photo of man with muscular body

Weight loss and muscle building are 2 of the most popular fitness goals.

Although they’re separate, they can also go hand in hand.

And one fix in your diet could enable you to achieve both these goals at once if you desire to.

The two ways of changing your weight

There are two ways you could gain or lose fat. And one way is by the fluctuation of your insulin.

Insulin

Insulin is a hormone that decides whether to store or use the glucose from your carbs.

And ONLY carbs can affect your insulin. This isn’t bad, because it’s needed, and here’s how it works:

  1. You eat a carbohydrate.
  2. It directly raises your blood sugar.
  3. Insulin is released in the blood to deal with the glucose and decide the quantity to store or use immediately.
  4. The more carbs you eat, the more energy will be stored in you as fat. It has nothing to do with calories, but because glucose is toxic in the blood in large quantities, and the threshold is low depending on how insulin-sensitive you are.
  5. But if carb has a higher GI (a figure used to measure how quickly foods that contain carbohydrates raise blood glucose levels), it will be broken down quickly, which will release energy quickly, which causes a sugar spike and crash.
  6. This causes most of the glucose molecules to be stored on you for later use, as they can’t remain in the blood for long.
  7. So when most people trying to lose fat consume high gi foods, it just makes it harder for them to access their fat stores and use them.

Example

Here’s an example. If you ate a sweet potato for dinner, it would get broken down and released into the blood slower, as it has a low GI of around 40. You would get longer-lasting energy as well as there would be an appropriate amount of glucose in your blood at all times.

But if you ate white rice, which has a high gi, it would get broken down and released into the blood quicker, which means you would get more energy in a short period.

More of the glucose molecules would be stored in you for later use rather than straight away because there’s too much in the blood at one go.

Once again, this depends on how sensitive you are to insulin.

For example, if you are insulin sensitive, it wouldn’t take many carbs or even a medium gi carb for your body to store more fat on you because more insulin would be released.

But if you aren’t sensitive to insulin, more glucose is in your blood, which can be dangerous and it’s known as diabetes.

Although you might not gain much fat, you won’t feel great and your energy will fluctuate.

Calories

Another way you gain or lose fat is by a calorie deficit or surplus. This is the more popular but also overrated method for fat loss.

A calorie deficit is when you burn more calories than you consume and for a calorie surplus vice verse.

For example, if you consumed 2000 calories today and then burned 2500 and did this daily for 1 week, you would be estimated to lose 1 to 2 pounds of weight.

But when you burn more calories than you consume, you lose muscle tissue, water weight and fat instead of just fat.

And this is simply because there’s excess energy that your body doesn’t need straight away.

This is why people could go into extreme calorie deficits and still lose weight, and even some competitive eaters do that. Some consume tens of thousands of calories and burn them off through intense cardio, but some can’t be bothered to do that.

But this depends on your metabolism. Your metabolism is the chemical reactions in your body’s cells that turn food into energy.

Having a fast metabolism means that your body can turn food into energy quickly, and having a slow metabolism means your body turns food into energy slowly.

Think of people with fast metabolisms as sports cars that are inefficient at using their fuel, and think of people with slow metabolisms as trucks that are efficient at using their energy.

Muscle mass

You gain muscle mass when your body converts protein into muscle tissue. Although some people can naturally gain muscle from an increased protein intake, they can build more muscle if they work out.

When you work out, you aim to create micro-tears in your muscles from using your muscles to lift weights to their limits.

And because this forces your muscles to adapt, they rebuild after some time, and they grow bigger and stronger.

So, if you wanted to maintain your muscle mass, you would just need to consume enough protein. I recommend a starting point of consuming your body weight in kg times 1.2, and this result should be how much protein you consume every day.

So, if you weighed 70kg, for instance, 70 times 1.2 is 84, and that’s how many grams of protein you would consume daily.

If you can see in the mirror that you aren’t losing muscle mass, then you can maintain that routine, but if you see yourself losing muscle mass, then increase your protein intake. And the worst-case scenario, if you’re gaining muscle, then consume less protein.

Building muscle

If you want to build muscle, you must work out. Read this article on how to build an effective workout plan after you’ve read this article.

But to keep it simple, here’s how your workout should be regardless of whether you are working out at home or in the gym:

  • Train close to failure every set
  • Do more sets of compound exercise, a gym example is squats and a calisthenic example is weighted jump squats or regular jump squats
  • Train 2 to 3 times a week
  • Try and increase the weight and challenge yourself by increasing the weight or reps every few sessions

Although you’re trying to create as many micro-tears as possible, you need to get as much rest as well.

Muscle growth happens when you’re sleeping. NOT when you’re lying in bed, but when you’re actually sleeping.

This is why training twice a week may be the best option for you because it takes 48 hours for your muscles to recover to only their base size and strength (if you had an intense, demanding workout), but 72 hours for your muscles to recover to their fullest, and grow bigger and stronger.

So also be sure to get 8 hours of quality sleep, which means you should be in bed for over 8 hours as it takes time for you to fall asleep.

Your protein intake should be higher when trying to build muscle. So you’ll want to be aiming for at least 1.6 times your body weight in kg, grams of protein daily.

So, if you weighed 60kg, you would do 60 times 1.6, which would be 90g of protein. You can go slightly higher if you want to, like 2 times, if you see you’re not realistically building appropriate amounts of muscle mass.

How your diet should look to achieve both

For losing fat, this is how your diet should look like:

And for building muscle, you should have high protein in your diet.

Here’s the reason for this diet:

High healthy fats

Healthy fats contain the most calories per gram out of all the macronutrients (9 calories) so they’ll provide you with energy to last throughout your day, and they’ll keep you satiated which prevents cravings, especially for junk food.

Because fats take longer to digest, your body burns calories digesting them, hence resulting in fat loss. They also enable your body to get fat adapted, which gives your body the ability to solely use your fat stores as energy, hence you losing fat.

High protein

Protein is needed to build muscle, and having more muscle mass increases your metabolism, which results in you burning more energy, even at rest.

Protein also keeps you satiated and takes longer to digest, so you’ll burn more calories, hence resulting in weight loss.

Low carbs

Carbs spike your insulin, which is fine, but a large spike is not beneficial for you.

Not only does it cause a sugar spike and crash, but it also results in you storing more fat from those foods.

But this is only the case if you consume refined carbs, which often have high GIs.

They will raise your blood sugar quicker, more insulin will be in your blood, and more will be stored as energy on you. 

However, your goal of fat loss is to burn the hundreds of thousands of calories you’re carrying, so refined carbs shouldn’t be in your diet.

The carbs you should be consuming should be low GI, like sweet potatoes, or fruit like berries.

And the highest composition even those carbs should have in your diet should be medium. But the less, the better, especially if you have a very slow metabolism.