Podcast 33

Why Does Muscle Really Matter for Weight Loss?

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SHOW NOTES

Dr. James Fisher answers the question “Why does muscle really matter for weight loss?” Find out why muscle mass should be a vital component of your weight loss strategy and why dieting without strength training is a recipe for long term disaster for your body. 

• There is a direct connection between your body’s muscle mass and its metabolic effectiveness, the ability to lose fat and keep it off, and your overall health.
• Why does muscle matter for weight loss? Muscle is metabolic reactive and consumes calories just by existing. You will burn a larger number of calories on a daily basis by having more muscle mass than someone with less.
• Instead of thinking about weight loss, we should think of it as fat loss because we don’t want to lose just any kind of weight, we want to improve body composition.
• Focusing on weight loss can be discouraging when people lose less weight than they hoped without taking into account gains in muscle mass.
• Without strength training, any weight you lose with dieting or activity will not be as much fat as you could lose by incorporating strength training into your routine.
• Anyone who goes on a calorie reduction plan to lose weight will end up with about 50% of the weight loss occurring within their muscle mass, which is an absolute tragedy. We want to hang on to as much muscle mass as we can as we age.
• Diet and cardio without strength training exacerbate the loss of metabolically valuable muscle tissue.
• Protein is a great calorie to consume as it’s thermogenic and used to absorb some of the protein you take in. Government nutrition guidelines should be adjusted to account for this.
• Maintaining your muscle mass has the additional benefit of preventing and reducing injuries so you can continue enjoying aerobic activities as you age.
• Weight loss without strength training results in frailty. In the older population, people who are lean are generally weak and have poor mobility. The best thing to do is to focus on strength training to build muscle and improve quality of life along the way.
• If you increase the amount of muscle mass you have, you will burn more calories by default. Muscle also stores glucose, which will help you with insulin-related conditions like Diabetes.

If somebody weighs 200 pounds and they want to drop their weight to 180 pounds, they shouldn’t talk about weight loss, they should talk about fat loss. And that really challenges people because, as I’m sure you’ve experienced with your clients, we then have to talk about body composition. It’s not just about weight, it’s about muscle mass.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast. I’m Amy Hudson. In today’s episode, Brian Saigon interviews Dr. James Fisher in a brief, ask the expert type of conversation where they discuss why muscle, specifically strength training, matters for weight loss. If you are a person who desires to lose weight and has been told to stop, Exercising as a means to meet that goal. Please listen to this episode. There is a huge connection between maintaining your muscle and your body’s metabolic effectiveness, your ability to lose body fat and keep it off and your overall health as well.

Sometimes the traditional guidance on these things goes against what the science shows. And so listen in on this conversation between Brian and Dr. James on why your muscle matters for weight loss. Let’s roll that interview.

Well, I’m back here with Dr. Fisher and we’re going to take a little different approach. This is just going to be kind of an ask the expert approach. And we’re going to constrain this conversation to no more than five minutes. And I think that sometimes it’s just a really neat exercise to help us as people who think a lot about exercise and exercise science to condense and simplify the complexity that can exist and make it digestible for people. So Dr. Fisher, thanks for being here today.

Yeah, it’s great to be here.

And I’m just going to throw a question out there and you can just sort of riff on it and maybe we’ll dialogue back and forth a little bit for five minutes here and we’ll land the plane and hopefully create some value for people. So here’s the question. Why does muscle really matter? for weight loss?

Okay. Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a really important question because most people when they think of weight loss, don’t necessarily think of muscle strengthening. So why is it important? Well, primarily muscle is metabolically active, burns more calories just by being there. So the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolic rate, the higher the number of calories that you’ll burn on a daily basis, compared to somebody with less muscle.

Interestingly, we talk about weight loss, Really what we should talk about is fat loss. So if somebody weighs 200 pounds and they want to drop their weight to 180 pounds, they shouldn’t talk about weight loss. They should talk about fat loss. And that really challenges people because as I’m sure you’ve experienced with your clients, we then have to talk about body composition. It’s not just about weight. It’s about muscle mass.

It’s about fat mass and so forth. And sometimes people don’t want to go through the process of understanding what part of their body is muscle and what part of their body is fat. Aesthetically looking in the mirror, we can probably see the difference. And whilst people step on the scales and say, wow, I haven’t lost the 20 pounds that I wanted to lose, I’ve lost 10 pounds. And yet I’ve dropped five inches off my waist and two inches off my thighs. We know that that’s a product of weight loss or fat loss.

