 cals. It worked, and I got a lot fitter and a lot thinner, but I didn't keep up the lifestyle and it gradually came back.
In January this year, I was back up to where I started at 95kg (15st) and Something Had To Be Done. So I upped my exercise and cut my calories to a net intake of 1500/day and by June was down to 79kg (12.5st). That's still fat (I'm 168cm/5'6, albeit with short legs and a long torso, but still, fat). I think the best way to avoid putting it back on, apart from not slipping into bad habits - which won't happen given the unwanted change in circumstances I had this year - is to increase the amount of muscle I'm carrying. I'm not aiming to look like a bodybuilder, just don't want to be skinny and weak. So I've added resistance training and modified my diet a little.
I have absolutely zero experience of resistance training, so I've taken on a PT for 3 months. Partly to show me the ropes, partly for motivation. At the moment we are into the third week of doing two sessions a week of weights (quite like), one session a week of core and boxing (enjoy), one session of core and HIIT (kill me now). I'm still aiming for 1500 cals/day net of exercise but I've further increased my protein consumption to around 2g/kg/day.
It seems to be doing something. I'm tracking my weight and body composition with a set of Withings scales (I know the limitations of the technology, but it should give an indication of what's going on) and being a geek and an ex-biologist I like numbers. I've plugged the data into Excel, done a little maths, and the numbers are quite interesting.
From January to June, I lost on average 700g of weight a week. Which would imply an effective daily calorific deficit of ~770 cals. That wasn't entirely even - my wife died in February, and I barely ate for a week or two, and then didn't give a s
t what I ate for a week or two, but overall I think it probably evens out. I could never figure out how to get the bf% working on my old scales, so I don't have data for that period.
For the period since I started the training, I've got some noticeable trends in daily measurements. There's noise, but that's easy to deal with statistically. I'm really interested in what happens to them over the coming months, but what we are doing appears to be working. Fitting trendlines by regression and using the regression coefficients to calculate smoothed weekly changes in total, fat and lean masses, my overall rate of weight loss has reduced from c.700g/week to c.420g/week. The body composition data, however, suggests that I am still losing about 700g/week of fat but gaining about 280g/week of lean mass. The actual changes calculated from starting and ending figures alone are greater than that, but individual data points are too volatile to be relied upon. It's early days, I don't have much data yet and I can't be sure how my body is going to react going forward, but if that trend continues I should be at about 16% body fat and 73kg by the end of the three months, having lost 9.3kg of fat and gained 3.5kg of muscle. I'd be pretty happy if it worked out like that, to be honest.
My gut feeling is that those numbers are feasible but not sustainable. 280g/week would be about 14.5kg a year - most estimates seem to suggest that someone completely untrained training hard and not running any calorie deficit at all would do well to manage 11kg in a year. It will be interesting to see to what extent it can be maintained.
In January this year, I was back up to where I started at 95kg (15st) and Something Had To Be Done. So I upped my exercise and cut my calories to a net intake of 1500/day and by June was down to 79kg (12.5st). That's still fat (I'm 168cm/5'6, albeit with short legs and a long torso, but still, fat). I think the best way to avoid putting it back on, apart from not slipping into bad habits - which won't happen given the unwanted change in circumstances I had this year - is to increase the amount of muscle I'm carrying. I'm not aiming to look like a bodybuilder, just don't want to be skinny and weak. So I've added resistance training and modified my diet a little.
I have absolutely zero experience of resistance training, so I've taken on a PT for 3 months. Partly to show me the ropes, partly for motivation. At the moment we are into the third week of doing two sessions a week of weights (quite like), one session a week of core and boxing (enjoy), one session of core and HIIT (kill me now). I'm still aiming for 1500 cals/day net of exercise but I've further increased my protein consumption to around 2g/kg/day.
It seems to be doing something. I'm tracking my weight and body composition with a set of Withings scales (I know the limitations of the technology, but it should give an indication of what's going on) and being a geek and an ex-biologist I like numbers. I've plugged the data into Excel, done a little maths, and the numbers are quite interesting.
From January to June, I lost on average 700g of weight a week. Which would imply an effective daily calorific deficit of ~770 cals. That wasn't entirely even - my wife died in February, and I barely ate for a week or two, and then didn't give a s
t what I ate for a week or two, but overall I think it probably evens out. I could never figure out how to get the bf% working on my old scales, so I don't have data for that period.For the period since I started the training, I've got some noticeable trends in daily measurements. There's noise, but that's easy to deal with statistically. I'm really interested in what happens to them over the coming months, but what we are doing appears to be working. Fitting trendlines by regression and using the regression coefficients to calculate smoothed weekly changes in total, fat and lean masses, my overall rate of weight loss has reduced from c.700g/week to c.420g/week. The body composition data, however, suggests that I am still losing about 700g/week of fat but gaining about 280g/week of lean mass. The actual changes calculated from starting and ending figures alone are greater than that, but individual data points are too volatile to be relied upon. It's early days, I don't have much data yet and I can't be sure how my body is going to react going forward, but if that trend continues I should be at about 16% body fat and 73kg by the end of the three months, having lost 9.3kg of fat and gained 3.5kg of muscle. I'd be pretty happy if it worked out like that, to be honest.
