How worried should i be about losing muscle while dieting on 160 once a week. I would like to try and lose atleast 5 pounds a week. I weigh 225 at 20ish body fat. Thanks
How do you plan to generate a 17,500cal deficit each week?
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I hope you meant .5 lbs per week.
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You think losing 10 pounds in 3 weeks is impossible? If i wasnt worried about losing muscle it would be pretty easy. Also my goal is to lose as much as possible so im not as fixated on the exact numbers as you i suppose. This is why i asked the question so i know how aggressive to be.
Aim for 1-2 lbs per week. Weigh yourself in the morning every day. Circle the lowest number week by week and use that as your weekly comparison.
You won’t lose any muscle, presuming your protein is 1.5x your body weight and you are training hard.
post a pic.
At that caloric deficit you will inevitably lose muscle mass no matter what drugs you take to mitigate it. If losing as much bodyweight as possible in the shortest amount of time possible, then you will have to live with the fact that you are losing muscle as well. Hell, you end up losing muscle even with much less strict diets. It just goes with the territory.
Unsolicited advice: stick to a low volume, high intensity routine with plenty of rest days. Avoid any cardio except for maybe a low paced walk here and there.
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Thanks for the reply. I wasnt sure if the trt would help offset the muscle i would lose.
Your math skills are undertrained but I digress.
IDK how you plan to be in a 2500cal/day deficit frankly, but TRT will help you maintain more muscle than if natty. Regardless, if you are above 10% BF, have adequate protein intake, and continue to train heavy - you should not lose any muscle.
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I appreciate the answer but why are you obsessed with the numbers? You say its impossible which is fine i just want to lose as much as possible and wanted to know how trt would affect a strict diet. I suppose i should just asked that knowing how people fixate on numbers. I run alot and play basketball a ton. While its not exact my garmin had me over 1500 calories burned playing full court for two hours. Also i stated im at mid 20s for body fat and know how to train just eat to much.
how tall are you? please post a pic.
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No, I didn’t. I’m saying that if you’re built like me (which isn’t likely, no offense), you need ~3200cal daily for maintenance. 3200-2500=700cal/day.
Rabbits eat more than that, but sure - you can do it, it’s just unlikely to succeed based on a litany of anecdotal and scientific experimentation. Most recommend not more than 1%BW/wk and you’re trying for 2.3%… it’s a literal crash diet which are almost always doomed to fail.
But yes, you can do it (in Rob Schneider voice).
Cool, so you just have to eat at maintenance and do this for ~3h 20m every day!
I know you think I’m shitting on you, but I’m actually on your side - you just don’t know it yet.
it’s exactly why I keep asking for a pic, I don’t have all the information.
It’s my experience that if you have muscle to lose, your beyond asking these types of questions
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Because numbers remove all the bullshit and feelings involved. Numbers don’t lie. To lose weight its all energy in/out and thermodynamics. A pound of fat contains approximately 3500 calories. In order to lose that lb you need to consume less calories than you are until it adds up to that for each lb. The thing is you can’t really do it too quick or you will muscle waste, which I’ll admit, is likely not a concern for you. Most people think they have way more muscle to lose than they do. It just “fat armor”.
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Maybe he is on the @hankthetank89 cutting routine. 4 hours of elliptical a day.
OP might lose 5 lbs the first week as water weight drops off. Week after week though that is aggressive. I’d feel like shit with that deficit.
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Yup thats likely. I stopped my nutrition plan about 4 months ago and ballooned up to 215lbs. I recently started a cut 1.5 weeks ago and I’m already down to 205. All that bloat and carb/water weight fell off quickly. Real tissue? Likely very little.
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2500kcal deficit is easy with almost no cardio… in my last cut i was on 3000kcal deficit a day, with no added cardio.
Maintenance is 3300… some 10-20k steps and some 20min cardio or gym adds up to 4500kcals spent easy.
Umm, hank… the most strenuous forms of exercise typically don’t burn more than 700cal/hr - which really doesn’t align with 4500cal like at all. If it did, my maintenance wouldn’t be 3200cal (because that’s a regular gym day for me).
I’ve said it before, but I’m pretty sure either your calorie counting is off by almost double, or you have the fastest metabolism alive (possibly aided by your, umm, substances 
).
That being said, OP doing something like you’ve mentioned would be required to generate this type of deficit.
Nah man, i would have tought that like cardio machines are off a bit and that Technogym elliptical maybe is off saying that i burn 1700kcal an hour on max resistance, but nowdays i have a Garmin heart monitor. I did 17mins of running to the nearest park and some hillsprints today - 400kcals.
When doing bodyweight circuits i average 200-250kcals in 10mins. Technogym elliptical does show a bit more, but treadmill shows less. On average o have tested this with different machines, watches, and heart monitors…they all say the same +/- 10%… And i have mentioned before that i also lose fat accordingly like almost to a gram. I dont know how Garmin or any other machine would account for, lets say tren in my system. The math is there, almost the same, almost always.
I have no idea what you guys are doing for “cardio”.
Even my GPS app, which only has my weight input, says i burn 300kcals an hour by being in a museum. Like - walk 3 steps, read the thingy, walk 3 steps, read it… If i am going down the street with a goal to actually get there, its 400-450kcals an hour, but my HR is like 90 so its not like im actually walking fast. Im just not strolling.
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I use a similar app and while it’s nice to see I burned 500cal by doing nothing other than walking to and from work, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t already calculated in our TDEE since this is not out of the ordinary activity, unlike scheduled weight training, HIIT, etc…
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