i'm not an expert, but it's my thinking that intaking proper amounts of protein builds muscle, not just being calorie excessive.

about 13-14 years ago i lost around 95lbs eating a low calorie diet and doing only cardio. by the time i hit 170lbs, a huge amount of my muscle mass was lost. fast forward to last year when i decided to change my life around, i have been weight training along with my cardio and find the combination to be much better than just cardio alone. so far in the last 11 1/2 months i have lost 85lbs, if i did only cardio i would probably weigh less, but i wouldn't look as good and i wouldn't be as strong which is more important than showing a lower number on the scale.

i wish i had my fat % checked before i started so i would be able to compare it with where i'm at now. any person i talk to about weight loss, i always highly recommend weight training along with diet and cardio.

I have been fairly high protein since I started losing weight. After I exercise I always have whey protein and milk. I also wish I had my fat% checked when I started though there is no question that it was a lot, lot higher. My neighbor made me a pair of pants when I was fat and took a waist measure. She still had it. I went from 39 inches to 27.7. I can't imagine what my hips were. But say I was 45% fat, which I think is in the ball park. I did go on one of those body fat scales once at a friend's house a few years ago and it showed 45% (I know, accuracy is highly questionable). That means my lean mass when I was fat was 90 pounds. That means I lost 15 pounds of muscle. But whatever, it is only a guess.

intaking whey protein with milk especially after a workout is a great way to maintain and or build muscle mass. question: how much protein do you take in after a workout?

you seem to know yourself very well, I'm willing to bet your estimates are pretty close.

About 8 grams in milk and 25 in whey.

i do about the same.

p.s. i remember reading a study that showed a person can only utilize about 30 or so grams max at a given time, pretty much any protein over that will just be burnt for fuel.

Goldfinch, some thoughts:

The idea that building muscle requires a calorie excess while losing fat requires a calorie deficit is oversimplified, and you may be coming to the wrong conclusion based on the oversimplification.

First: Building muscle mass doesn't require eating an excess of calories, and it doesn't require eating tons of protein. It does require that we eat sufficient quantities of foods containing the amino acids we can't synthesize, but you can be eating enough of those foods to build muscle mass EVEN when you're operating at a calorie deficit, or at calorie-neutral.

Second: The calories to fuel the process can come from the foods we eat, but they can also come from our fat reserves - which is what we're trying to accomplish when we're trying to lose fat and build muscle.

The way you're thinking about it, if you increased your calorie intake to both provide raw materials for muscle building, and to maintain you and fuel the muscle-building process, you wouldn't lose any fat along the way. For some people, that's the objective. But, if you're still sitting at 27% body fat percentage (which is, by the way, still in the acceptable range for women), you may be wanting to lose some fat along with building muscle - that way, you stay about the same size overall, but stronger and tighter.

If you really want to gain muscle weight without losing any fat, then you would have to increase your calorie consumption, as you suggest. But is that what you really want?

If you kept all your fat (say it's 29 lbs, as you said), to go from 27% to, say, 20% body fat would require that you weigh 145 lbs - so you'd have to gain 40 lbs of muscle. Somehow, I don't think that's what you're after. (Of course, it's an individual decision.) Not to mention that, at our age, that would take a long time to do, if it were even possible.

This is a tangential point, but I'll throw it in: Lean Body Mass includes everything but fat, including water and blood. Obese people have a greater blood volume than thin people. Moreover, many diets have diuretic effects - this is particularly true of low-carb diets. So some of that 15 lbs of muscle mass that you thought you lost may actually have been blood and water. (BTW, before anyone jumps on the idea that fat contains very little water and muscle contains more of it, yes - thin people have a higher percentage of their body weight made of water than fat people. But when you talk about absolute numbers, the total weight of water in a thin person is probably significantly less than the total weight of water in that same person at 100 lbs heavier.)

I thought about this more last night and thought about what it would have meant if I had kept the entire 90 pounds of lean mass and weighed what I weigh. Not really realistic at all. It would mean a body fat percentage of 14%. Yeah. Right. And as you say, the lean mass isn't just muscle.

From what I have read it is difficult to gain muscle for women at more than a rate of 1 pound a month and probably less at my size.

I think that I just will focus on stable weight and getting stronger and quit overthinking this.

Great plan! :)

P.S. I wish I had your problem right now - I still need to lose another 20-25 lbs. But that's a lot better than where I was 4 months ago, when I still needed to lose another 70-75 lbs...

