[haywood]

This is good news (probably?), but wanted to chime in with a tangent.

Also going to preface this by saying I have struggled with weight my entire life and have lost and gained substantial weight through diet alone, always gaining it back and then some — but I think I found something that has worked for me and I have been reflecting on what I wish I was told a long time ago.

It's not necessarily a problem to be "obese", meaning you can have extra fat on top of muscle but also be metabolically healthy. In those cases, the extra weight is just causing your calfs to be huge.

Instead of focusing on getting skinny, I started focusing on getting strong. All of a sudden diet was a supplemental tool to this goal, and not the main thing. I just made sure to eat more protein, and if I had a "bad day" of eating, I chalked it up to my body having more energy to synthesize new muscle :) Before a bad day would "undo" days of suffering on an energy deficit, and I would just give up. But if you frame it as: look, you have struggled your entire life to be 'thin', when in reality, your ability to be obese was a hidden superpower. Stop fighting it and lift weights, you were probably _made_ for this!

In this context I'm weirdly happy with my genetics? there are so many "hard gainers" that do everything in their power to put on 10bs so they can gain muscle. I'm gaining muscle without hardly trying. How many other obese, inactive people are like me and would respond amazingly to resistance training ALONE as well?

I focused on strength training and protein for a long time when I started, that was fun and easy, and my body composition started to change. Then I started to notice the changes, and now I have purposeful short-duration "cuts" in my routine and it seems like at some point I'll eventually not be obese.

Just trying to say that I wonder what would happen if people were told, "hey, you don't need to diet right now, just come in and train twice a week and eat more protein". Of course "energy toxicity" is absolutely real, but lean body mass can improve health markers A LOT before worrying about that.

[shepherdjerred]

This is really interesting. The idea of intentionally putting on weight terrifies me because I worked so hard in college to lose weight.

What does your plan look like long-term? Are you just going to keep gaining muscle and working out for the rest of your life, or do you plan to stop?

Obviously your TDEE is going to go up with more muscle. I wonder if there's a stable point where you can eat a 'normal' (read: not protein heavy) diet while working out, so that muscle is only maintained.

[haywood]

For the first 6 months I basically didn't worry too much about diet, except getting more protein and working extremely hard on my two workouts (which has since expanded to 3 workouts a week).

What happened was I put on a ton of muscle, and actually lost some weight... in the end I was 12lbs lighter, which doesn't seem like a lot but with the amount of muscle is EXTREMELY noticeable.

For me, seeing my body get more stronger and more muscular was a revelation, it's really fun to see the growth in those areas, much more than suffering to get "skinny fat". So now I'm actually working 4-6 week stints of weight loss into my program where I target 2lbs of fat loss week, while keeping the training intensity high (with lower volume to combat fatigue) to maintain the muscle I have built. I'll follow that with 2-3 months of maybe a slight surplus in calories to build (which comes with some fat gain). A few cycles of that and I'll be golden :)

From a health span and longevity standpoint, having lean body muscle is absolutely crucial for aging, and it's something I plan to not stop doing, even if I fall off the nutrition wagon completely, I'll at least be increasing my bone density and muscle mass which will counteract a lot of whatever bad food habits I'm doing at the time.

The cool thing about muscle vs just pure weight loss, is that muscle isn't super hard to maintain once you have it. The amount of stimulus you need to keep the muscle, especially in an energy balance or surplus environment is surprisingly small it turns out. So to me it's much more rewarding than a crash diet that can be completely erased and then-some in a matter of months.

I wish I had this frame of mind a long time ago, it has personally helped me tremendously.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

I too found this valuable, I dropped 15-20kg doing this 5 years ago and slowly put it back on due to health problems. I’ve found recently that even cardio works - if I exercise, I don’t want to waste the effort by eating shitty food, if I do have a bad day or two (Xmas period) then it feels like a bank loan I must pay off before the interest kicks in.