Little while ago, I decided to lose weight after realizing I got unacceptably fat. By July, I ballooned to a little over 220 lbs. This morning, I weighed in at 199 naked, so I'm making progress. I'm achieving this weight loss the old fashioned way: eating less, eating healthier, and daily exercise - namely walking, swimming, pull ups, light weights, push ups, etc.
I'm happy for these results, but I'm now wondering if the nature of my diet and exercise regiment is costing me muscle mass. Might be a silly worry since I was hardly exercising when I got fat, but I'm concerned that my food cut (I'm probably eating a third less food overall, if not more) could be forcing my body to adapt by eating my muscle mass instead of just the fat. I've always had a high level of muscularity and don't want that to change simply because I'm eating less.
Are my worries unfounded, or is it time to eat more and hit the heavy weights?
-- Yoblazer: http://oi52.tinypic.com/ad21i1.jpg Watch and you'll see... someday I'll be... part of your world!
Whenever you lose weight, you'll always lose muscle mass. It's just the way it goes. I think the only way to not lose muscle mass is to lose weight by weight training. But that said, even then you'll initially gain weight since muscle is heaver than fat.
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"Don't freeze up girl, you're looking quite a sight." - Adam Ant. "Baby, can you dig your man? He's a righteous man." - Larry Underwood
Muscle atrophy would have already occurred when you were getting fat. Exercising now, wouldn't have changed anything. While the rate of change depends person to person. Your body burns fat firstly before muscle, muscle is more of a last resort type of thing.
If your nutrition is as good as possible, your body burning away your muscle is unlikely.
You likely lost some muscle mass, but if you incorporated even some weights in your exercise it likely wasn't that much. As Sorozone pointed out, much of the mass you may have lost was when you were gaining fat.
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My Japanese alter-ego. Hey all this is Bartz btw.