Avoiding Skinny Fat & Muscle Loss

Ever dropped weight but found out your lean body mass is actually fatter? 

Confused by this? 

Then your not alone - Check out the Podcast!!! 

1) I explain why this happens, 
2) How to Avoid It
and 
3) Easy practical tips keep muscle while losing fat

Transcript

0:00

welcome to the FIHI podcast. I'm your host Blake Che. And today we have a really good standalone podcast. I find this one to be extremely helpful. I wrote this, just a lot of clients have experienced what we're gonna talk about regarding losing muscle. In particular, when they're trying to lose body fat, and we're gonna go through some of the science of that and quick tips and tricks that I've seen to work as we've kind of fixed this, working with some clients, but I just wanna take a quick moment, um, and give you a quick advertisement of some of the work I do outside of the podcast. I am a trainer at Lakeland athletic club, but I also have my own remote business, uh, Blake Che so you can go over to Blake che.com Check out the website. There are testimonials on there to give you some insight from clients that I've worked with. And then there is a application form. It is completely free. Sign up on the application form. Jot down some of the things you're looking for, things that you're struggling with, things that you need help with, and that'll get sent over to me and I'll try to respond back to you within 24 hours and we'll hop on the phone together and I'll explain a little bit more about what my remote coaching business looks like for you as an individual. I will. Make it a hundred percent geared towards you, your goals, your nutrition, and your lifestyle. So head on over Blake Che, S C H E I D t.com. Fill out the application and you'll be hearing from me soon. All right. So for today, we're gonna be talking a little bit about losing muscle and what losing muscle wouldn' that happens. It is not a great trade off, right? Losing muscle with fat keeps you at a similar, if not worse body composition. So this is pretty common. Uh, this happens a lot when I'll do like a consult with an in-house client here at Lakeland athletic club, and someone will hop on, they'll be extremely excited. They've lost five pounds. They think it's gonna come back. Great. And then we get their body results and it looks as though they've gained fat and they are super confused, frustrated. And really defeated. That's never fun. So how do we avoid that? How do we avoid that? What is actually going on? Um, well, what's going on is when you hop on anbody scan or any kind of metrics of body fat, uh, calculation, what they're gonna do is it's a, it's a mathematical equation of your lean body mass versus your water weight. Assuming against just, uh, bone density and, um, and then fat mass. And out of that, they take a percentage of that with your BMI and everything else and make a body fat assessment of what, how much percentage is your body fat, um, at, um, when that happens, when you are lower in muscle mass, right? And higher in body fat, you're going to have a higher body fat percentage. Right. Vice versa. So you could be 300 pounds like a bodybuilder, but you are 250 pounds of muscle and you are 50 pounds of fat. You're going to have a low body fat percentage, even though you're 300 pounds and your BMI would say that you're obese, right. You're gonna have a very lean physique. So where a lot of people. Get very caught up in just the scale body. Fat composition is probably what most people are really looking for when they come in as a general population client. And they're looking for, I wanna look better and feel better. Right. And in that order, so with that how do we avoid this as we're setting out for a lot of us and our goals to, gain a leaner physique? Well, you need to start changing your mind from just losing fat to, I wanna hold onto muscle as I lose weight. Cuz if I hold onto muscle, as I'm losing weight, I know that I'm only burning fat. I'm not burning muscle. Why does that happen by the way? Why do, why do you think that happens? well, it's really easy. So the, like I've said in multiple podcasts, and I say this all the time, the body's main thing is to survive. It wants to survive. And so if you keep that in the forefront, when we put the body in a position to lose weight, what we're really doing is we're, we're offsetting homeostasis where the body wants to be comfortable and thrive and stay homeostasis is when everything's kind of function. As is, and normal what you do when you cut calories and you cut energy coming into the body, you send the body into a state of getting outta homeostasis and in a fight or flight state. And when that happens, the body then tries to survive. And so by surviving either burns fat, or it will get rid of muscle mass because muscle mass. Is an extremely energy costly tissue on the body. And so, uh, why this happens so often from a scientific perspective