My gut feeling is that those numbers are feasible but not sustainable. 280g/week would be about 14.5kg a year - most estimates seem to suggest that someone completely untrained training hard and not running any calorie deficit at all would do well to manage 11kg in a year. It will be interesting to see to what extent it can be maintained.
Thank you, that's very interesting. I should say, she isn't a bodybuilder but her partner is, and reviews her plans.
She said the objectives for the first four weeks were technique, endurance and fat loss. I was hoping that with the resistance training and high protein intake I could minimise muscle loss during this phase, but it appears to be doing better than that with some growth, albeit perhaps not at a sustainable level.
Do you think a moderate calorie deficit and high protein intake is likely to continue working?
She said the objectives for the first four weeks were technique, endurance and fat loss. I was hoping that with the resistance training and high protein intake I could minimise muscle loss during this phase, but it appears to be doing better than that with some growth, albeit perhaps not at a sustainable level.
Do you think a moderate calorie deficit and high protein intake is likely to continue working?
Thanks Luke. I'd love to have the time and resources to do a proper literature review. I spent the first three months of my PhD sat in the library, it would be great to be able to do that, but... I have been reading papers, though - as you say, although there is some good, well referenced writing, there is a lot of stuff written on the web which clearly isn't evidence based. I suspect that most of it originates from people selling their products or services as if they have some arcane secret that others don't. And those studies have certainly informed the approach I've taken and give me reason to expect it to work.
What I was looking to add, though, was personal experience outside of controlled trial conditions. Also, I'm slightly obsessive about this at the moment, to some extent I'm treating it as a little experiment with my own physiology, so I wanted to talk about it with people who won't think it's an entirely weird thing to be doing
What I was looking to add, though, was personal experience outside of controlled trial conditions. Also, I'm slightly obsessive about this at the moment, to some extent I'm treating it as a little experiment with my own physiology, so I wanted to talk about it with people who won't think it's an entirely weird thing to be doing
Thanks Luke, that's really useful (and reassuring). I'll check those resources out too, looks like some good reading 
The effect of timing on protein intake is one of those things that my trainer mentioned and I immediately thought "that sounds like bks, I will fact check it when I get home" - and found to my surprise that it was evidence based. Also noticed that some carbohydrate at the same time has been shown to be beneficial. I've got a whey powder shake with virtually no carbohydrate in it, which means I can add or not add some carbs as required by chucking it in the blender with some banana and/or oats.
The soreness is not too bad, tolerable - it's just that with four sessions a week, it feels like there's always something that hurts, it's only the location that changes
I'm not recording my exercise in any detail, only that my sessions are picked up and tracked by my watch/phone, but my trainer diligently notes everything down. Might ask her for copies at some point.
I may have gone a bit too far in my obsession with data - I found out that DEXA scans are not that expensive if you book a package of three, so I'm booked in for the first one next week. Would have been nice to have done it earlier, but this is the soonest they can do. I will follow up in a couple of months, and again a couple of months after that. Should give me a really good understanding of what's going on. May also help understand and address some minor oddities of posture my trainer has pointed out and some asymmetry of strength I've noticed. You have to explain why you need it to their doctor before you can have it done, but they were happy with my reasons and approved it.
The effect of timing on protein intake is one of those things that my trainer mentioned and I immediately thought "that sounds like b
ks, I will fact check it when I get home" - and found to my surprise that it was evidence based. Also noticed that some carbohydrate at the same time has been shown to be beneficial. I've got a whey powder shake with virtually no carbohydrate in it, which means I can add or not add some carbs as required by chucking it in the blender with some banana and/or oats. The soreness is not too bad, tolerable - it's just that with four sessions a week, it feels like there's always something that hurts, it's only the location that changes
I'm not recording my exercise in any detail, only that my sessions are picked up and tracked by my watch/phone, but my trainer diligently notes everything down. Might ask her for copies at some point.