Interestingly, I do have less blood. I now am at too low of a weight to give blood. Taking away a pint of blood at my size is too much. Being a bit silly here, using the rule of thumb that about 7% of your weight is blood I now have about 4 pounds less blood then I did when I was fat. :)

Not so silly - that's already 4 lbs of your lean body mass loss accounted for, without having to even think about muscle loss...

As an aside, I just did some calculations (VERY ROUGH!), and at the rate I'm going, when I reach my target weight, if I continue losing LBM and fat at the same rate that I am now, I'll end up at between 17% and 18% BF% when I'm done. I believe this calculation just a little bit less than I believe that nice man who was trying to sell me that bridge over the Hudson...

Interesting thread. I haven't read completely thru but rather skimmed over all the posts. This interests me because I've been obese my entire adult life and weighed in this week at 387 lbs.

I follow health and nutrition news pretty closely and I'm up on many of the latest dietary ideas, including Paleo, low-carb, etc.. Gary Taubes is a primary proponent of the low-carb approach and his theory in a nutshell is that insulin causes cells to store fat and carbohydrate causes the pancreas to secrete insulin. So if you eat low carbohydrate you have less insulin and therefore less ability to store fat. Of course, it's much more complex than that but this is the gist of the low-carb idea.

This week I went to a bariatric physician who is a huge advocate of the low-carb paradigm. He uses the typical "aids" for weight loss, like appetite suppressants, HCG, etc.) but his overwhelming goal is to get people acclimated to a low carb diet for life.

Having said that, my weight was 387 lbs and my total lean body mass was 189 lbs, which means I'm not just obese, I'm carrying a significant amount of muscle on my frame. You would think this would give me a higher metabolism because muscles burn calories, right? My basal metabolic rate is 2200 calories per day, which is just the body processes required to keep me alive. Once I roll over in bed or get up out of bed, my caloric needs rise from that point.

One thing the Dr. checked was my insulin levels. Normal reference range for insulin is 6.0 - 27.0 mU/L and mine was 83.6!!! Remember, insulin tells your body to store fat and my insulin level is over twice the highest level of "normal". This creates a vicious cycle where when I eat, many (most?) of the calories I consume get shunted off into fat stores rather than burned as energy. If a large percentage of the calories I consume are stored instead of burned what happens? The cells screaming for energy still don't get any and I'm hungry again! And again. And again.

The two primary causes of high insulin are a high carbohydrate diet and being obese. If I cut my carbohydrates down to a very low level, the insulin level will drop and the food I eat will get burned for energy, rather than stored as fat, and I'll actually not feel hungry shortly after. Calories still count and if I eat more calories than I need for energy, even if it's not carbs, the body has ways of storing that extra energy as fat. However, my appetite should tend to regulate itself once insulin levels are normal.

I can't vouch that what I've posted is 100% technically correct and any biochemists here can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my understanding from doing a lot of reading and spending a lot of time on forums with other people who follow this stuff.

If anyone wants more information on this I highly recommend Gary Taubes "Why We Get Fat". He has another book called "Good Calories, Bad Calories" but that is a scientific tome that is not for the faint of heart. "Why We Get Fat" was written for laypersons like us.

Also, the low-carb paradigm isn't the end-all-be-all that Taubes makes it out to be but it's a vital step in understanding some of the basic biochemistry that regulates our weight.

Yes, we'll none of those guys are endurance athletes. Try training day in and day out with low or no carbs, and you'll see what I mean.

I was fine on short runs but when my runs started to exceed an hour in duration I crashed hard. Each time, no exception. I finally consulted a dietician who told me to add back the carbs and see if that fixed it.

Started eating carbs again (in moderation) and have not had one single issue since.

That's true, but then most Americans are pretty sedentary. It's well accepted by most that the more active a person is, the more carbohydrate they can consume with no ill effects. Given that this is a biking forum, that is a very relevant point that I should have included in my original post. Thanks for bringing it up.

And as with everything else, this varies per person. I trained for and competed in my first triathlon on a low-carb diet (<20 grams/day.) I had no issues with crashing and my daily workouts would usually exceed 1 hour. I'm not saying that everyone can/should do this, but I was able to.

I gave up the low-carb diet after 7 months just because I was fed up with eating so much meat (pun partially intended.) My weight loss had plateaued and mentally I needed to do something different.