How to change your body composition
You lose weight by being in a caloric deficit. This means you’re burning more calories than you’re taking in. However, most people don’t realize that when you lose weight you don’t just lose fat, you also lose muscle. Just like you can’t spot reduce where you lose weight, you can’t control what percentage of your weight loss is fat loss. In order to preserve the muscle on your body you need to be sure that while you’re in a caloric deficit you’re also:
- maintaining a high protein diet- Protein helps feed your muscles.
- strength training- If you don’t tax your muscles through resistance training your muscles will not grow and they will instead waste away.
It’s important to note however that the muscle definition that you see once you lose fat is often the muscle you already had on your body, it just becomes more visible once your body becomes leaner. It’s hard to build new muscle while in a caloric deficit because a caloric surplus is generally needed to perform the workouts necessary and progressively overload. You expend a lot of calories during your strength training workouts. This is why it’s hard to simultaneously lose fat and gain muscle. There are a few exceptions to this.
For example, if you’re new to weight lifting and have very little muscle on your body currently this will be easier to accomplish because weight lifting becomes a new stimuli. It shouldn’t be a disappointment to you if this exception doesn’t apply to you. You can still get the physique you want by losing fat and maintaining the muscle you currently have on your body. This is accomplished by following a proper diet and exercise program.
Does fat turn into muscle
You can shrink fat cells, but you can not turn fat into muscle. Muscle is “active tissue that burns calories around the clock even as you sleep.” Fat however is just the storage of excess energy. Some body fat is needed to stay healthy but when you have too much it will start to collect around your waist, hips and butt.
You can help fuel your muscles by taking in a high protein diet as I mentioned above and you can help reduce your fat by putting yourself in a healthy caloric deficit, which should be about 20% below your maintenance. If you cut your calories too much too fast you risk slowing your metabolism and losing too much muscle.
How aging affects body composition
It is a myth that muscle turns to fat with age, but rather studies have shown that fat mass increases and muscle mass decreases with age. This increase in fat is more likely to collect around the mid-section, which puts you at risk for things like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Part of the reason for this is because naturally our metabolism slows down with age. This is why we can’t get away with eating the same unhealthy foods we did when we were younger without paying the price for it in our body fat.
Having a solid strength training program in place helps to counter this effect of aging because it helps slow down the process of muscle atrophy and speeds up your metabolism so you’re burning more calories at rest.
Diet to lose fat and maintain muscle
There is no such thing as a fat to muscle diet. Having a high protein diet that is rich in lean protein sources such as chicken, beef, fish, beans, eggs, yogurt, turkey and lentils is helpful in building or maintaining muscle because protein is necessary for the repair, growth and maintenance of muscles. However, you don’t want to have so much protein that it puts you into a caloric surplus, which will cause the extra calories to convert to fat. To better understand how many calories you should be taking in each day read our blog post on macro-tracking. To lose fat you need to make sure you are in a healthy caloric deficit so you don’t lose weight too fast and risk losing too much muscle too.
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