I did a bit of a double-take at the headline because it seems to imply that one can grow stronger while calorie-restricted, which is contrary to common practice around strength development - caloric surplus is generally understood to be necessary for muscle growth.
I've only read the abstract, but the title as I interpreted it seems misleading:
> One study showed that individuals on calorie restriction lost muscle mass and an average of 20 pounds of weight over the first year and maintained their weight for the second year. However, despite losing muscle mass, calorie restriction participants did not lose muscle strength, indicating calorie restriction improved the amount of force generated by each unit of muscle mass, called muscle specific force.
So even if force per unit increased, overall mass decreased and total strength was unchanged. I guess the title is technically correct but the implication is off. This might be better phrased as "calorie restriction in humans doesn't incur as much muscle/strength loss as previously thought", which is still an interesting result.
> which is contrary to common practice around strength development
This belief is already changing in bodybuilding and strength circles. Surprisingly, the fitness influencers on tiktok are leading the charge in changing minds about this.
"This belief is already changing in bodybuilding and strength circles."
This is a mistake and one that can be extrapolated to the much larger world.
Real world growth implies building in excess of the target and then trimming the leftover.
I don't care if you're planning a battle charge or setting your family finances or going for massive gains in your delts: exact allocation of resources is doomed to fail.
In fact: the "bro science" of bulking up in a training phase and then "cutting" to a competition weight, etc., is revealing a deeper truth about the world.
Interesting - guess that hasn't percolated through to my traditional powerlifting-ish circles yet. I'd love to read/watch anything on this you've found useful.
I'm probably leaving way too much information on myself on this website, but Anne Debouté, a french kayakist (won France Championship, top 8 in a world cup) told me she ate a lot after the competion season, but 5 month later (in the 90s), she cut her calory intake and lost up to 15 kg. Her trainer was skeptical, but she did it every year and told me she really felt relatively stronger despite being less muscular, so i guess she was right in the end, and her trainer wrong. I'll bookmark this.
That strength (which has to be defined via a mostly arbitrary set of tests) can increase while body mass or even muscle mass decreases is not controversial, anyone who starts strength training while losing weight can attest to that. There's more to force output in a specific context than contractile tissue mass.
Increasing muscle mass while losing body mass is a very different question though.
One of my favorite studies, an oft-replicated and cited study, tracks several hundred people who claimed to be "diet resistant". Using a technique invloving "doubly-lableled water" they were able to determine that every single person in the study who claimed to be diet resistant was overreporting their exercise and underreporting their calorie intake:
Of course, this was a study of obese people. If you're doing a study on healty-weight people who are trying to build muscle, you may get far fewer people who will lie.
Is it supposed to be surprising that someone having weight issues would have issues reliably tracking the impacts of actions that would lead to their weight?
Have any similar "favorite studies" on hand about alcoholics who underreport alcohol use and overreport abstaining? Punching down is a favorite pastime of mine too btw :)
Participants also lost weight and muscle mass in this study. 12% calorie restriction and 10% weight loss maintained over 2 years (avg weight reduction of 7.5 kg vs 0.1 kg weight increase in control group), of which 71% was fat loss.
> They found that during a two-year span, the goal for participants was to reduce their daily caloric intake by 25%, but the highest the group was able to reach was a 12% reduction
This feels like something the royal we should be talking about as well.
It’s clearly really difficult to restrict calories/eat less in the US. It’s unclear if this is a US only phenomenon or not but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were.
Little anecdote… my friends and I are mostly from Europe and travel a lot and eat food from all over the world… we are mostly not fat. So the only country where we gain weight without doing anything else are the USA. It’s like magic.
And yes it’s the food and you people don’t walk anywhere. Not even a block. Still love your culture.
It's not hard to restrict calories in the US if that's what you've always done, but if you grew up eating a lot, it's hard to stop eating a lot. Doesn't matter where you are in the world, it's just hard to change your lifestyle long-term.
> It’s clearly really difficult to restrict calories/eat less in the US
Just came back from a 3 weeks trip to the US. I found it easy to control my calorie intake by just skipping a meal or two and avoiding sodas and sweets. It was much harder to eat something reasonably healthy while being on the move though. I'd be curious to check my cholesterol level before and after the trip.
