BMR and Fat Loss Vs Muscle Loss

In the first Podcast, I got a little ahead of myself and made some comments that were not very clear. Here is a clarification of how your Basal Metabolic Rate works with Fat Loss.

Your BMR is the amount of calories that your body burns without doing any physical activity. This is influenced by your total weight and the total amount of muscle that you have. A person who has more muscle will burn more calories naturally than a person with less muscle at the same weight.

If you put on a pound of muscle, you can eat up to 50 more calories per day without gaining weight. Muscle is very metabolically active and burns calories all day long. This doesn’t work if you put on a pound of fat, because fat just sits there. If you put on a pound of fat, you don’t get to eat more food.

How does BMR and Fat Loss and Muscle Loss all relate?

This is a simple rule of thumb:

When you are losing weight, you will lose a combination of fat and muscle. If you are on a reasonable diet where your daily caloric intake is greater than your BMR, you will lose mostly fat. If you are on a diet where you are eating less than your BMR, you will be losing fat, BUT you will also be losing a higher percentage of muscle as well.

On a very severe diet, you may lose 50% fat and 50% muscle weight! If you have ever heard people say that dieting can destroy your metabolism, this is why. When you lose muscle, your BMR goes down, and you are forced to eat less and less because your body naturally burns less and less.  It is a lose-lose situation.

Muscle is the furnace that drives your metabolism. Keep your muscle at all costs!

Your goal should be to lose Fat, not just weight.