Weight-Loss How Many Calories?

Weight-Loss
T

Toddless

New member
Hey All,

I've done a quick search for this but the results came back mixed. I was wondering how many calories are in 1 pound of muscle? Put another way, if I want to put on a pound of muscle a week, what's my excess calories?

...Or if I wanted to burn 1 pound of muscle a week, what's my deficit?
 
impossible to calculate..

lean mass can only gain so fast, and it progressively slows the more you train.. A good rule of thumb once you're past the noob gains phase is 1-2lbs a month lean mass is about the best u can hope for.

As for gaining mass, lift hard. like really hard. and eat till you can't eat anymore. Then eat more. How much you need to eat depends a lot on genetics. I'm eating upwards of 4-5k calories a day to gain weight. Some people I know need even more than that. Some less.
 
I don't know muscles but I have been told 1lb of fat is worth 3500kcals. I have no idea if it works the same way as muscle eg body mass rather then just body fat but I do know its very hard to build muscle and can take weeks just to build a single pound even if you are eating additional calories. This is because the body has to build it, its not the same as storing excess calories it requires hard work eg lifting weights in order to tear the muscle (micro tears) so it can build itself up again...then you tear it again...happens little bit by little bit and takes a while. Where as with body fat, you simply eat more calories then you burn and some of that excess gets stored as body fat, up to 2lbs a week (but in many cases less then that, it depends on circumstances and genetics).

So in answer to your question, I guess its dependant on the work you do to build the muscle, the genetics you have and what you are eating/how healthily your body is working as a result of what your eating.

Thats my guess/assumption anyway! Hope you find your answer.
 
Jynus said:
impossible to calculate..
Click to expand...

There's got to be an answer, right? I mean in terms of how many calories it would take to burn a pound of muscle. Here's what I've been thinking about:

Most of us know that a pound of fat is worth 3500 calories, so I'd need to eat a deficit of 3500 calories a week to lose a pound of fat. But this assumes that 100% of my deficit calories are spent on burning fat, which can't be true, some of it will be spent on burning muscle (especially if I'm not active), and I'm guessing some of it will be spent on burning other things like sugar in the blood? My point is that your body doesn't just automatically go to fat for it's calories. So what good is it if you're trying to eat in a deficit? If you can't determine where your body is pulling the calories from, how do you know how much or how little to eat?

Let me give an example:

If I eat in a deficit of exactly 500 calories for a week, that's 3500 calories by the end of the week. While most might say, "aside from water weight, you've lost a pound!", all I can think is, but what if I burned muscle? And what if muscle is only worth 600-1600 calories as some sources suggest? Maybe I just burned 2-5 pounds of muscle... which means that my metabolism is 100-250 calories slower every day (assuming 50 cals burned per pound of muscle)... and that means that by eating in a deficit, I've actually forced my body to slow down, and I must continue to eat at this new level, else I could gain the weight back, except it could all go back as fat.

Does that make sense? And more importantly, does it have any merit?
 
Well, it's certainly possible! Except for the metabolism slowing by that much. Muscles only burn about 6 to 7 calories a pound according the sources I've found...

However, it is possible that you could lose muscle and gain fat - which is yet another reason it's highly advisable to get your protein and do some strength training while losing weight. Given that most people don't lose all fat or all muscle, and given that the heavier you are the more likely you are to gain muscle and lose fat, I'm not sure that it's something people should be worried about on a constant basis.
 
Treat muscle as protein. 1g protein = 4 calories, 1g fat = 8 calories. So if a pound of fat is 3500 calories, a pound of muscle is probably around 1750.

But if you eat an excess of 1750 calories it's very unlikely it'll all go to muscle anyway. But if you're very meticulous about calorie counting and know your needs and are noticing that you're losing more weight than expect, probably you're losing lean mass along with the fat. It wouldn't necessarily be all muscle either, a fat person has extra connective tissue, extra skin, extra fluids, and all that would need to reduce to get you to a normal size.
 
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I admit that was pretty much an over-generalization - it's what I get for trying to respond quickly... what I should have said was that the higher your BF% the more of your weight loss tends to be from fat and not muscle. I.e. someone who's morbidly obese will tend to lose more fat than muscle even if they're not exercising.

If you don't have a lot of muscle for your height/frame it's also a lot easier to gain it than it is for someone who's well trained/has already deliberately built muscle.

So while it's not impossible for someone who's 300 lbs to diet down to 200, lose lots of muscle, and then eat their way back up and not gain any muscle back... that kind of implies that they did something different the first time they gained their way up to 300 lbs. Otherwise... why would you expect that they'd have gotten muscle while gaining weight to begin with?

In any event, while it could all come back as fat, and certainly there are good reasons to work out, I don't think that the average guy on the street has to worry that if they eat at a deficit for a while they're going to 'ruin their metabolism' somehow. If they're not working out anyway, then just the normal cycles of surplus and deficit (since few people graze all day long and maintain a constant supply of calories) is as likely to have people replace fat and lose muscle as deliberately dieting is.

Soooo, much longer response to say that no, I still wouldn't think it's something that people should need to be aware of on a constant basis.

(The 6 to 10 calories and not 50-70 per pound of muscle is accurate though!)
 
Coach Palfrey said:
Why would you want to 'burn' muscle?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't. I was trying to make a point that it IS possible to burn muscle, which I think people tend to forget about when they're losing weight. Counting calories to put yourself in a deficit doesn't mean you'll lose fat, only weight. If you want to focus your body on burning fat, you've also got to work out.
And I think we can all agree that there's no point to dieting if you're NOT working out. Losing muscle because you're lazy and won't workout, or because you want to start your diet first and workout later, won't help you and will only cause your weight loss progress to plateau quicker. You shouldn't want to lose weight, and I urge everyone on the forum to correct the people who say that it's what they want. They want to lose fat, and in order to do that, they need to be working out as well as dieting.

...Maybe we could get the whole site changed to fat-loss.fitness...
 
Well, I don't think there's no point to dieting if you're not working out. I lost 65 lbs that way.

I wish I'd done strength training, but I guarantee that I'm happier and healthier now than if I'd never dieted and lost the weight. I've made back up some of the muscle, still working on it, and again agree that it would have been better if I hadn't worked out.

But there definitely was a point to my dieting, and it didn't make me fatter in the long run!
 
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