[tertia]

"Finally, muscle mass is far from enough to be an effective metabolic regulator. While I have yet to meet anyone who runs 100 miles a week and is overweight, it's not uncommon to find that someone who benches 500lbs still carries a gut. I myself have gained a great deal of both fat and muscle since my school years when I was a runner."

1. Take an equal amount of fat vs muscle: which will burn more calories? Muscle, obviously. 2. People who bench 500lbs are not that common, and those that are are probably power-lifters, not body-builders. There's a big difference. Power-lifters are more apt to gain 'dirty weight' (meaning fat included with the muscle) to help them drive ever-higher PRs.

[xiaoma]

Of course, muscle requires more food to maintain than fat does. I think you missed the point.

What I was saying was that merely building muscle doesn't do much in terms of cutting down body fat. Muscle burns calories, but people with more muscle also tend to eat more calories. This is even true of people who have extraordinary quantities of muscle.

Cardio, on the other hand, only works that way up to a point. People who do a bit of running also tend to compensate by eating more. However, after a certain level of volume, cardio starts to suppress the appetite to about what's needed to maintain the workload. This is probably why I've never seen anyone, including myself, manage to keep the weight on after getting over about 70 miles/week (about the level of an ambitious high school cross-country runner).