[haywood]

You can't cheat the laws of metabolism. If you're in a large caloric deficit, the body will not waste energy building muscle, which is an EXTREMELY expensive process. If you weight train and consume hundreds of grams of protein per day, you can work to maintain the lean tissue, and in some cases if you're a beginner and/or obese, you can put on some muscle in the beginning, but it won't last.

Building muscle requires a slight caloric surplus and sufficient protein intake spread out through the day (last part is more about optimization)

[FartyMcFarter]

> Building muscle requires a slight caloric surplus

It doesn't:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10838463/

There are other similar studies, plus lots of anecdotal data from people who were able to gain muscle while losing weight.

[haywood]

Exactly, like I said, if you're overweight like the cops in the study, or new to training, or you take steroids, you can build muscle and lose fat. But it's not forever, at some point you'll plateau and need to pick a lane: lose fat and maintain LMB, gain some fat and gain muscle.

We're not talking insane caloric surpluses for the latter either.

[FartyMcFarter]

True - I was just pointing out that the particular part I quoted was contradictory with that point.