"It compared outcomes in a group assigned a target of 25% CR (i.e., a 25% reduction in energy intake below baseline levels) with outcomes in an ad libitum diet control group. "
Absence of significant health problems, including diabetes, cancer, heart and liver disease, and AIDS
Absence of medication use except oral contraceptives
Age from 20 to 50 (inclusive) for men and ages 20-47 (inclusive) for women
Body mass index (BMI) of 22-27.9 (lean to slightly overweight)
No recent substantial weight loss
No history of eating disorders, behavioral, or psychiatric problems
Use by women of an acceptable form of contraception throughout the study"
It just means eating 12% fewer calories than your baseline to maintain your current weight. So if you eat 2,500 calories per day to keep your weight and activity levels, bump it down to 2,200 and keep it there. I have heard that it is possible to build muscle while "cutting" (calorie restricting) but it's going to be much slower and probably more uncomfortable. Note that this study was a 12% restriction maintained for 2 years. The metabolic and inflammatory benefits persist long after the calorie restriction period in animal models, and this study seems to show the same genetic pathways are getting upregulated and downregulated in humans as we have seen in the animals that benefit from longer lifespan after calorie restricting.
When you put on 10 lbs of muscle, presumably your baseline will be slightly higher than it was prior to that (extra muscle requires extra calories to maintain), but still less than what it took to put that muscle on quickly and efficiently. I have no clue how much you should expect that difference to be, I'm sure many a bro scientist has opinions on it, some of which may be reasonable. Bulking and cutting is a classic technique in bodybuilding, however, typical cuts go on for a few months at most as opposed to 2 years.
One major takeaway from this study is that on average, you will be just as strong as when you started calorie restricting even though you will have lost muscle mass. It is theorized that your muscles will have become more efficient, so if you put on more muscle after a long period of calorie restriction you will be considerably stronger than if you had skipped the calorie restriction and just added the muscle. Food for thought.
> One study showed that individuals on calorie restriction lost muscle mass and an average of 20 pounds of weight over the first year and maintained their weight for the second year. However, despite losing muscle mass, calorie restriction participants did not lose muscle strength, indicating calorie restriction improved the amount of force generated by each unit of muscle mass, called muscle specific force.
If people lost 20 lbs in the first year of a 12% calorie restricted diet then that means that this study took place among people who were already obese (which seems extremely relevant). Anyone who is in good shape and not 6'8 is in no position to lose 20 lbs without serious risks to their health, aside from vastly decreased muscle strength. It is interesting, but not very surprising, that obese people with atrophied muscles don't lose "strength" by cutting calories and losing some muscle mass, which is very low to begin with.
I do 4 meals at 40g each. Only one of those meals has a single scoop of whey protein (I add it to my pre-workout oats). Though all the meals usually revolve around some high protein source like cottage cheese, skyr, eggs and of course chicken breast. YouTube is full of high protein recipes (look for bodybuilding "full day of eating" videos and the like). Some channels just produce a ton of videos with anabolic recipes (jclarkefitness, felu and pretty much every major fitness influencer).
I'm sure this won't be enjoyable to many people, and only works well for certain meals, but my secret weapon is gelatin powder. Mix with water until paste forms in your bowl then put steaming hot food on top and it will turn into a kind of 'creamy' sauce-like consistency. Nice mouth feel without too much flavor.
Oh, and learning to cook meat/protein so it is tender, browned, flavorful, and seasoned properly. It also seems like acid is way under-utilized in a lot of lazy / American style cooking. Helps a lot with palatability and digestion to use lime juice, rice vinegar, and other acidic ingredients during the cooking process.
Eat more veggies, too. They are full of digestive enzymes, but most veggies don't add too many calories.
If you want 150 grams of pure protein that's about 500g of chicken meat. Other things have protein as well so you could probably bump it down to 400 and have some other stuff like rice and veggies on the side.
Thats a pretty big meal but if you split it in two and have 8 hours between them it's really not that much. Doesnt seem like it should be a problem.
I've spent years without eating any meat, and this week I ate 500g of chicken in one shot, that feels good. But I really don't need it every day, it's also not very scalable in terms of environment
I'm 60kg, 1m83, with I guess strong and endurant muscle with all the bike and manual tasks I'm doing
Why 8hr? For the entire day eat 5 times and 200 plus grams is very doable. I only have one scoop of whey, and sometimes a bar, but everything else is lean Protein or carbs and fat that also have protein (oats, pb, yogurt)
Intermittent fasting. I don't know if there are any real documented benefits but anecdotally fasting is pretty nice. I often feel very energized and clear headed while fasting.
