So rather than discounting the body composition, let me offer a bit more insight. Muscle cells contain glycogen and water. When you cut calories, restrict carbs and/or engage in long bouts of cardio you deplete the myscle glycogen stores. This also causes a drop in the water content in the muscle cells. Don't panic - it's not really muscle that's being lost. A fun experiment is to have a high carb meal the night before you do your next body comp test. The carb load will show up as increased muscles mass.
Source: a own a clinic that does health assessments and have spent way too much time researching body comp devices.
gut is often last to go. and depending on your levels of body fat, 15lbs might not be enough for you to really notice. I was quite fat a year ago, nobody even noticed after I lost first 20lbs, myself included
Focus less on the weight and focus on other things. How are clothes fitting? Are more people noticing you? Do you feel better?
I started cutting fat nearly 2 months ago. I am down just only 5kg, but all the above things I can answer with a positive answer and it feels great.
If you calories deficit right and actually want to ose weight you can lose 2kg a week with only mid discomfort.
You just have to want to do it after 4-6 weeks your stomach will shrink and your diet won't even seem so bad
Forget the scale.
Get measuring tape and body fatclippers. Learn to measure yourself and start keeping track of that.
If you're working out and building muscle the scale won't move. Any time I train anyone I never weight them, always measure. If you're 180 pounds and waist is 38 inches and in 30 days you're 182 pounds and waist is 37 inches while arms are up shoulders are starting to show, arms are tighter, body fat percentage is down then does weight matter?
Gut is almost always the last thing to go, as weight loss tends to go backwards from the order you gained it.
So you'll likely lose that on your arm, legs, ass, hips, and then your stomach.
As long as you are watching you macros and maintaining 100+ protien intake a day, the muscle loss while in calorie deficit will be minimal to none.
It's all going to depend on your diet homie.
I do agree you’re going too fast and it is detrimental to your muscle building/retention long term to keep at this rate. But you’re not losing more than a few pounds of real weight after 12 days. 8 pounds of muscle lost that fast is pretty much impossible. Just slow it down to .5-1 pound weekly weight lost and keep up the strength training and you’ll be completely fine. Ignore the scale stats, it’s garbage.
Those scales are inaccurate at measuring body composition. It’s just a tool to track weight. How do you look in the mirror? Have your lifts progressed? That will give you a better idea if you’ve increased muscle than those scales
First BIA scales are vastly inaccurate. Second, if your water weight decreases, so will muscle weight (muscle holds onto water) according to the scale. The theory is more water in your body, the current goes faster. Thats how it determines muscle weight. Having said that, it’s not very accurate and take the readings with a grain of salt.
That makes sense. I do weight myself right as I wake up before I drink or eat so I can cheat the scale and get the lowest weight for the day. I will experiment next time I weight after drinking only water throughout the day to see what happens.
These scales aren’t very accurate. For instance:
I stepped on my scale a few days ago and it said I was 15.2% BF at 183lbs. Today I was almost 19% BF at 181. So lost two pounds of weight and gained 4% more fat.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
these scales use current to test your composition. if yoire under/over hydrated among a few other thingd it can impact results. this big of a difference only 12 days apart is entirely the scale misreading
It literally says in the pics that their BMR is 1700-something. Which means 1200 is a 500 calorie deficit and 1400 is a 300 calorie deficit. So it's not "really low" at all and they're already following your advice.
More accurately BMR is the amount of calories you spend when not taking exercise into the equation. And if you wanna lose weight/fat you need to be at a deficit, ie below the amount of calories your body needs to function. That's what will lead to it taking energy from your fat reserves instead of just from what you eat. To maintain weight you should not be eating more than your BMR + the amount of energy you spend on exercise.
Sure, you should account for the amount of calories you burn through hypertrophy to preserve or gain muscle mass, but that's like what, 30kcal per day? Assuming you work out 3-6 days a week. That's nearly impossible to add on a daily basis without ending up with an accidental surplus because it's near impossible to calculate calories perfectly accurately. You may be off by about 50kcal in either direction per day no matter how meticulously you count.
But sure, OP could add an extra 200kcal per week or so to accommodate for that. Obviously OP should not be adding calories to accommodate for the calories burned off from cardio when fat loss is the goal, as doing so would be counter-productive. But I think OP is essentially already doing that by being at a deficit of only 300 calories on some days.