I may have gone a bit too far in my obsession with data - I found out that DEXA scans are not that expensive if you book a package of three, so I'm booked in for the first one next week. Would have been nice to have done it earlier, but this is the soonest they can do. I will follow up in a couple of months, and again a couple of months after that. Should give me a really good understanding of what's going on. May also help understand and address some minor oddities of posture my trainer has pointed out and some asymmetry of strength I've noticed. You have to explain why you need it to their doctor before you can have it done, but they were happy with my reasons and approved it.
Interesting article - not much to worry about then! I did spend some time working on fluctuating asymmetry in fish as an indicator of developmental stress, so I know most bilaterally symmetrical organisms show some individual deviation and that it can have a whole raft of causes. And as the article points out, we are handed creatures, so some differences are likely to arise from our tendency to favour one side or the other. I find that I am weaker on one side than the other, and also that some exercises requiring balance are a lot harder one way than the other. My trainer often corrects the position of my feet, and I often find the "correct" position less natural.
So, update. I just had a follow up DEXA scan, three months after the last (would have been nice to have done the first one before I started the training, but never mind).
Headline figures;
weight now 74.1kg from 76.7kg,
body fat % down from 23.3% to 18.4%.
4kg of fat lost.
1.5kg of muscle gained.
Fat distribution improved - android region down from 30.3% to 23.6%, gynoid region 26.1% to 22.9%, ratio down from 1.16 to 1.03 (ratio of fat on your belly to fat on your hips, higher values connected to diabetes and cardiovascular disease risks)
Fairly happy with that. I expect I could have lost more fat or gained more muscle if I had sacrificed the other objective, but that doesn't seem a bad compromise to me. I had already lost a lot of weight by the first scan, I was 90kg in January...
The body fat % figure from my scales which was about right three months ago is now way out, by the way...
Headline figures;
weight now 74.1kg from 76.7kg,
body fat % down from 23.3% to 18.4%.
4kg of fat lost.
1.5kg of muscle gained.
Fat distribution improved - android region down from 30.3% to 23.6%, gynoid region 26.1% to 22.9%, ratio down from 1.16 to 1.03 (ratio of fat on your belly to fat on your hips, higher values connected to diabetes and cardiovascular disease risks)
Fairly happy with that. I expect I could have lost more fat or gained more muscle if I had sacrificed the other objective, but that doesn't seem a bad compromise to me. I had already lost a lot of weight by the first scan, I was 90kg in January...
The body fat % figure from my scales which was about right three months ago is now way out, by the way...
Still seeing the trainer four times a week. We've dropped all of the cardio now and we're doing much lower rep ranges and heavier weights. I will adjust my nutrition if I feel it's stopped working, but I'm still going with a moderate calorie deficit, fairly low carbohydrate, 2g protein / kg / day. I don't mind if it takes a while to drop the remaining fat, I'm in this for the long term. I'm also not particularly looking to get massive. The original objective was to increase lean mass to help with weight maintenance long term. If I'm honest, I do like the aesthetic effect of the changes in my body and want to take it a bit further, but I'm not aiming for the brick outhouse look
Hoofy said:
I suppose so. I guess it's related to how most people have a NYR approach to gyms.
I don't think there's any doubt that the hormonal and metabolic changes of middle age make it harder to achieve the same changes, nor that a lot of people of all ages get it wrong and don't get the results they were hoping for. I think also that people can get the impression that they've gained a lot of muscle when they've just lost fat and gained tone, which probably results in a frowny face when they scan tells them they've actually lost a bit!J4CKO said:
Fantastic progress, amazing that your scales were in the same ball park as the Dexa Scan, I have been warned not to trust them but if they are wrong they are at least consistently so, I started at 31 percent Bodyfat and am now on 28, 33 percent muscle is now 35 which is consistent with how I feel, clothes fit better and looking in the mirror I can see my shape changing.
It's interesting that they were right the first time and are well out now. Could be the stopped clock right once a day effect, or could be that it doesn't work very well over that range of values. In normal mode, it overestimates my body fat and in athlete mode it underestimates it. J4CKO said:
I think it is important not to get too competitive with guys on here, some are utter machines that have been training for years and years, I do what I can and can see improvement but I am not going to start willy waving, or trying to as I will hurt myself if I try to.
God no, not getting into that! The weights are getting heavier, but that's just to get the effect I want, not for the sake of it.
J4CKO said:
I am 45 and still two to three stone overweight, but I am seeing improvements, I am not expecting Physical perfection but I look and feel better, my pants dont cut me in half, I can see muscle, I can feel stuff I couldn't feel before under my skin, it is very compelling.
Yes, that's the thing, I got into this because I had got fat, again, and I wanted not just to get it off but to reduce the chances of it coming back. But now, I'm quite liking the effect.Gassing Station | Health Matters | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff