Bottom line today:

MrWookie: 3616 food calories (I had a late dinner and was ravenous, so I ate too much. It was mostly lean protein, however), -904 biking caloires, 332 g protein (see?)
MrsWookie is missing a data point that she'll look up tomorrow.

Chest 44.75
Bust 38.25
??
What is she measuring? Seems backwards to me.

Across nippes, underboob.

So you're using Bust for underboobs? Otherwise she's really weirdly shaped.

That's what she called the bra band measurement, and she said that's what it's called in dress making. I dunno, I just took her at her word.

The body part measuring/charting seems obsessive and pointless but if it helps motivate you then rock on. All that stuff will get taken care of if you keep lifting and eating better.

Anyway, great progress. I'm legit jelly of your DL progress and your Squat progress is also very solid.

The primary goal of measuring everything was to see if we could observe gains of not just strength but of muscle mass even as we are losing total body weight and significant body fat. Everyone expected neurological- and technique-based improvements in the amount of weight we could lift, but the answers I got for whether or not people could gain muscle mass while losing weight were muddy. Based on what I read when I asked and when other people asked similar questions, some thought I could gain a little muscle mass, but only up to a point. Others thought lifting while cutting would only help me maintain muscle mass, or only lose the minimum. As such, I'd look better and be stronger at the end of the cut than I would were I to just have dieted or done diet+cardio, but that's not especially great motivation to join a gym and start lifting.

Instead, the fact that I'm adding shoulder and thigh bulk while shedding volume just about everywhere else, esp. in places that tend to store a lot of fat, suggests as a preliminary result that I am indeed adding a non-trivial amount of muscle mass despite eating at a deficit and shedding total body weight. This is supported by subjective aesthetic assessments. I find this to be a fairly surprising result. My hypothesis was that I'd shrink everywhere, my strength gains would be real but less than they've been, and that ultimately, it'd be difficult to make a case to a fatty or even a guy just moderately overweight that they should start lifting (as opposed to using just diet or diet+cardio, which are easier to do and don't require joining a gym) if their main goal is weight and/or fat loss. Instead, it appears that for a person who's modestly overweight, newish to lifting, and willing to closely monitor a high-protein, caloric-deficit diet, he or she can make some pretty respectable gains in not only strength but also muscle mass, which also indicates accelerated fat loss compared to diet alone or diet+cardio, as the weight loss has been pretty well described by the caloric deficit.

What I would have done were I to do this all over would be to measure all the circumferences both tensed and relaxed (all these are relaxed). That might have better indicated muscle gain in areas even where fat was lost. Both my wife and I can see and feel improvements in, e.g. our upper arms when flexing to show off, even if the circumferences of our upper arms while relaxed are shrinking.

Maybe I'm not keeping up, but have you posted how your weight loss is progressing?

I guess I didn't include that graph. I weighed in at 211.0 this morning. When I started this thread, I said I was at 214 and change, but I'm pretty sure I was dehydrated at that point. I had weighed myself that night after lifting, and I hadn't had enough water. I sweat a lot when lifting. I usually weigh myself in the morning. I was at around 217 for the next few days. I've been dropping pretty steadily since, with the exception of when I lost 7 lbs over night due to food poisoning. I've gained that back, however.

First of all, if you guys indeed are gaining a bit of muscle too - AWESOME, but what I don't understand is how losing bodyfat, while retaining muscle mass and getting stronger is "not especially great motivation to join a gym and start lifting"?

Every fatty looking to get slimmer should start lifting for those reasons alone.
Diet+cardio only makes fatties skinnyfats.

Gyms are expensive and a hassle compared to going for a jog or riding a bike you already own. Plus, you already know how to ride a bike or how to jog, but learning to lift takes time. You can go for a jog just by stepping out of your door, but you have to actually transport yourself to a gym. Also, how much muscle do you actually shed when doing just diet+cardio? Maybe it's not that much. Has it really been measured? Are you sure that a diet+cardio plan sheds enough muscle so as to have significantly worse results than lifting, were we to assume hypothetically that the best lifting could do would be zero muscle gain or loss? Cardio won't gain muscle, but if it doesn't result in much muscle loss and lifting on a cut doesn't result in much muscle gain, what's the real advantage of lifting? IOW, why bother with all the gym crap unless it offers substantially more than diet+easy cardio?

Homegym's where it's at imo.
So convenient and a rack+bar+a pile of plates aren't really that expensive.
Need to have some spare floor space, tho.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/66/3/557.short

Abstract...

...and parts of Discussion:

...emphasis mine.

Shoulda done SS instead...

Bored at work so downloaded the pdf-version of that study and read it all.

A couple more things in favor of lifting+diet versus cardio+diet or diet only:

tldr; fatties should lift. everyone should lift.

Looked back and I'm surprised I didn't post this article earlier:
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat...g-fat-qa.html/

As you can see, both you and MrsWookie fulfill Lyle's criteria for both losing BF and gaining muscle mass:
- Novices
- Overfat (no offense obv)

How long will this continue? Hard to say, but some variant of "not very long".


All true of course, but ime people tend to give up on jogging (especially) and cardio in general faster than if they learn to lift properly. Probably a few causes:
- A decent novice program lays out a proper structure for lifting, leading most people to getting into a habit to lift every mon/wed/fri (or whatever) at the same time of day. Getting into the habit of exercising is likely to biggest hurdle for many to overcome - and you get some of that "for free" with a novice lifting program. Conversely (and again this is ime), going running a few times a week is harder to do in a structured fashion and you don't get the same feedback if you miss a few sessions (failing to put weight on the bar vs ???).
- Intrinsic feedback - you can easily see the progress made when lifting by weight added to the bar. This is a bit more ephemeral with cardio, especially after the first few weeks.
- Learning a skill might make you more prone to not waste the time spent to learn said skill (i.e. learning to squat and DL properly vs putting on your shoes and going for a run).

