[crazygringo]

If you're "cutting" as part of bulking and cutting, then obviously.

But if you're going from obese to healthy, then your goal isn't to retain all your leg muscle, that's absurd. Your goal is to get to a healthy weight with overall balanced healthy muscle -- not disproportionately large legs.

Nothing is "strictly superior". What is best depends on what your goals are. Bodybuilding and not being obese any more involve wildly different measures of success.

[cthalupa]

If we didn't see tons of people reaching their "target weight" on GLP-1 drugs while having unhealthily low levels of lean body mass, you might have a point.

But that is what we do see. I'd argue that they're still in a better place than they were before, and we know that muscle that has been lost recently grows back very quickly when exposed to stimulus and adequate protein and rest, so I absolutely am a full believer in GLP-1 medications.

But if everyone on GLP-1 meds were keeping up with their protein and resistance training, even leg day, there would be very very few that had huge legs. That one portion of their body might be, on average, more muscular than a totally untrained individual, but it's not like being fat is the equivalent of a low bf% bodybuilder when it comes to lower body muscle mass. A formerly 300lb person dropping down to 180 with average genetics is almost certainly going to have smaller legs than someone who has been lifting for a year at the same height/weight.

[sn9]

No this is absurd.

The goal for anyone obese is to lose as much fat as sustainably possible.

For any given rate of weight loss, losing a higher proportion of body fat is always better.

This notion of "balanced" healthy muscle is one you've made up that no one else thinks of. I've been on fitness forums for well over a decade and have literally never seen a single case of this.

[crazygringo]

> The goal for anyone obese is to lose as much fat as sustainably possible.

Correct.

> For any given rate of weight loss, losing a higher proportion of body fat is always better.

That is in direct contradiction to your previous sentence. No, losing the higher absolute amount of body fat is better. While being sustainable healthy.

> I've been on fitness forums for well over a decade and have literally never seen a single case of this.

You may be on the wrong forums then. Most forums don't think all your days should be leg days.

[sn9]

> That is in direct contradiction to your previous sentence. No, losing the higher absolute amount of body fat is better. While being sustainable healthy.

This isn't in any way a contradiction if you're mathematically literate. If the highest rate of weight loss is some rate R, and losing weight without preserving muscle has you losing 0.5R muscle and 0.5R fat, losing R fat and 0 muscle is literally going to lose you more fat at the same rate. This is middle school math, and is literally what anyone who knows what they're talking about suggests, and is validated in the research.

> You may be on the wrong forums then. Most forums don't think all your days should be leg days.

Oh good more shit you've made up. No where did I suggest this. If you're going to engage in bad faith, go away.

Any well-rounded strength program will preserve muscle mass in a cut. You only need to work every muscle twice per week. No leg emphasis needed.

[crazygringo]

> if you're mathematically literate

No insults, please. I'm sure that if you have good arguments, you won't need to resort to that kind of attitude. And the fact that you're resorting to swearing later in your comment doesn't help you.

> If the highest rate of weight loss is some rate R

That's not a valid precondition. Nobody chooses a rate to lose weight at, and then magically chooses some proportion of fat vs muscle. What actually happens is that you lose fat through eating less calories, and you naturally lose muscle from using your leg muscles less by putting less weight on them, because you weigh less.

> No where did I suggest this.

You did. You literally said:

> This notion of "balanced" healthy muscle is one you've made up

You are arguing that one should preserve all of the leg muscle for a 300 lb body, even once you're 180 lbs. Again, that's absurd. That's going to take a far disproportionate amount of time at the gym on your legs to maintain. You say "No leg emphasis needed." That's completely and utterly false.

You are talking about bulking and cutting for strength training. But you already have a balanced body, I'm assuming. This conversation, on the other hand, is about obese people losing weight. Their muscles are disproportionately in their legs. Do you get that now? Do you understand the concept of a balanced distribution of muscle and strength, e.g. between arms and legs? Or since you're so concerned about having a conversation at a "middle school" level, do you need it explained in even simpler terms?

[hollerith]

>you naturally lose muscle from using your leg muscles less by putting less weight on them, because you weigh less.

