Stuffing my face with food yesterday (Happy Thanks giving to my fellow Americans!! 🦃) inspired me to use this week’s Fitness Tip to dispel a common food-related myth!
There are many people out there who believe and teach that both building muscle and losing fat are a simple matter of “calories in vs calories out”. There are many, MANY flaws to that statement. Far too many to go over in this newsletter. But I’ll put it this way… if that was true, then from a fitness perspective there would be no difference between ingesting 3,000 calories from green vegetables and lean meat… and ingesting 3,000 calories from TWINKIES!! Either way, it’s just 3,000 calories, right? WRONG!!! Of the dozens of issues with the “calories in vs calories out” belief, I’ll just emphasize one today:
You do NOT need to be operating at an energy surplus (eating more calories than you’re burning) in order to achieve hypertrophy / build muscle!
Dozens of studies have proven that even for someone who is living on a significant caloric deficit and losing a tremendous amount of fat... resistance training will still stimulate muscle growth, as long as there is a token amount of protein in the person’s diet. (See Research Article 1 below for just one example, and Research Article 2 for a meta-analysis)
This also highlights just one of the key takeaways from this knowledge – the fact that it is absolutely possible to lose fat and build muscle at the same time with the proper science-based training regimen and diet!
Relevant Research Articles:
1) Muscle hypertrophy with large-scale weight loss and resistance training
2) Is an Energy Surplus Required to Maximize Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy Associated With Resistance Training
Dr. Gains 
Leave a comment