Losing Fat and Gaining Muscle at the Same Time

 

When I was competing in bodybuilding at Junior Nationals last year, I was talking with the competitor next to me prior to going on stage and he said, “I had two main goals this year:  To gain as much muscle as possible and to get as lean as possible.”  I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, that’s pretty much every bodybuilder’s goal in the world.  Does he think this is an original idea?”  I just smiled and agreed and carried on with the competition.

 

Just about everybody in the gym that I have ever asked what their goal was, it was this same answer.  Every guy I know wants to lose fat and gain muscle.  And most of them want to do it at the same time.  I would always tell them, it’s not really possible.  You need to focus on either losing fat OR gaining muscle to effectively reach either goal.

 

It wasn’t until a few months later that I found out I was wrong.  After doing a lot of reading and a lot of learning in the past 6 months, it finally dawned on me that I was thinking about it all wrong.  When I thought of losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time, I was hard-locked into this idea of doing both at the same “instant.”  Now, what I have learned is that everything needs to be broken down into “periods.”  If you look at a week for instance, and you work out 4 days per week, you could consider the time centered around those workouts as periods.  You can consider the blocks of time in between as other periods.  If you look at it this way, then the answer becomes yes, you CAN add muscle and lose fat at the same time – same time meaning within the time frame of a few days or a week.

 

So how does this work?  It works by dedicating periods of your time towards fat loss while avoiding muscle catabolism, and dedicating other periods of time to muscle acquisition with minimal fat gain.  How long is a period?  That is not an easy answer.  And the answer is sometimes geared toward your MAIN goal (which is more important to you for the next several weeks?  Is it muscle acquisition or is it leaning up?).  If your main goal is fat loss, you would want to dedicate the majority of your time to this goal, so there might be either longer periods, or more periods or both geared for this.  And vice versa for muscle acquisition.  You would want to stay in an anabolic state for the majority of your time if this is your main objective.

 

One example of how I am currently doing this is by Alternate Day Fasting (ADF).  It’s just as the title implies, it involves 24 hours of very little food (only fiber) followed by 24 hours of eating a fairly clean, somewhat balanced diet.  I’m sure you are thinking, “That’s crazy!  You will lose all kinds of muscle mass if you don’t eat!”  I would have said the same thing.  But contrary to what logic would tell me, studies on mice have demonstrated that

 

”…nutritional stress induced by the Every Other Day feeding (EOD) model of Calorie Restriction (CR) together with a moderate increase of energy expenditure through physical exercise produces metabolic changes that increase the efficiency of mitochondrial activity in muscle, reduces oxidative damage and improves physical performance. Subtle modifications at the cellular and biochemical levels in response to dietary stress seem to be the basis for a higher mitochondrial efficiency.”¹

 

After practicing this type of diet, I can now attest that these findings seem to translate to humans also.  My results over the past five weeks speak for themselves.  I continue to see a slight improvement of strength week after week, and a noticeable amount of fat loss (which has been my main goal).

 

One thing I find difficult is changing your mindset every period.  Once you start thinking about losing fat, and then all of a sudden, it’s time to gain muscle, it takes a complete turn around of your thinking.  For instance, when I am dieting to lose fat, I am very conscious about what I eat and how much I eat.  When I am “bulking” I don’t have so many restrictions on these factors.  So when one day you are watching calories, or avoiding carbs, or eating nothing at all, and then the next day you are eating to increase calories and increase energy stores after a low calorie day or a fast, and increasing protein to give your muscles building blocks to grow, you really have to focus on what gear you are in.  You follow the rules of what you are trying to do for that period.

 

ADF is one type of diet I have tried with great results.  There are other ways and other diets, but now I know how to accomplish two goals at once by thinking about time broken into periods and dedicating different periods of the day or week to my goals.  These periods either focus on fat loss while avoiding muscle catabolism or muscle acquisition with minimal fat gain.

¹Rodríguez-Bies E, Santa-Cruz Calvo S, Fontán-Lozano Á, Peña Amaro J, Berral de la Rosa FJ, et al. (2010) Muscle Physiology Changes Induced by Every Other Day Feeding and Endurance Exercise in Mice: Effects on Physical Performance. PLoS ONE 5(11): e13900. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013900