Is it possible to build muscle and lose weight?  The answer is yes…..and no.

It depends on what kind of weight you are wanting to lose.  If you are going to be gaining muscle, you are going to be gaining weight.  There is no reason that you shouldn’t be able to burn off fat and build muscle at the same time.  Paying close attention to your scale might frustrate you.  What you are trying to do is transform your body so that the weight you have is muscle and not fat.

Don’t get trapped into thinking that you are going to be turning fat into muscle.  They are two different things.  Fat can’t be turned into muscle and muscle can’t be turned into fat.  You can lose fat and gain muscle or gain muscle and lose weight. You could even gain or lose both at the same time.

What you should realize is that to lose fat you must be consuming less daily calories than your body needs so that it is forced to use your fat stores.  To gain muscle, though, you must eat more calories than your body normally needs.  There lies the problem.   For someone new to weight lifting it is going to be easier to accomplish this.  For those who are not weight lifting novices, it is much more difficult without having to resort to steroids.  It can be done but it will be more effective for muscle building beginners.

As said before, weight loss can happen when you eat less calories but it really happens when you have a calorie deficit.  When you consume less calories you are going to be instantly putting yourself into a calorie deficit but that isn’t the only way.  Another way is to burn off the calories through working out and exercise.  If your goal is to gain muscle then you aren’t going to be doing the usual means of burning calories, which is lots of aerobic activity.

Spending hours on a treadmill or stair climber is going to burn off calories for sure but as a weight lifter or a body builder it will be counter productive to do this.  Your calories needs to be spent lifting weight.  If you can find 3 days a week where you spend 30 minutes doing an aerobic activity, that will be plenty for your heart, as research has shown.  It is good to spend about 5-10 minutes doing some kind of aerobic activity before your weight lifting routine to get your body warmed up but don’t get carried away.

Your muscles need calories to grow, and they need them to come from protein.  To energize your workout you are going to need carbohydrates.  I know that this flies against those low carb diets that are so popular but your body is going to have to decide between carbs and protein for energy and muscles can only come from the amino acids in protein so you want every bit of your protein to go towards your muscles for building them.

That means that your energy needs to come from carbohydrates.  They aren’t evil.  If you use them correctly they can be quite useful.  To get a good balance, try thinking of a 3-2-1 diet where your diet consists of 3 parts carbohydrates, 2 parts protein, and 1 part fat.  Making most of that fat come from monounsaturated fats will be helpful as there is a direct correlation somehow to the amount of monounsaturated fats and your levels of testosterone.  The higher the levels of monounsaturated fats are in your body, the higher the levels of testosterone, which can help you in your workout.

Now, you may have to cut out some calories to help you lose weight, but make sure that they come more from the amount of fat you take in and never from the amount of protein. Also make sure that you eat more than three times a day.

The more often you eat, the less often your body is going to be hungry.  Remember that one of the reasons your body stores fat is because it is afraid that it’s supply is going to be cut off.  If it gets a more steady supply of food then it will be tricked into thinking that that it doesn’t need to store as much.  Now this isn’t giving you permission to eat a large meal 5 or 6 times a day.  Eat moderate amounts and eat them slowly.

 If you monitor the amount of food you eat and use the right proportions and then spend your workouts concentrating on building muscle and not trying to be a marathon runner then building muscle and burning fat will come about naturally.

Remember that it isn’t the weight that is bad, it is the weight that comes from fat.

Build muscle, the good weight, and burn fat, the bad weight.

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