is that we're not getting enough of the right nutrients in, even if it's a deficit, you still have to get enough in at the right amounts in particular protein. We'll talk about that in a minute. To keep this from, uh, eating up your muscle mass. So a lot of times it's really easy to lose weight quickly, but a lot of times it's it's good weight. And then you become what we call skinny fat. Right? You get that kind of runner's skinny, fat body. And, uh, that's because you're burning more calories than you're bringing in. You're in a deficit. That's not a bad thing or a good thing. It's just a place that you're trying to be at. And then from there, what you're doing is you're not getting enough protein in. So your body then wants to burn up what is costly and that is going to be muscle mass. So that's it in kind of a quick three minute snapshot. So what are the three keys to avoid this? So you either can number one, say, okay, I'm in too much of a deficit, right? You don't need to be that low. So you need to up your calories slightly. and as you up your calories slightly, you should also up your movement with that. So you can still burn enough calories, but your calories that are coming in are going to keep that muscle tissue from burning off. Right? So you need to have probably enough, I would say protein and carbohydrates. So just up those slightly, but still be in a deficit and off you can. kind of keep losing the weight at a certain rate. If you up your movement with that. All right. That's one way, number two, maintain adequate amount of lean protein. So, you know, if you listen to a lot of bodybuilders who have to do this kind of intense calorie cutting before a show and this is kind of the most, uh, extreme case of this is why I'm using this. But what they'll do is they'll actually up their protein more. Because they know they're in such a calorie deficit, they wanna avoid any muscle loss. So let's say most body pillars are like one gram per one pound of body weight during their bulk or their maintenance season when they get into a cut and they're getting ready for show, they'll bump that up to like 1.2, 1.5, sometimes even crazier to like two grams per pound of body weight. There's a lot of different studies out there on what is best. Usually most people need to figure that out by experimentation on their own body. But general rule of thumb is at least one gram per body weight per uh, for protein. And then maybe even air a little bit higher as you're going through a cut just to avoid some of that muscle loss. Now, the third way. Is a little bit, uh, different and I'll explain it a little bit now, just briefly and then maybe, uh, dial it in a little bit more at the end of this podcast, but the third one would be what we call like a refi day. So right. If you're in a calorie deficit, your body's in a stressed out state and it's kind of feeling those hunger cues, which is the good thing that you want, that if your goal is to lose some body fat, um, but you wanna also get the body to relax. So it's. Yeah, going to burn up that muscle. One of the strategies for this is we call a refi day. So there's different ways of doing this, but let's say you are at a 500 calorie deficit all week on a refi day. You could do something along the lines of I'm only gonna be in a hundred calorie deficit, or I'm going to eat at maintenance that day still be at a weekly deficit. But that day I'm gonna eat a lot more. Foods in particular, usually carbohydrates because those allow the body to get into a parasympathetic state., you're usually depleted of those in a cut and, it allows your body to have store restore some of that, those sugars that it's missing., so that utilize that for exercise. we'll talk a little bit more about that, but I would say just a, a good rule of thumb. You call this extra credit, right? The longer the diet. So, you know, the less like, oh, I gotta get this done in eight weeks, 10 weeks. Right. That's a, that's a short diet, the longer the diet. So let's say it's, um, anywhere between. Three to six months, right? The less intense the calorie deficit, probably the less likely to lose muscle, the more intense the diet. So the more it's a shorter window have to do a crazy amount of, a deficit. The more likely you're going to lose muscle. So that's kind of a good rule of thumb right there. So here's some important, kind of thoughts on, on some of this stuff that I just mentioned to get a little bit more into it, back to the upping, the calories, one of the biggest problems could be that you're in too much of a caloric deficit. So remember that muscle's one of the most calorie expensive tissues, on our body. So as you up calories, make sure to up your movement. So I think of walking cardio or so you can go on elliptical, you can go ride a bike, you can go just outside walking, which is my favorite. Um, you can walk at certain speeds. You know, you can do some interval