That is one cause of muscle loss, but there is a more important factor: when running a calorie deficit, the body removes protein from muscle so that it can turn the protein into glucose for energy. The human body preferentially gets fuel (calories to use to fight infections, digest food, and do the other things needed just to stay alive) from muscle (as opposed to getting it from fat) during times of not-enough-food because it takes more energy (fuel) to keep muscle cells alive than it takes to keep fat cells alive.

We evolved in an environment in which the body had no way to know whether the time of not-enough-food would last so long that it would lead to death. In that scenario, the policy that maximizes the probability of survival is to disassemble most of the muscles first and only then to start to disassemble the fat in the fat cells.

Corollary: most people on weight-loss diets should regularly exercise their muscles especially if they are elderly (because the elderly find it hard or impossible to regain the muscle once it is lost) and should consume a decent amount of protein.

Having a large amount of muscle mass doesn't make you live longer (as far as I know): the case for striving to preserve muscle mass during the aging process is that it gives a higher quality of life.

[sn9]

> No insults, please. I'm sure that if you have good arguments, you won't need to resort to that kind of attitude. And the fact that you're resorting to swearing later in your comment doesn't help you.

I have zero patience for intellectual dishonesty and made up claims as you've repeatedly done.

> That's not a valid precondition. Nobody chooses a rate to lose weight at, and then magically chooses some proportion of fat vs muscle. What actually happens is that you lose fat through eating less calories, and you naturally lose muscle from using your leg muscles less by putting less weight on them, because you weigh less.

Do you not know how thought experiments work? If you lose weight without strength training, you lose less fat and more muscle than if you lost weight while strength training. The numbers were chosen to illustrate that point, not to say those were precisely the numbers you'll see.

And of course it's entirely wrong that you lose muscle in your legs specifically because of the reduction in weight. You lose muscle everywhere you don't use it, which means a smaller proportion of your weight is lost as fat, which means it takes you longer to reach your target body composition.

> You are arguing that one should preserve all of the leg muscle for a 300 lb body, even once you're 180 lbs. Again, that's absurd. That's going to take a far disproportionate amount of time at the gym on your legs to maintain. You say "No leg emphasis needed." That's completely and utterly false.

This is yet more evidence of your complete ignorance of this topic and even what I've been suggesting. Your obsessive fear of having muscular legs blinds you to everything I've said.

Maintaining muscle mass takes far less work than building it. You literally only have to hit your muscles twice per week to do it, which could take anywhere as little as 1-3 hours per week of work if you know what you're doing.

You are objectively and empirically wrong about this and are only demonstrating how much you don't know about this topic.

> You are talking about bulking and cutting for strength training. But you already have a balanced body, I'm assuming. This conversation, on the other hand, is about obese people losing weight. Their muscles are disproportionately in their legs. Do you get that now? Do you understand the concept of a balanced distribution of muscle and strength, e.g. between arms and legs? Or since you're so concerned about having a conversation at a "middle school" level, do you need it explained in even simpler terms?

So much for no insults. Rules for thee and not for me seems like your motto.

If an obese person losing weight is worried about an imbalance, then the solution is not to let their legs atrophy to nothing but to increase the volume of the work for the muscles they fear are lagging so they can experience more growth and catch up, just like anyone else who has ever lifted weights.

These are extremely basic concepts in the field.

And lastly, a topic I should have mentioned earlier, anyone who follows your advice, which is clearly the advice of someone who neither knows what they're talking about nor the advice of someone with a healthy relationship with body image, will inevitably be increasing the risk and extent of lose skin if they avoid strength training. If you don't bother preserving muscle, not only will it take longer to reach your target body composition, you will have end up with less total tissue filling your skin and, short of surgery, you would have to build muscle to fill it up again to reduce or resolve the issue.

Your advice is objectively terrible, rooted in ignorance of basic fundamentals of the space, and will lead people to worse outcomes.

You should in no way be offering advice on this topic to anyone. You will only increase the chances that they give up as their journey takes longer and results in worse outcomes in terms of both health and aesthetics.