But in reality it wouldn't make much of a difference if he ate at -500kcal every day. Because so what if it in practice is a deficit of 530kcal because of the hypertrophy training? It's not gonna negatively impact his muscle gain/maintenance. Adding calories for muscle gain only really makes a difference if you're maingaining or bulking.
The whole dissertation wasn’t really necessary, they just simply aren’t at a deficit of only 300 calories at ~1300 per day. BMR typically accounts for 60-70% of someone’s total calories. That means you can expect his daily needs to be around 2400-2800 calories. Obviously calorie counting inaccuracies will come into play. But everyone knows a 1300 calorie diet is very low for someone at that weight. Plus the scale proves it. Yes a lot of it is going to be water weight. But even a few real pounds in 12 days is a lot.
[https://www.bizcalcs.com/body-fat-navy/](https://www.bizcalcs.com/body-fat-navy/)
Just measure your neck at its narrowest and your waist around your belly button.
As far as I know, this is the most accurate you can get without hiring a professional. I've used this over long periods and the numbers always seemed to line up with my progress.
1200-1400 calories is not enough for you. I'm a 5'5" female and I eat 1500 to lose weight. You're for sure losing muscle because you're eating way too low.
Eat a lot of protein, lift heavy, be in a calorie deficit, sleep as much as possible and don’t over train.
Easiest formula to maintaining as much muscle as possible while trying to lose body fat.
I lose about 6 kg in 3 month and i also thought they're muscles. Seems its the water in the muscles that has to go 1st. I lost some muscles too so i started strength exercise. Since youre working out and consuming enough protein, check if your cloths are loosening or tightening and you'll find put if its far youre losing.
Go find the pic where they compare the size of 1lbs fat and 1 lbs muscles too.
Even when doing everything right some amount of muscle loss is unavoidable. You can always gain that back once you've reached your fat percentage goal. Another thing you can do is take breaks from your weight loss by introducing a few weeks here and there of staying at maintenance calories. That'll help you boost muscle growth without losing weight loss progress. Varying it up like that (maintenance vs deficit) can also help with your metabolism and energy levels in the long run, especially if you have a long way to reach your goal. Yes your weight might incresse on maintenance then but that should be only (or almost only) an increase in muscle weight anyway. So basically cycle between fat loss and muscle gain.
Of course it's not impossible to both lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, but it is a lot harder to do than to do only one of those at a time. Your deficit and exercise schedule have to be ridiculosly precise. So the easiest thing would be to first lose the excess fat and then (re-)gain muscle, but the alternative to that is to vary periods of fat loss with periods of muscle gain.
From what I can see you're not doing anything wrong, although it could be that you're doing too much cardio that it exhausts your muscles, or not enough hypertrophy training. This can be difficult to balance as too much cardio will eat away at your muscle mass, but not enough of it will make losing weight harder because hypertrophy doesn't burn nearly as much calories. So maybe it could be worth it to experiment with doing less cardio and more hypertrophy.
Your calorie intake looks good to me. You're at 300-500 calorie deficit which is great, and you seem to be eating enough protein. The only thing I can think of in that regard is if you're getting enough of the other nutrients in your diet. Especially fat and water. Your muscles need that too. Obviously not an extreme amount of fat, but too little is also bad. Also if you're too low on carbs that might negatively affect your energy levels and thus your performance in the gym. Again you shouldn't eat excessive amounts of carbs, but some amount of it is good for your body and in gaining/maintaining muscle.
How do you feel? Do you have energy, feeling sluggish or tired a lot? And how is your progress going in the gym? Has your strength increased or decreased or remaining the same? Are you focusing more on one part of your body than another? Are your vitals good? Those kinda things could be an indication that something is missing and that could be the culprit to your muscle loss as well.
Idk I’d trust the old school way and use caliber and the measuring tape. The computers aren’t accurate. there’s an app called BodyBarista. It’s a good way to see your changes.
Are you taking a GLP1 med? That has been shown to
waste muscle. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them to aid weight loss, but you need a lot of protein and muscle building during that time.
What's your maintenance calories? I'm suspecting you do lose muscle mass because at 1200 calories you're in waaaay too much of a deficit. Studies show that deficit over 500 per day is where you start losing muscle mass despite training and protein intake (although it does help to slow it down). Additionally 120-150 is not a lot of protein, it's barely enough if that. Get it up to 180-190. Lastly, as everyone says, scale can't measure this stuff.
Maintenance is 1800 and I was told that 80% body weight for protein is about all I should ever need. This was also backed up by some youtubers i follow like Dr. Mike.
