Fat or Muscle loss

How Do You Know If You’re Losing Fat Or Muscle?

By Christian Finn

“I’ve been using a body fat scale to let me know if I’m losing fat or muscle,” wrote one reader.

“But I’m not sure how much I can trust it, as the results seem to vary wildly.”

“How can I be sure that I’m losing fat rather than muscle?”

The honest answer is that you can’t. Not with any degree of accuracy anyway.

As I explain in Why I Just Threw My Expensive Body Fat Scales Out the Window, body fat scales are largely a waste of time. Skinfold calipers can be useful in some circumstances, but even they have their problems. Even “high tech” methods like DXA and underwater weighing can’t be trusted.

So what are you supposed to do?

Rather than spending a bunch of money on expensive body fat tests, I think you’re much better off using two simple metrics — your weight on the scales and your strength levels in the gym.

Scale Weight

The argument against using your scale weight to track your progress is that any loss in fat will be offset by a gain in muscle.

That is, if you lose 5 pounds of fat and gain 4 pounds of muscle, the scales will show that you’ve lost only 1 pound in weight.

While the theory sounds good, it doesn’t always work that way in practice.

Once you’ve moved past the “overweight beginner” stages of training, you won’t be building muscle at anything like the same speed at which you’re losing fat.

While you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, you won’t do so at the same rate. The best that most people can hope for is to gain a relatively small amount of muscle while losing a much larger amount of fat.

For example, you might lose 6 pounds in weight over the course of a month. In reality, you might have lost 7 pounds of fat and gained 1 pound of muscle.

While the scales aren’t a completely accurate way to track your progress, they will tell you if you’re moving in the right direction.

I also recommend that you weigh yourself every day, rather than every week or every month.

Some advise against the practice of weighing yourself daily, mainly on the basis that your weight fluctuates from day to day.

But when you think about it, this is really an argument IN FAVOR of daily weighing.

Let’s say that you weigh yourself once a week, and that you stepped on the scales first thing this morning. Let’s also assume that the scales show that you’re one pound lighter than you were last week.

“Great,” you think to yourself. “Things are moving in the right direction.”

But are they really?

How do you know that today isn’t one of those days when your weight happened to fluctuate downwards? And that if you weighed yourself again tomorrow morning, it won’t have shifted upwards again?

A single weekly data point isn’t particularly useful when it comes to guiding your decisions about what to eat and how to exercise.

So instead of weighing yourself once a week, weigh yourself every day. Then take an average at the end of the week.

Any daily fluctuation in weight will be “averaged out” over time. Over a period of several weeks, you’ll be able to see a trend. If the trend isn’t downwards, you’ll know that some aspect of your diet and training program needs to change.

Strength

Your strength levels in the gym are a good way to gauge your progress.

If you’re getting stronger (i.e. you can do more reps with the same weight, or a heavier weight for the same number of reps), there’s a good chance that, at the very least, you’re holding on to the muscle you have.

Muscle size and strength are not 100% correlated, and there are other factors (most notably your nervous system) that contribute to strength gains.

But for our purposes, the link is strong enough. If you’re gaining strength, you’re on the right track.

As you get leaner, your strength gains will slow down. Eventually you’ll reach the point where the best you can hope for is to simply maintain your strength. It’s not uncommon for competitive bodybuilders to lose strength in the weeks before a contest.

What this means is that you’ll need to modify your expectations as your body composition changes. All other things being equal, you’ll find it easier to gain strength while losing fat when you’re going from “overweight” to “lean” than you will going from “lean” to “ripped.”

Finally, keep in mind that muscle consists of a lot more than just contractile protein.

Take a close look at a slice of muscle tissue and you’ll find stored carbohydrate in the form of glycogen, fat stored both in and between muscle fibers, as well as water.

When you go on a diet, the amount of glycogen, water and fat stored in your muscles is going to drop. This can leave them looking a lot “flatter” than they otherwise would do.

When this happens, don’t panic. You’re not losing actual muscle protein. Rather, you’re just losing some of the things stored around those proteins, which are quickly and easily replaced.