Teachers love teaching; to honor that, I’m going to use Danielle to teach a simplified lesson in weight. The picture to the left is from 2012. She weighed 113# and was running 25+ miles a week to maintain her body composition. The reason I have this picture is Danielle sent me an updated picture, eight years later, in which she is wearing the exact same pants (picture on the right). She said the pants are “SKINTIGHT around my thighs now because my quads and hamstrings are so huge! Like when I wear them, I can see the indents of my quads and I can see my hamstrings (which is new this year)!”
For the record, her legs are not “HUGE;” that is gym lexicon. Her legs are developed, tight, toned, firm—use whatever word floats your boat. After we celebrated her newfound definition and coveted, yet elusive for most, hamstring visibility, I had to know her weight; she is seven pounds heavier today.
So the exact same pair of pants that fit her waist eight years ago are a little loose around her waist eight years later, she now sports a much more developed pair of legs and butt, and she weighs seven pounds heavier. What gives?
She gained muscle and lost fat, and that muscle is reflected in weight on the scale; how trite. Let’s freshen this up and look at exactly how this happened. I’ll be purposely brief:
1️⃣ I met Danielle; Danielle did Boot Camp; Danielle died; we didn’t see Danielle for two weeks. In all fairness, there was no fairness. Danielle came from the world of long-distance cardio into an explosive, high-intensity training class. To her credit, after she recovered from the initial shock, Danielle came right back. She has yet to miss a day of training to my knowledge.
2️⃣ Danielle slowly expressed interest in adding weight training. She was seeing results with Boot Camp and was most thrilled about the fact that she did not have to spend an exorbitant amount of time running each week to maintain her level of leanness.
3️⃣ Danielle added in a little bit of weight training.
4️⃣ Years went on as Danielle was practicing a 50/50 mix of weight training and Boot Camp. She expressed a desire to take it to the next level. I told her to add in another day of weightlifting, even if it meant losing a day of Boot Camp; she agreed to try.
5️⃣ Danielle began a 75/25 split of weight training to Boot Camp. Danielle was putting on muscle but was not happy with the way she was looked. She felt bulky and partly wanted to return to her previous Boot-Camp-dominant schedule. I suggested to Danielle that she was doing everything right except we needed to get her nutrition in order. She was hesitant, as she never wants to feel pressured to be nutritionally “perfect,” but she did want to see some specific physical results from her labors. She was game.
6️⃣ Danielle succeeded beyond even her own wildest expectations with the New Year Nutrition Program. She dropped just over 5 lbs. and 6 inches; doesn’t seem like a lot? Proportionally, it is. She looked like a different woman after; she also learned how to eat for progress while still enjoying life and food with her family.
Let’s really get blunt and fresh; what exactly happened?
Danielle was a long-distance runner. She was training her body to burn fat AND burn muscle AND store fat. Why does long-distance running burn muscle? Muscle is metabolically heavy. The goal of long-distance running is to complete a lengthy distance in as short a time as possible; muscle is not conducive to that. She was lean—after all, the pants fit—but she also whittled away the muscle mass in her legs, hence the pants being so baggy in the thighs. As she lost fat, she also lost muscle. What if she kept doing this?
She could have kept getting leaner if she kept running more and more, eating less and less, or both. Example: if she started running 30 miles a week, she would lose more fat and weight. Eventually, she would need to up it to 35 miles, then 40, and then 50. What’s the problem with this? Sooner rather than later, she would find no more time exists for her to run more, but she could start eating less. If she was eating 1500 calories, she could cut it to 1400, then 1300, then 1200, and so on. What’s the problem with this? As she progresses, she will either die or have to start eating more.
If she embarked on this path, would she “damage her metabolism?” Kind of, sort of. Simply, think of your metabolism like a furnace that is always burning. The sciency name for this is basal metabolic rate; it’s a measure of how many calories your body burns at rest. The bigger your furnace, the more calories you can burn at rest and during any activity you partake. If Danielle were to journey upon the fictional path above, as she was losing fat, she would also be losing muscle. As she loses muscle, her furnace (metabolism) gets smaller. As her furnace gets smaller, she can burn less fat.
Here’s where it gets tricky: if Danielle could normally eat 1500 calories a day and her weight would remain the same, but she shrinks her furnace down to half its size (through muscle loss), she may now only be able to eat 750 calories a day to remain the same. If she eats more, she’ll get fat! (This is grossly simplified to illustrate this point.) Now Danielle becomes a serial dieter and slowly starts to gain fat over the years, and no matter what exercise or diet she’s trying, she just gets bigger, her pants get tighter, and after eight years go by, she looks back at old pictures, lamenting her days of youthful exuberance and pants that fit, wondering what went wrong!
Let’s look at what Danielle did right instead. Danielle started lifting weights, and she did put some weight on at first. She started using her muscles, and in turn, her body started storing energy and water in them, which is reflected on the scale as weight. However, this is good weight. This is the type of weight that increases the size of Danielle’s furnace so she can eat more and burn more. Once Danielle went through this initial phase, her body was primed to get leaner. Unlike long-distance running, how is her body going to adapt to the specific type of weight training Danielle does? It must get stronger, leaner, firmer, and tighter. The more weight training Danielle did, the more this happened. Then she hit a standstill; she wasn’t getting leaner and felt bulky. Simply, she was building muscle, but her nutrition, even though she was eating healthy foods, was not conducive to her getting leaner. We sorted that out, and now she’s used to the ebb and flow of lifestyle eating.
She saw great results and is at a place where her furnace is so big that she can explore a bit, enjoy some drinks with her hubby, enjoy some treats with her kiddos, and maintain or make slow progress. However, if the balance starts to get out of whack, she will assuredly lose some of her progress, at which point, she can apply herself again for a short period of time, regain, move forward, and go back to enjoying some great spirits and ambrosial fare. Meet Eb and Flo. So long as she never ventures too far off track nutritionally, the really hard work is done. Now we can focus on fun things like getting those hamstrings to pop more and doing chin-ups with weight hanging from her waist!
PANDEMIC ALERT! We’re going to make this a discussion point for Facebook this week. Let’s envision a world where Danielle keeps up with her nutrition but not her weight lifting during the pandemic (this is completely fictional as she and her husband are training 100% during this time). Danielle would not be using her muscles in the same fashion as she was previously in the gym, and as such, her body would have no need to hold onto all of it. She would slowly start to lose muscle and slowly start to shrink the size of her furnace. How would this reflect itself on the scale? The exact opposite of before! As her body has no need to store the same energy and water in her muscles, that would manifest itself as scale weight; the scale would go down. This is not good weight loss because as we will see, the changes that are slowly starting to take place in her body are going to reveal themselves in an insidious fashion months down the road from now because that scale slowly starts to creep up into uncomfortable places. But that is a different tale for an upcoming day!
About the author
Chris Rombola
Chris is the owner of Fit House. He's run the training departments at several commercial gyms, and after years of seeing how awful those environments were for his clients, he opened his own studio. He is devoted to getting people strong, lean, and healthy.
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