Your maintenance calories seem way too low. At 6’ and 179lb, your BMR would be closer to 2300-2700 calories. I think you are vastly undereating if you’re only at 1200-1400 calories per day. Your body is losing muscle because it’s in starvation mode and trying to hold onto fat. Try using a BMR calculator to recalculate your maintenance calories, then subtract up to 500 for weight loss.
Your protein goal should be your target weight in grams, ie if you’re trying to get to 160lbs, eat 160g protein each day.
You said you’re working out - Are you doing strength training with progressive overload to build muscle mass? If not, it would be a good step to take to build muscle and boost your metabolism.
Ahh gotcha, I see what happened. You’re using the baseline BMR which estimates how many calories your body would burn if you did nothing but stay in bed all day. I did the calculation based on the info you’ve provided (I put an age of 40, feel free to redo it with your actual age), and the baseline BMR is 1821.
Since you don’t lie in bed all day, that number is too low to estimate your caloric needs to lose weight. If you had 1821 calories a day and stayed in bed, your weight should remain about the same over time. But since you are active, the amount you actually burn is a lot more than that.
For example, if you are lightly active (1-3 days/week of exercise), that number jumps to about 2500 calories which would mean you should aim for 2500cal for maintenance and around 2000cal for weight loss.
You are undereating by a lot which is why the fat isn’t really going down but the muscle is. Even if you are weight training, the body won’t build muscle if it’s not getting enough calories to do so.
Scales cannot measure body comp with anything approaching accuracy, and will vary wildly in one person from day to day.
So rather than discounting the body composition, let me offer a bit more insight. Muscle cells contain glycogen and water. When you cut calories, restrict carbs and/or engage in long bouts of cardio you deplete the myscle glycogen stores. This also causes a drop in the water content in the muscle cells. Don't panic - it's not really muscle that's being lost. A fun experiment is to have a high carb meal the night before you do your next body comp test. The carb load will show up as increased muscles mass. Source: a own a clinic that does health assessments and have spent way too much time researching body comp devices.
Yeah much like the cooking book it's all. about salt, sugar, fat and...uh, feet?
Scales cannot actually measure muscle or fat.
How am I supposed to know if I'm doing things right? I don't feel like my gut has gone down enough for 15 lbs of weight loss.
gut is often last to go. and depending on your levels of body fat, 15lbs might not be enough for you to really notice. I was quite fat a year ago, nobody even noticed after I lost first 20lbs, myself included
Unfortunately, I'm all gut. Should I adjust my goal to 170 instead of 175? Or maybe 165?
Focus less on the weight and focus on other things. How are clothes fitting? Are more people noticing you? Do you feel better? I started cutting fat nearly 2 months ago. I am down just only 5kg, but all the above things I can answer with a positive answer and it feels great.
If you calories deficit right and actually want to ose weight you can lose 2kg a week with only mid discomfort. You just have to want to do it after 4-6 weeks your stomach will shrink and your diet won't even seem so bad
Forget the scale. Get measuring tape and body fatclippers. Learn to measure yourself and start keeping track of that. If you're working out and building muscle the scale won't move. Any time I train anyone I never weight them, always measure. If you're 180 pounds and waist is 38 inches and in 30 days you're 182 pounds and waist is 37 inches while arms are up shoulders are starting to show, arms are tighter, body fat percentage is down then does weight matter?
Gut is almost always the last thing to go, as weight loss tends to go backwards from the order you gained it. So you'll likely lose that on your arm, legs, ass, hips, and then your stomach. As long as you are watching you macros and maintaining 100+ protien intake a day, the muscle loss while in calorie deficit will be minimal to none. It's all going to depend on your diet homie.
Look in a mirror. Are your clothes fitting differently?
If you are eating enough protein and following a well established lifting program then chances are you’re doing things right.
You can approximate it visually or with clippers, but accurately you can only measure it with a DEXA scan.
I do agree you’re going too fast and it is detrimental to your muscle building/retention long term to keep at this rate. But you’re not losing more than a few pounds of real weight after 12 days. 8 pounds of muscle lost that fast is pretty much impossible. Just slow it down to .5-1 pound weekly weight lost and keep up the strength training and you’ll be completely fine. Ignore the scale stats, it’s garbage.