And again, that’s a part of our building our muscle. When people talk about a toned figure, what they really mean is a reduction in body fat and visibility of kind of longer, leaner muscles. So without strength training, the any weight you lose through dieting alone or diet plus activity will not be, you will not lose as much body fat if you’re doing those things in the absence of strength training. Yeah, absolutely. So anybody who goes on a calorie reduction to lose weight, and then even if they add in cardiovascular exercise in the form of running, cycling, swimming, and so forth, probably about 50 % of the weight they lose will actually be muscle mass.

And that’s absolutely tragic, because we should be hanging on to every ounce of muscle mass that we can, because we’re going to lose it as we age anyway. So we want to give ourselves as good a chance to hang on to it as we can.

Yeah, that’ll have such a ripple effect on your health, not to mention, as you said at the outset, muscles metabolically active.

So part of the problem begin with is we’re losing muscle as we’re aging, we’re losing our metabolism, but then you’re saying diet and cardio without doing strength training actually exacerbates the loss of metabolically valuable muscle tissue.

Yeah, yeah. And government guidelines haven’t helped this because we’ve tended to talk about a volume of exercise as a time. So as long as people are doing that time of exercise, they feel great. And then they look at what the nutritional guidelines are. And unfortunately, they’re quite dated in their thinking, we should probably should be consuming much more protein than than government guidelines suggest, both in the US and in the UK. And And if we add in strength training and we increase our protein intake, well, protein itself is actually thermogenic.

So about 25 % of the protein that we use, that we consume, sorry, is used in simply absorbing the rest of the protein that we’ve taken in. So it’s a great calorie to consume because we don’t actually consume all of those calories. We use some of them straight away. And then of course we add in strength training to build or retain our muscle mass. And of course that has a knock -on effect because it can reduce risk of injury, which if we really love the cardiovascular exercise we do in cycling or swimming or running, we want to avoid injury. We want muscle mass to do that.

Seldom do we see a runner who simply has too much muscle. It just isn’t the case. What we end up with if we go down the route of weight loss without strength training is frailty. And it’s plain to see, we look at our older population, people who are lean are generally weak and, and they’re generally frail. They have often a poor mobility or higher risk of injury or have suffered injuries and so forth.

And what we actually should be doing is strength training and strengthening to build muscle, to help weight loss, but to improve quality of life along the way.

Does it help keep the weight off? Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Simply because it’s metabolically active. And it’s not a huge amount. You don’t add a pound of muscle and suddenly justify a McDonald’s Happy Meal or bigger. It’s got to be in relative terms here.

But if you increase the amount of muscle mass that you have, then you certainly will burn more of the calories that you consume.

And it’s my understanding that a large driver of our body’s storage of body fat is, is hormonally based. And so the muscle loss or the optimization of muscle also, I believe can improve the hormonal milieu, if you will, of the body, like our body’s insulin sensitivity versus insulin resistance. Yeah, absolutely. So as soon as we have muscle, we have a place to store glucose. So adding that muscle, we will naturally consume glucose, even somebody on a very low carbohydrate diet will naturally have a sugar intake or some of the some of what they consume will be converted. to sugar and muscle is where we will store that sugar.

As soon as we can’t store it there, we create a problem because we then convert it to fat to store. So the more muscle that we have, the better from a health perspective to avoid things like diabetes and insulin sensitivity and so forth. So we definitely have hormonal responses around there. And if we walk down that path without going into something that’s going to take way longer than we have now, we also know that muscle is itself an endocrine organ. release as well.

called myokines, which basically sends signals around the rest of the body for positive function to maintain health and longevity and quality of life in the rest of our bodily organs and systems. Fantastic. Well, Dr. Fisher, I think you made the case in a few minutes for why muscle really matters when someone’s goal is is weight loss. So thanks so much.

And we will talk with you again soon.

Thanks a lot, Brian. And that’s going to wrap it up. Thanks, Dr. James, for coming back on the podcast and chatting with us on this very important topic. I hope you got a lot out of this episode. If you are looking for a program to help you add healthy muscle to your body in a safe, effective, efficient way, check out an Exercise Coach location near you. We love to help people combine whole effort exercise with whole food nutrition in order to achieve what we call a whole new you.

Make it a great day, everybody.

Bye -bye.