[quote]clads10 wrote:
For every pound of muscle you gain your body needs to burn and extra 50 calories to maintain it".
That sounds good in theory, however something is wrong with that math.[/quote]
Something’s wrong with the math because you either misremembered what you read or what you read was incorrect. 10 pounds of muscle burns an extra 50 calories a day. Not one pound, 10.
The body always prefers homeostasis. If you try to burn fat, it’ll try to burn muscle first because it’s easier and “safer” from a survival perspective. As bodyfat gets less and less, the body wants to panic for survival and often tries to slow metabolism to compensate. A well-designed training and nutrition plan can outsmart this step. If your daily calories are too low, protein/aminos (in muscle form) are among the first to get burned. Basically, when it comes to bodybuilding, the body is a jerk.
Of course we know that having more muscle on your body is a good thing. It improves appearance, performance in the gym, and does increase the resting metabolic rate, but the key to fat loss is not “eat as few calories as possible.”
During a fat loss plan, you generally do need to adjust calories from week to week, if not sooner - sometimes lowering them, sometimes increasing them - depending on the rate of progress. Macro breakdown and training can both also influence the results, so it’s difficult if not impossible to look at any added muscle out of context.
These articles talk a bit more about it, and other related issues, and might give you some better insight:
On a general note, Tony Robbins has a good quote about the non-need to understand certain complexities. To paraphrase, “I don’t know how electricity works, how it gets from the power plant to a lamp in my living room, but I’m always willing to trust that when I flip the light switch, the light will go on.”
Make sure you don’t get hung up on trying to figure out the intricacies of the human metabolism. It sounds like you had some great results from your fat loss plan (can you toss up pics? That’s gotta be a great transformation). I’d track back and double-check what you did (in training and nutrition) and, if you choose to go further, simply build upon those steps to continue seeing progress.