Can You Still Build Muscle While Dieting?
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Unfortunately, we’re now currently living in a world in which everything seems to be catered towards the lazy and the idle. Rather than doing things safely, effectively, and efficiently, people are instead looking for shortcuts and the easy way of achieving their goals. The diet and “fitness” industry is a prime example of this as there are now numerous “diet plans” and supplements that are marketed as being able to yield extremely impressive weight loss results in very little time indeed. If you were to think of diet foods, typical foods that would probably spring to mind would be salad leaves, fruits, vegetables, and lean cuts of meat such as white fish or skinless chicken breast. The term ‘diet’ is actually a very broad term as there are now several diet plans out there. Due to the extreme nature of many of the diets you hear about these days, many people believe that you can’t actually build muscle if you’re dieting in order to lose fat. In reality however, you can indeed build muscle and burn fat simultaneously, you just need to know what you’re doing.
Why do people think it’s impossible to build muscle whilst dieting?
Simply put, the main reason why people think it’s impossible to build muscle if you’re dieting is the fact that many diets are so incredibly calorie restrictive. On average, women require around 2000 calories each day, whilst men require 2500 calories. Those are just general guidelines as everybody is different, but for the most part, those numbers do add up pretty well. This means that for a women to maintain her current size, she would require at least 2000 calories each day. If she had more, any leftovers would be stored as fat for a later date. If she had less however, the body would burn body fat in order to make up for the lack in calories. Because of this, many diets are very low in calories, forcing the body to burn body fat. The problem is that in order to build muscle, we need more calories than we can burn off, and there’s no getting around that.
What can be done to burn fat and build muscle?
First off, we need to forget about “diets” and instead we need to adopt a healthy eating program instead. Rather than consuming less than 1500 calories each day, we should be aiming to consume 2000 – 2500 calories, but making sure that the calories we consume come from fresh, natural, and healthy sources, rich in protein. Protein is vital for muscle growth and without it we simply would not grow. The trick is to not restrict our calories, instead we get our calories from healthy sources, and we make sure that we perform the right exercises as well. To help control body fat, cardio is effective. To build muscle, we still need to lift weights. Providing we track our macros (protein, fats, and carbs) and eat as close to maintenance as we can, we can still gradually burn body fat, and build lean muscle simultaneously. It isn’t easy, but nothing in life worth having is, and the results at the end are well worth a little extra effort.
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