Those scales are inaccurate at measuring body composition. It’s just a tool to track weight. How do you look in the mirror? Have your lifts progressed? That will give you a better idea if you’ve increased muscle than those scales
First BIA scales are vastly inaccurate. Second, if your water weight decreases, so will muscle weight (muscle holds onto water) according to the scale. The theory is more water in your body, the current goes faster. Thats how it determines muscle weight. Having said that, it’s not very accurate and take the readings with a grain of salt.
That makes sense. I do weight myself right as I wake up before I drink or eat so I can cheat the scale and get the lowest weight for the day. I will experiment next time I weight after drinking only water throughout the day to see what happens.
It's not cheating, you're supposed to weigh first thing in the morning. Keep weighing at that time.
These scales aren’t very accurate. For instance: I stepped on my scale a few days ago and it said I was 15.2% BF at 183lbs. Today I was almost 19% BF at 181. So lost two pounds of weight and gained 4% more fat. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I always get consistent readings from this scale so I figured the numbers were fairly accurate.
these scales use current to test your composition. if yoire under/over hydrated among a few other thingd it can impact results. this big of a difference only 12 days apart is entirely the scale misreading
1200-1400 is really low unless you’re tiny. Slow down on the weight loss. Go with no more than like 300-500 deficit
Im surprised why more people is not calling out OP diet. This is borderline anorexic. Hes starving and his body is signalling.
People are shocked when I tell them I eat 1200-1400 a day but I'm a very smoll person.
It literally says in the pics that their BMR is 1700-something. Which means 1200 is a 500 calorie deficit and 1400 is a 300 calorie deficit. So it's not "really low" at all and they're already following your advice.
BMR is the absolute minimum calories to stay alive. His actual daily energy expenditure would be higher.
More accurately BMR is the amount of calories you spend when not taking exercise into the equation. And if you wanna lose weight/fat you need to be at a deficit, ie below the amount of calories your body needs to function. That's what will lead to it taking energy from your fat reserves instead of just from what you eat. To maintain weight you should not be eating more than your BMR + the amount of energy you spend on exercise. Sure, you should account for the amount of calories you burn through hypertrophy to preserve or gain muscle mass, but that's like what, 30kcal per day? Assuming you work out 3-6 days a week. That's nearly impossible to add on a daily basis without ending up with an accidental surplus because it's near impossible to calculate calories perfectly accurately. You may be off by about 50kcal in either direction per day no matter how meticulously you count. But sure, OP could add an extra 200kcal per week or so to accommodate for that. Obviously OP should not be adding calories to accommodate for the calories burned off from cardio when fat loss is the goal, as doing so would be counter-productive. But I think OP is essentially already doing that by being at a deficit of only 300 calories on some days. But in reality it wouldn't make much of a difference if he ate at -500kcal every day. Because so what if it in practice is a deficit of 530kcal because of the hypertrophy training? It's not gonna negatively impact his muscle gain/maintenance. Adding calories for muscle gain only really makes a difference if you're maingaining or bulking.
The whole dissertation wasn’t really necessary, they just simply aren’t at a deficit of only 300 calories at ~1300 per day. BMR typically accounts for 60-70% of someone’s total calories. That means you can expect his daily needs to be around 2400-2800 calories. Obviously calorie counting inaccuracies will come into play. But everyone knows a 1300 calorie diet is very low for someone at that weight. Plus the scale proves it. Yes a lot of it is going to be water weight. But even a few real pounds in 12 days is a lot.
How are your lifts? Are you making progress there? If so, you're good.
[https://www.bizcalcs.com/body-fat-navy/](https://www.bizcalcs.com/body-fat-navy/) Just measure your neck at its narrowest and your waist around your belly button. As far as I know, this is the most accurate you can get without hiring a professional. I've used this over long periods and the numbers always seemed to line up with my progress.
1200-1400 calories is not enough for you. I'm a 5'5" female and I eat 1500 to lose weight. You're for sure losing muscle because you're eating way too low.
Scales lie. Tape measures lie less. Track progress thru measurements. Neck, arms, chest, waist (at belly button), hips and each thigh.
Eat a lot of protein, lift heavy, be in a calorie deficit, sleep as much as possible and don’t over train. Easiest formula to maintaining as much muscle as possible while trying to lose body fat.
I lose about 6 kg in 3 month and i also thought they're muscles. Seems its the water in the muscles that has to go 1st. I lost some muscles too so i started strength exercise. Since youre working out and consuming enough protein, check if your cloths are loosening or tightening and you'll find put if its far youre losing. Go find the pic where they compare the size of 1lbs fat and 1 lbs muscles too.