In short I'd say that people will probably stick to lifting at a higher rate once they actually learn how to lift, but fewer people will get to that point as compared to doing cardio.

Cardio is way easier to stick to than anything else when cardio is riding a bicycle/paddling/surfing in California.

Forgive pummi. He is a tweeker and a very weird dude. He is also quite French.

100000x agree with both Pummi and SM.

I was fat, nothing offensive there. I'm still kinda fat, but less so. But yeah, it sounds a lot like some of the feedback I got when I asked initially. Part of this experiment is to see how long. Is a couple months long, or not that long? I'm not really sure. MrsWookie wants to keep up with this experiment at least through the end of this month, and likely even through Thanksgiving or beyond so as to impress family at the holidays. We'll keep taking data as long as we can to see when/if muscle gains stop.

I disagree. It was actually trivially easy for me to set out a structured plan for cardio: every morning I'd bike to work, and every evening I'd bike home. My wife downloaded some "Couch to 5k" app for her phone, and it got her running before work every morning.

I timed myself on every bike ride, and I was able to make substantial improvements in speed over the span of several months. My wife also tracked her speed and completed more difficult workouts using the app.

Perhaps, but I think there are ways to increase motivation for cardio such as getting on a specific plan for improvement and tracking your progress, all of which are pretty easy compared to lifting, that will increase motivation and compliance with cardio.

2 months is not long.

What is your estimated BF% at the start?

I would think a noob could gain muscle for multiple months, well into the mid-teens of BF% if he's weak enough. Somewhere in the 225x5x3 @ 15% BF to 265x5x3 @ 20% BF for squats is where I'd think a big turning point is. No data to back that up, just "feel".

This was me, too. I was 29BMI and novice or untrained strength I think but my recent round of SS was while cutting and I definitely noticed visual relaxed gains in the chest, shoulders, quads, and calves. Just soaping my calves in the shower it was obvious they were larger to the touch. Actually the quads I noticed when flexed, not sure about relaxed. But when flexed it was a world of difference.

Are you saying you can't cut and do SS for too long or else it begins to be far less (or counter) productive? I went from about 222 to ~200 at 6'0".

Agreed that it's an interesting experiment since you actually collect data along the way.


Fair enough. Though I think it's fair to say you guys are more structured in your approach to exercise than most of the population, the apps and equipment that's been popularized over the last few years definitely makes it easier to quantify cardio performance.


Probably individual. Unless you get involved in something competitive, I find it boring to improve cardio performance beyond a certain level. Getting two or three wheels on a lift? That's sweet. But yeah, fair enough here too.

I don't see any reason why it would be counter productive in terms of fat loss. But you'll definitely see diminishing returns on the holy grail combo of fat loss + muscle gain when lifting on a deficit. I think saw's numbers look pretty good.

Certainly, and I'll even concede that some fitness tracking stuff like FitBits and the like often result in people taking them seriously for a couple months or so before abandoning them.

I use Strava to track my biking, and it's pretty clever about motivation. I joined a group of folks from the MicroLimit forum who were all working on losing weight, and we'd compete for most miles, hours, and rides per week. It also times not only your whole ride but your ride in individual, user-defined segments, rewarding you for incremental improvement and showing your speed compared to that of any other Strava users who've been on that segment. Works pretty well, imo.

It's true that adding more weight is motivating and rewarding (adding 120 lbs to my deadlift? Obamanotbad.jpg), and one tends to add weight more frequently than one runs or bikes for PRs, but this forum isn't short on examples of people who've had difficulty staying motivated with either cardio or weights (YTF, prominently). The activation energy necessary to get started on weights is much larger compared to other activities, however, so more explicitly quantifying the benefits may help more people get started.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything to suggest lifting would ever be counterproductive, unless you injure yourself. That would be an issue of technique more than not eating enough. But it's also virtually certain that there's a wall somewhere. We obviously can't go below 0% body fat (the real floor is probably more like 10% body fat or above), so we can't expect to continue to add muscle while eating on a deficit beyond some point. There's also a maximum amount of weight we'd be able to lift with that maximum amount of muscle mass.

But where is it? Saw's guess doesn't seem unreasonable, but measuring is good. Do we hit the wall for maximal muscle and strength addition primarily whenever we hit a certain body fat level? After a certain amount of training (time trained and/or lifted weight added)? If it were the former, that would be pretty awesome news for fatties, who could conceivably add considerable muscle while shedding fat. But if it's more like the latter, it may be easier for compliance's sake for a fatty to just start out with diet and cardio and get their weight down closer to ideal before starting to lift (and transitioning to eating at maintenance or at a slight surplus), as opposed to starting to lift right away, going at it for a few months or so before lifting progress stops, and then finding themselves discouraged despite still having 30+ pounds to shed. Lifting throughout the whole weight loss process would certainly be good, even ideal, but compliance is king, and motivation and free time are finite. The missus and I couldn't possibly generate enough data to fully tease apart the answer to all those questions, but we can offer up what we can.

Regarding the bold, my understanding is that it's a combination of the two. The stronger and bigger (muscle-wise) you get, the more difficult it is to get stronger and bigger. This applies regardless of energy intake. Now, the fatter you are, the more energy your body has readily available to do things. So in a simplistic view, you have

muscle building potential = food energy + fat energy - current muscle.

The left side of the equation is decreasing as a result of both fat decreasing and current muscle increasing. At some point, to keep the left side above a certain threshold to notice muscle gain, you need to increase the food energy.

Obviously this is super simplistic. And of course incorrect, because it shouldn't be linear, probably some kind of log/ratio/whatever, but it's not worth it to think about it in any more complex terms than that imo.