On the surface, trying to gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat seems like two opposing goals. After all, to gain muscle, you need to be in a calorie surplus, and to lose fat, you need to be in a calorie deficit, so trying to do both at once means you don’t achieve either goal.

Some variation of the above is pretty common advice, and it’s not entirely true. The argument assumes your body’s only source of energy is the food you’re eating. But your body also pulls stored energy–i.e., body fat–and it can pull quite a lot of energy from there.

For example, assuming a pound of fat contains 3500 calories, someone with 30 lbs of fat is storing over 100,000 calories the body can draw from. The cost of building muscle is only a few thousand calories. So even if this person was in a deficit and losing fat, there’s still enough available energy to put towards muscle gain (assuming their programming is on point).

Furthermore, in a review by Barakat and colleagues, the authors concluded that body recomposition is possible even in trained individuals, but the likelihood and magnitude depend heavily on context.

But this raises a second question: How much does your caloric intake actually matter if you’re trying to recomp? The common advice is that a recomp should involve eating at maintenance calories. What happens if you eat in a deficit, while keeping protein high? Could a recomp still occur?

A recent study compared whether eating high protein at (a) maintenance calories or (b) -250 calories below maintenance resulted in changes to body composition and maximum strength.

​Vargas-Molina and colleagues recruited 30 lifters (26 men, 4 women; average age 23) and assigned them to three groups for 10 weeks.

• Group 1 (ISO, n=10): Ate at maintenance with 2.5g of protein per kg of bodyweight per day.
• Group 2 (DEF, n=10): Ate 250 calories below maintenance. Same protein as ISO.
• Group 3 (CON, n=10): Told to eat their normal diet with no specific requirements on protein intake.

All three groups lifted 4 days a week and had body composition measured by DEXA.

Let’s skip to the results:

• ISO gained ~1 kg of muscle and lost ~1.4 kg of fat.
• DEF gained ~1 kg of muscle and lost ~3 kg of fat.
• CON - no change

At first glance, this looks like a pretty clear win for high protein intake and lifting weights to achieve body recomposition.

But there’s a caveat: The results look more impressive when you compare each group’s before-and-after changes. In other words, ISO improved compared to where ISO started, and DEF improved compared to where DEF started.

But when the researchers compared the groups against each other, the differences were less clear. The high-protein groups appeared to gain more fat-free mass than the control group, but the study didn’t show clear differences between groups in fat loss or strength.

Nonetheless, the broader takeaway remains consistent with the literature as a whole: body recomposition does occur, even in trained individuals. In some studies, participants have lost body fat despite eating in a caloric surplus, while in others, participants have gained muscle mass in a caloric deficit.

That said, training status and body fat levels are likely the biggest factors determining whether you can recomp successfully. If you’ve been training for a relatively short time and have more fat mass to lose, your chances of recomping are pretty high. On the other hand, if you’ve been training for years and are fairly lean, recomping might be more difficult.

In short, a body recomposition is possible, but it’s more likely to happen if you’re newer to lifting and/or carrying more body fat.

As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that a body recomp will be much slower than prioritising fat loss or muscle gain. So, if you think you need to lose fat, my advice is to focus on fat loss and then transition to muscle building. Any muscle growth that happens is a nice benefit. Similarly, if you think you need to gain muscle, make that the focus. If you happen to lose some fat during this time, great. But you’ll have plenty of time to drop body fat later.

How Jasmine Lost 52 lbs, Improved Her Health, and Built the Strongest Body of Her Life

I have a new client case study up on the site if you're looking for more content to read.

Jasmine's story is pretty similar to what most people experience: They're doing the right things and making some progress until their perfect plan is disrupted and they fall off track.

“I would have one or two bad days and give up and then start the yo-yo dieting cycle over again,” Jasmine explained. The result was some attempts at fat loss over the years, but nothing that actually stuck. After years of starting and stopping, she was ready to try something different.

Here's how Jasmine lost over 50 lbs and broke free of that cycle.

–Aa

P.S. How did you find this week's instalment of the Vitamin?

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