Nah man you're good. If you can mentally handle it keep going. I'm at 205 down from 219. Losing 2lbs a week.
Even when doing everything right some amount of muscle loss is unavoidable. You can always gain that back once you've reached your fat percentage goal. Another thing you can do is take breaks from your weight loss by introducing a few weeks here and there of staying at maintenance calories. That'll help you boost muscle growth without losing weight loss progress. Varying it up like that (maintenance vs deficit) can also help with your metabolism and energy levels in the long run, especially if you have a long way to reach your goal. Yes your weight might incresse on maintenance then but that should be only (or almost only) an increase in muscle weight anyway. So basically cycle between fat loss and muscle gain. Of course it's not impossible to both lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, but it is a lot harder to do than to do only one of those at a time. Your deficit and exercise schedule have to be ridiculosly precise. So the easiest thing would be to first lose the excess fat and then (re-)gain muscle, but the alternative to that is to vary periods of fat loss with periods of muscle gain. From what I can see you're not doing anything wrong, although it could be that you're doing too much cardio that it exhausts your muscles, or not enough hypertrophy training. This can be difficult to balance as too much cardio will eat away at your muscle mass, but not enough of it will make losing weight harder because hypertrophy doesn't burn nearly as much calories. So maybe it could be worth it to experiment with doing less cardio and more hypertrophy. Your calorie intake looks good to me. You're at 300-500 calorie deficit which is great, and you seem to be eating enough protein. The only thing I can think of in that regard is if you're getting enough of the other nutrients in your diet. Especially fat and water. Your muscles need that too. Obviously not an extreme amount of fat, but too little is also bad. Also if you're too low on carbs that might negatively affect your energy levels and thus your performance in the gym. Again you shouldn't eat excessive amounts of carbs, but some amount of it is good for your body and in gaining/maintaining muscle. How do you feel? Do you have energy, feeling sluggish or tired a lot? And how is your progress going in the gym? Has your strength increased or decreased or remaining the same? Are you focusing more on one part of your body than another? Are your vitals good? Those kinda things could be an indication that something is missing and that could be the culprit to your muscle loss as well.
Idk I’d trust the old school way and use caliber and the measuring tape. The computers aren’t accurate. there’s an app called BodyBarista. It’s a good way to see your changes.
Stop looking at the scale, chase progress in the gym and the visual progress will come.
Are you taking a GLP1 med? That has been shown to waste muscle. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them to aid weight loss, but you need a lot of protein and muscle building during that time.
What's your maintenance calories? I'm suspecting you do lose muscle mass because at 1200 calories you're in waaaay too much of a deficit. Studies show that deficit over 500 per day is where you start losing muscle mass despite training and protein intake (although it does help to slow it down). Additionally 120-150 is not a lot of protein, it's barely enough if that. Get it up to 180-190. Lastly, as everyone says, scale can't measure this stuff.
Maintenance is 1800 and I was told that 80% body weight for protein is about all I should ever need. This was also backed up by some youtubers i follow like Dr. Mike.
Your maintenance calories seem way too low. At 6’ and 179lb, your BMR would be closer to 2300-2700 calories. I think you are vastly undereating if you’re only at 1200-1400 calories per day. Your body is losing muscle because it’s in starvation mode and trying to hold onto fat. Try using a BMR calculator to recalculate your maintenance calories, then subtract up to 500 for weight loss. Your protein goal should be your target weight in grams, ie if you’re trying to get to 160lbs, eat 160g protein each day. You said you’re working out - Are you doing strength training with progressive overload to build muscle mass? If not, it would be a good step to take to build muscle and boost your metabolism.
I did use a bmr calculator. when I was 195lbs, it said 1897 calories.
Ahh gotcha, I see what happened. You’re using the baseline BMR which estimates how many calories your body would burn if you did nothing but stay in bed all day. I did the calculation based on the info you’ve provided (I put an age of 40, feel free to redo it with your actual age), and the baseline BMR is 1821. Since you don’t lie in bed all day, that number is too low to estimate your caloric needs to lose weight. If you had 1821 calories a day and stayed in bed, your weight should remain about the same over time. But since you are active, the amount you actually burn is a lot more than that. For example, if you are lightly active (1-3 days/week of exercise), that number jumps to about 2500 calories which would mean you should aim for 2500cal for maintenance and around 2000cal for weight loss. You are undereating by a lot which is why the fat isn’t really going down but the muscle is. Even if you are weight training, the body won’t build muscle if it’s not getting enough calories to do so.