Need for life? Maybe not. But for sports performance, 1.4 to 1.6 grams per kg of bodyweight is about where the ROI tapers off for most people so far as i know. More probably only if one is very lean or anabolically reistant.
Readit News
I've only read the abstract, but the title as I interpreted it seems misleading:
> One study showed that individuals on calorie restriction lost muscle mass and an average of 20 pounds of weight over the first year and maintained their weight for the second year. However, despite losing muscle mass, calorie restriction participants did not lose muscle strength, indicating calorie restriction improved the amount of force generated by each unit of muscle mass, called muscle specific force.
So even if force per unit increased, overall mass decreased and total strength was unchanged. I guess the title is technically correct but the implication is off. This might be better phrased as "calorie restriction in humans doesn't incur as much muscle/strength loss as previously thought", which is still an interesting result.
This belief is already changing in bodybuilding and strength circles. Surprisingly, the fitness influencers on tiktok are leading the charge in changing minds about this.
This is a mistake and one that can be extrapolated to the much larger world.
Real world growth implies building in excess of the target and then trimming the leftover.
I don't care if you're planning a battle charge or setting your family finances or going for massive gains in your delts: exact allocation of resources is doomed to fail.
In fact: the "bro science" of bulking up in a training phase and then "cutting" to a competition weight, etc., is revealing a deeper truth about the world.
Increasing muscle mass while losing body mass is a very different question though.
I had a Dexa scan before and after. As well as various other ultrasounds, physical tests and blood tests.
I lost weight and gained muscle according to the Dexa scan!
No other changes to my general exercise. I wasn’t weight training or doing cardio. Just walking and day to day stuff.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199212313272701
Of course, this was a study of obese people. If you're doing a study on healty-weight people who are trying to build muscle, you may get far fewer people who will lie.
Have any similar "favorite studies" on hand about alcoholics who underreport alcohol use and overreport abstaining? Punching down is a favorite pastime of mine too btw :)
This feels like something the royal we should be talking about as well.
It’s clearly really difficult to restrict calories/eat less in the US. It’s unclear if this is a US only phenomenon or not but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were.
Just came back from a 3 weeks trip to the US. I found it easy to control my calorie intake by just skipping a meal or two and avoiding sodas and sweets. It was much harder to eat something reasonably healthy while being on the move though. I'd be curious to check my cholesterol level before and after the trip.
and
"... CALERIE TM participant requirements included:
Source - https://calerie.duke.edu/backgroundI want to live longer. I would also like to build some more muscle, ideally to a BMI of 22. What if I gain 10lbs of muscle then restrict?
When you put on 10 lbs of muscle, presumably your baseline will be slightly higher than it was prior to that (extra muscle requires extra calories to maintain), but still less than what it took to put that muscle on quickly and efficiently. I have no clue how much you should expect that difference to be, I'm sure many a bro scientist has opinions on it, some of which may be reasonable. Bulking and cutting is a classic technique in bodybuilding, however, typical cuts go on for a few months at most as opposed to 2 years.
One major takeaway from this study is that on average, you will be just as strong as when you started calorie restricting even though you will have lost muscle mass. It is theorized that your muscles will have become more efficient, so if you put on more muscle after a long period of calorie restriction you will be considerably stronger than if you had skipped the calorie restriction and just added the muscle. Food for thought.
If people lost 20 lbs in the first year of a 12% calorie restricted diet then that means that this study took place among people who were already obese (which seems extremely relevant). Anyone who is in good shape and not 6'8 is in no position to lose 20 lbs without serious risks to their health, aside from vastly decreased muscle strength. It is interesting, but not very surprising, that obese people with atrophied muscles don't lose "strength" by cutting calories and losing some muscle mass, which is very low to begin with.
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Oh, and learning to cook meat/protein so it is tender, browned, flavorful, and seasoned properly. It also seems like acid is way under-utilized in a lot of lazy / American style cooking. Helps a lot with palatability and digestion to use lime juice, rice vinegar, and other acidic ingredients during the cooking process.
Eat more veggies, too. They are full of digestive enzymes, but most veggies don't add too many calories.
Thats a pretty big meal but if you split it in two and have 8 hours between them it's really not that much. Doesnt seem like it should be a problem.
I'm 60kg, 1m83, with I guess strong and endurant muscle with all the bike and manual tasks I'm doing
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