No Weight Loss - Is It Muscle Gain?

Once I had settled into my fat loss plan I estimated that if I followed my plan carefully, I should be able to lose 1lb a week. In my first year on the plan I lost a total of 23lbs. Well, I lost a little more than that but I put a few back on too! It’s evident that I most certainly did not lose 1lb a week. I averaged 1lb every other week.

There were some weeks where I blatantly did not follow the plan; I had takeaway pizzas and curry, I ate out at restaurants and didn’t hold back, I skipped workouts and so on. On those weeks when I did my stats at the end of the week I was just glad if I hadn’t put any weight back on. But there were some weeks, quite a lot in fact, where I followed my plan pretty well and yet at the end of the week there was no change, or very little.

A “No Change” Week – So Common and so Demoralising

I know I am not alone in this situation. A few years ago I spent several months as a consultant for Slimming World and week after week I would have several members who would adamantly state how they had followed the plan to the letter and had not lost any weight. As a member this is terribly demoralising. You go along to some club who sells you a plan that promises to allow you to lose weight. You follow the plan and nothing happens. As a consultant I found this very hard to deal with as I just didn’t know what to say to these people.

The story is the same with slimmers all over the world on all sorts of fat loss plans. When one of these “No Change” weeks crops up, (or worse, weight is actually put on) most people will try to rationalise the results and come up with a comforting fact that could explain the results. The most common one I hear is this:

“I must have put on muscle which is cancelling out the fat loss on the scale” ... (or something to that effect)

Digging Into the Logic

Let’s take that statement and examine it for a while. On what logic is it based? Muscle is a much denser matter than fat. If you take a chunk of muscle and a chunk of body fat of the same size and weighed them you would find that the muscle weighs much more than the fat. This is the reason why two people can be exactly the same height, exactly the same weight but look completely different where one appears much fatter than the other. The slimmer person holds more muscle and less fat on their body but the muscle weighs more than the fat causing the person to weigh the same as the larger person who holds more fat.

These days it is widely accepted that building muscle is beneficial for fat loss so many slimmers will sensibly combine a healthy diet with exercise that includes some kind of strength training. Putting these two things together then and you can see where the conclusion comes from. If in any given week I am burning off fat and building muscle at the same time then won’t they cancel each other out on the scale?

Simultaneous Fat Loss and Muscle Gain

This is a topic that I am going to cover in it’s own post so I will keep it brief here. We all know that in order to lose fat, we must create a calorie deficit in our bodies. That means that the number of calories we supply in terms of the food and drink that we consume is less than the energy used up by our bodies. The extra energy required is then taken from our fat reserves (hopefully!) We also know that muscle is build through resistance training, not on cardio machines. But what many people don’t realise is that to gain significant amounts of muscle, a calorie surplus is required. Obviously the two goals are in conflict with one another.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule and there are some people who swear that it is all rubbish and that you can quite happily build muscle whilst losing fat. However, to do so would require extremely strict training and a very clean diet and I doubt that somebody who is being that strict with themselves would get on the scale at the end of the week, see no change and just rationalise about why.

So let’s move on...

Crunching the Numbers

Now for arguments sake, let’s assume that it is quite normal to lose fat and to build muscle at the same time. What kind of numbers are we talking about here? Well in my case I was planning to lose 1lb a week. I am quite a small person so my calorie allowance isn’t all that high and I simply hate dieting so I don’t have a very low deficit but many other people are more aggressive and are aiming for a loss of around 2lbs a week. So if we get on the scale at the end of the week, see that there is no change and then assume that we must have put on muscle instead, we are implicitly making the assumption that we did indeed lose that 1 or 2lbs of fat and that we also gained that same amount of weight in muscle.

There are 52 weeks in a year. 52 x 2 = 104. For us folk in the UK we need to think in stones, and there are 14lbs in one stone. 104 lbs is over 7stones! Wow that’s a lot. I don’t know many people who have lost 7 stones in one year. Taking my own example of a loss of 1lb a week, with a maximum of 52 lbs in the year that would equate to a total possible fat loss of 3st 10.

I know many people who have lost 3 stones in a year. I’m sure you do too even if not personally. There are many success stories to draw from. But let’s look at the other side. How many people do you know have put on 3 stones of pure lean muscle in a year? Hmmm not as many I would suspect. By saying that your lack of movement on the scale is down to muscle gain you are making the assumption that you can put on muscle just as fast as you can lose fat.

It is Simply HARD to Gain Muscle

Ask any body builder how fast the average person can put on muscle and they won’t tell you 1lb a week, maybe 1lb a month would be closer. The situation is worse for women; we simply lack the testosterone required to build muscle so it is much, much more difficult for us to increase our muscle mass.

Those bodybuilders that do put on large amounts of muscle in a short space of time work incredibly hard. My gym is a bit of a ‘muscle gym’ and there are at least two professional bodybuilders who workout there and let me tell you – they do not do gentle recreational lifting! The average member here comes in and works very seriously, squeezing out that last rep with every iota of energy in his body. This is in stark contrast to my previous gym that was a hotel guest gym also open to the public. Most of the members there were women and hardly any used weights at all. Those that did tended to have the same routine – they would move from machine to machine doing 10 reps of this, 10 reps of that and barely breaking a sweat. Which one are you?