walking, which is some of the things me and my coach do together. So those are some good, important tips there. Protein, make sure you're staying. Like right at around 0.8 to one gram per pounds. But, manage that a little bit higher if you're in a pretty intense cut would be my recommendation. So this is kind of just I'm, I'm recapping all the things we just talked about and the number three, the refi day. And I said, I would explain this a little bit more. So this is where I'm gonna do this. And then I'm gonna give you some recommendations outside of this. and we'll conclude, but if you're in a deficit, think about having a reef D day where you eat more food. All right. This isn't a cheat day where you eat wherever you want. That's not the point, but rather a calculated day where you know how much more to eat specifically to stay in the same weekly deficit. Deficit as if you stayed consistent all week. So here's a great example, right?, if your goal is to be like, let's say in a 14,000 calorie for the week by eating, 2000 cows a day, then you could like a stay consistent eat 2000 calories a day. And you'll, you'll kind of hit that deficit. Let's say if you know, uh, you're supposed to be eating. 3000 calories a day. You're eating 2000 calories a day. Alright, so B eat 1900 calories a day, but on Fridays you get to eat 2,600 calories. by keeping your weekly cows at 1400 calorie deficits. Still this refeed spikes, leptin hormone, which is responsible for speeding up your metabolism. And while this doesn't work perfectly with everyone, it has been well studied in nutrition and seems to work well for most men and women. So some people call this refi days. Some people like to do this with what we call like a carb cycling. So you're, you're on a high fat, high protein diet. Protein stays the same. And then on this refi day, you switch go low fat, high carbs, and, um, and up your calories slightly on that day. Um, and that would be like your refied and supposedly it's it. It's not supposedly for most people, it really does work. It spikes your leptin hormone. And in doing that, it allows your metabolism to kick on and you start burning fat and relaxing a lot better. I have tried that, uh, two years ago it worked really, really well for me. I am not currently doing that right now. The hard part about that refeed is that you have to be very calculated. You need to measure, you need to, to know what you're eating daily and you need to be a little bit more strategic, but here's my recommendations. Slightly up your calories in your movement would be number. All right. So if you're, if you're losing muscle slightly up your calories, that'd be the first place. I start still stay in a deficit, but just go up maybe a hundred calories, maybe plan the timing of those calories around your workout, both before and after. just so that you're, you're also getting more outta your workout, cause you got a little bit more energy. Number two, get your protein dialed in and add a shake in if you need. so there's a whole reason why protein shakes are huge in the supplement industries. People start realizing, man, this is really difficult to build muscle. It's really hard to keep muscle. Um, and it's extremely frustrating when you start building it and then you lose it. So adding 20 to 25 grams of protein in from just a drink is extremely. Easy, um, and helpful. There's also, um, there's some studies that have come out recently that have shown that they actually can be more beneficial for processing and synthesizing that protein then than some of the, the actual foods we eat, because one of the problems with protein is that you can get so enough in, but your body might not be digesting and utilizing all of that protein. So, um, that's where things get a little more complicated, but don't let that derail. You just try to hit your numbers and get your workouts in number three, try adding day. If you're a lower body. right. So you're already pretty low and you're trying to get kind of really, really lean think 15% are under. Think about adding two refeeds a week. Um, so the, the more body fat you have, the longer your refeed, you can go without a refeed the smaller, a smaller or more lean you already are. The more often you should do a refeed. And the reason for this is just. Again, part of the podcast to avoid losing muscle. Hopefully this was helpful for you and that you learned some, some great ideas on how to avoid losing muscle. I really wanted to make this because it's a frustrating thing and I want to help people not good news is that most people who do lose muscle can gain it back fairly quickly. With just some of these quick, easy tips and tricks, and being more mindful of, of. Big three things usually. So, all right. Well that's all for today. I hope you found this helpful and go over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and please rate us and give us a good review. Thank you.