Stay with me until the end, and you will understand why the fat vs. Muscle is an unequal struggle of forces.
What is fat? What is muscle?
Body fat is our main source of energy reserve. At present, the food supply is continuous. However, this has not always been the case. Our ancestors could go through times when food was barely available. One gram of fat provides 9 calories. Fat is the macronutrient with the highest energy value.
Therefore, fat is not bad and to a certain degree, it is necessary for life. In addition to being a source of energy, it serves to protect organs and joints. It also acts as a body thermoregulator and vitamin reservoir.
What is muscle mass in the human body?
Muscle mass, or lean mass, refers to the totality of muscles that we have in the body. Muscle is essential for health since it also acts to protect bones and joints, and of course, it prevents us from injuries.
Why is muscle mass important?
Depending on the muscle fibers that we are more used to training, we will have more developed different physical capacities such as strength, endurance, or power. We tend to associate a person with a lot of muscle with a person with a lot of muscle volume, but this is not necessarily true. There are people with a large percentage of muscle mass and a lot of physical strength, without this necessarily translating into an aesthetic that accompanies them.
Having a good percentage of muscle mass is one of the most important protective factors in old age. This is why it is very important for our health to play sports throughout our lives.
Fat vs muscle in women and men
With age, we progressively lose muscle mass, especially after 40 years. Normally, men have more lean mass than women. This, in addition to a genetic issue, is also cultural.
While women pursue a canon of beauty based on thinness, men do so on muscle volume. However, at the health level, muscle mass is necessary for both genders.
Other reasons why muscle catabolism (loss of lean mass) can occur are low protein diets and having suffered from a digestive disease.
Lose weight by increasing muscle density
When our goal is to lose weight, we tend to think about reducing the volume of body fat. The most common methodology is to start with a hypocaloric diet and training that promotes fat loss. This is usually a type of training based on cardiovascular physical exercise.
From my point of view, this is a mistake. It is not a serious mistake, but it is not the most optimal way to achieve the goal.
When we develop muscle mass, we manage to increase our basal metabolism. In other words, when we build muscle, our energy needs to increase. The reason this happens is that the muscle also needs to “eat.”
So, for the same exercise, we will burn more calories the more lean mass we have in our body. For this reason, the best training to lose fat will be the one that combines anaerobic exercise (working with weight) with aerobic (cardiovascular)
The body weight hoax
When I work with patients who want to lose weight, the proposal usually goes along the same lines that I have mentioned. Reduce caloric intake and choose foods that promote muscle anabolism, all this, in conjunction with a sports routine.
To the surprise of many people, the first shock comes when after following the indicated guidelines, they go to the scale and realize that their weight has not changed or that it has even increased.
What weighs more fat or muscle?
That doesn’t mean they haven’t lost weight, it means that weight is a very bad indicator of achievement. When we begin to exercise with loads, it is natural that at the beginning we increase more or less quickly, our muscle mass.
Muscle weighs considerably more than fat. So even though we have lost fat, if we have gained muscle, we may now weigh more.
How to make good measurements?
Theirs would be that the measurements were made by a professional. On the contrary, if we do not want or cannot go to a specialist, we should use a bioimpedance scale. But be careful which one we buy. There are many cheap scales on the market that claim to report your body composition, however, all they do is take statistics.
What we must look at to know if we are making progress is our muscle mass percentage and body fat index.
There are two types of body fat, visceral fat, and subcutaneous fat. Subcutaneous fat is what is under the skin, it is what we can pinch when we measure our folds. In plain words, the famous love handles.
While visceral fat is the fact that we have integrated between tissues (adipose tissue) and organs. Typically, it is the subcutaneous fat that rises or falls, while the visceral fat remains unchanged. The latter is not appreciable at a visual level.
What scale should I buy?
These types of scales are expensive, if you see one for 20 or 30 euros, be completely suspicious, no matter how much they tell you that they give you a body analysis, they don’t, they are based on statistics, not bioimpedance.
My advice, if you do not want it for professional use and you are interested in knowing the data that I am talking about in this article with good precision, it would be the OMRON:
Percentages of body fat and muscle mass
Leaving aside the aesthetic part, there are some scales to determine the health ranges in which a person should be with respect to their levels of body fat and muscle mass.
We remember that high levels of body fat coincide with a nutritional disorder called obesity, which is a precursor to many diseases such as diabetes and myocardial infarction.
A healthy man should have between 10% and 20% body fat, while a woman, between 20% and 30%. A professional athlete is usually between 5% and 10%.
Regarding the percentage of muscle mass: For a man, between 40% and 50% would be a good figure, and in the case of women, between 30% and 40%.
How many kilos of muscle does the average person have?
This will depend on a large number of variables such as age, sex, height, complexion … In general, we could say that around 8% of our weight are kilograms of muscle.
That is, if I weigh 70 kg: 70 × 0.08 = X kilograms of muscle in my body.
However, as I said before, this will depend on many factors such as the amount of sport you do.
If you liked this article, I invite you to share it so that more people can continue learning. On the other hand, if you think you need help in any aspect related to psychonutrition, do not hesitate to write to me and I will be happy to give you an answer.
