Can You Really Burn Fat And Gain Muscle At The Same Time? ~ Muscle & Fitness & Building

Can you build muscle while losing fat at the same time? This is the question many the world over have been trying to figure out for a very long time. It seems for every person who claims you can burn fat while gaining muscle, you have hundreds who say it’s impossible.

It seems like it should be impossible. After all, you need to burn calories to lose fat, but you need a surplus of calories to build muscle; these goals are on the exact opposite ends of the spectrum. This is why “bulking season” and “cutting season” are things in the bodybuilding world.

Even the guys who take steroids must choose between building muscle or losing fat. If we had the ability to do both at the same time, we’d be living in a world full of supermen. But here’s where things take a turn for the awesome. Science is now starting to figure out natural ways to make this work.
But before we get to that, let’s clear something up first: You cannot turn fat into muscle.

This is one of the oldest and dumbest fitness myths out there. The only reason people still believe it, is because when you’re already fat and you start to train consistently, your muscles start to show in the places you have lost fat. This gives you the illusion that your fat is being turned into muscle. Wrong! Your fat cells are just shrinking and your muscles are growing. But wait, doesn’t that mean you’re losing fat and growing muscle at the same time?

And…here we go. This is where it all gets a bit muddled. It makes sense that you’d lose fat and the muscle that was already underneath would start to show. But it also makes sense that if you’re doing heavy weight training you’re going to gain muscle — and because you’re overweight and working out for the first time, you’d simultaneously lose fat.
Makes your head hurt, doesn’t it? Well, don’t worry, we’re about to hit you with some easy science. To simplify things, think of building muscle and burning fat like this: you need energy in the form of calories to build muscle. You need to burn energy/calories to lose fat. But if you’re overweight, your body will convert the stored fat into energy to feed the muscle. Therefore, you’d burn fat to build muscle.

This is where the keto diet comes into play. When the body is in a state of ketosis, fat can be utilized for muscle hypertrophy. This doesn’t occur, though, if the body has plenty of carbohydrates to be used as energy instead of the stored fat. But you might be wondering, what is the keto diet exactly?