If this post is making you feel a little uncomfortable, perhaps a bit defensive then I hope that you’ll also have realised that the reason you feel this way is because you have been kidding yourself all this time. You haven’t been secretly putting on muscle, perhaps you’ve just not been working hard enough or perhaps you’re suffering from a fluctuation, or any number of other reasons why the fat has not come off. Fluctuation is another subject that is to be covered in a future post but if your weight is fluctuating upwards then it must come down as well so that excuse will only work for so long.

Give the Excuse the Boot

There are two things that we must understand. Firstly we must know the difference between weight loss and fat loss. Our bodies are made of water, bones, muscle tissue, organs, blood, skin, fat and probably a whole host of other things that I don’t know about. When we lose ‘weight’ it can be coming from any number of areas. I’m sure many of us have suffered with ‘water weight’ at some time or other. What we really want is to lose fat, not just weight so that means that using the scale alone is not a sufficient stick to measure by.

We need something else. We need a way of measuring how much fat we have and that is what body fat testing is all about. In my post about the Different Types of Body Fat I talk about some different methods of measuring body fat and the ups and downs of those. Whichever method you use, although it may not be totally accurate it will give you a much better idea of how your body is composed. You will know how much is lean body mass and how much is fat. If you track these numbers from week to week then you don’t have to wonder whether or not you have gained muscle because your measurements will tell you.

So stop kidding yourself, get rid of the excuses, measure properly and if you don’t get the results you want take a close look at your behaviour and see if you can spot the real reasons for it.

As a final note on this topic, I am not suggesting that in all cases, the lack of fat loss is simply due to not trying hard enough. There are other isues such as food intolerances, water retention especially for women around menstruation etc, but in many cases we are just making excuses for ourselves. And if there is a proper medical condition underlying our symptoms then we should get them checked out by our doctor.

Holding onto the Treadmill for Dear Life!

In the gyms that I frequent I often see the following phenomenon… Somebody starts working on the treadmill and begins to jack up the incline but they put the incline so high that they can’t actually work at that level so they have to cling onto the bar just to stay on the treadmill.

Last week I saw a really extreme example of this behaviour. A man who often seems to do things very strangely in the gym set the incline level at what I can only assume to be the maximum. In order just to keep himself from flying off the thing, not only did he have to hold on tightly but he also leaned back so that the angle between his body and the base of the treadmill was the same as if he was standing normally with the incline flat.

I couldn’t find any pictures of anybody doing this so let me try to illustrate with some silly diagrams!

Diagram 1 - Running on flat treadmill

Ok diagram 1 here is pretty standard – the treadmill is flat and somebody is running (or walking) without holding onto the bar. Look at the dotted red line. This serves the highlight the angle between the runner and the running surface. Here it is clearly a right angle: 90 degrees.

[Edit] Oh bugger, there's no dotted red line in that picture! Well I could recreate the picture but it would be easier to ask you to scroll down at look at diagram 3 which has the red line in the same place! Oooopsie! :-)

Diagram 2 - Running on a high incline

Now in diagram two the runner has increased the incline of the treadmill but he is still running and not holding on. Because of gravity, humans need to be positioned at a right angle to the core of the earth. The treadmill provides an artificial ground for the runner and in order to stay on the treadmill and not fall off, the runner has to effectively learn forward to keep the centre of gravity positioned correctly through his body.

What the incline of the treadmill does here is increase the angle between the runner and the artificial surface beneath him. Notice how that angle is larger (or smaller depending on which of the two angles you are looking at! I’m looking at the one to the left of the red line.) That’s what gives him the extra resistance and thus makes the run harder. Basic principles at work here.

Diagram 3- Holding on to a treadmill on a high incline

So far so good but look what happens when the runner decides that he can’t actually run at the incline he has set so instead decides to hold on. What usually happens is that as he holds onto the bar he effectively hangs his bodyweight off it which changes the angle of his body – he is now positioned once again at a right angle to his artificial ground. This means that the resistance that he tried to increase by increasing the incline is effectively cancelled out by his need to hold on.

Now this diagram is an extreme example but this was exactly what I saw in my gym last week. The angle was so high that I couldn’t see how anyone could get up a hill like that without holding onto something. This man was literally holding on for dear life and as I watched him I could see the angle of his body positioned just like the one in my diagram above.

So What? What Does it Matter Anyway?

This guy is kidding himself. He thinks he is pushing himself to the max by setting the incline so high and yet he is defeating his own efforts by having to hold on. Of course I also see many people holding onto the bar even when the treadmill is flat. This carries health problems of its own and a quick Google search will reveal lots of informative pages about that. However what I would really like to get across is not so much the health problems of holding on exactly, but the fact that this man is sabotaging his own efforts and tricking himself into thinking that he is working much harder than he is.

This is a recurring theme in the fat loss and fitness arena. I have been guilty of kidding myself in so many ways over the years and it is only now that I am starting to see where many of us are going wrong. I think it’s important to highlight the ways in which we do this to ourselves because there is nothing worse than coming to the end of the week where you think you have eaten well and exercised well and you do your weighing and measuring and do not get the results you expect. You wonder why your plan doesn’t seem to be working when you are obviously doing everything right.

I’m going to start a new category for this post and I’ll be putting in quite a few more articles in it in the coming weeks.