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As a Marine who has gone through many, many building and leaning cycles, I call BS on this. When you drop that fat, you aren't actually losing muscular tissue (
by craftinator 7y ago
As a Marine who has gone through many, many building and leaning cycles, I call BS on this. When you drop that fat, you aren't actually losing muscular tissue (at least not much). I've gotten down to Olympian levels of body fat, 9-10%, and what you are losing besides the fat is water weight. Your muscles shrink because they hold in less blood; your body regulates this to keep blood pressure normalized with all the decrease in fatty tissues. At less that 8% (on average, for men at least), most bodies will start to break down and metabolize muscle tissues (started happening to me around 9%, and was NOT a fun experience).
- radicalbyte 7y agoI've always been a fat-ass (somewhere from 15-25% BF) so I've also never experienced considerable loss of muscle tissue (at least as far as the scales tell me) - however the body-builder club are at 6% body fat when cut and at what, 12-15% when bulking? They are absolutely going to metabolize muscle tissue when cutting.
- remarkEon 7y agoYeah, came here to say this (was in the Army). My experience is the same. When it started to happen you could actually smell it (smells like ammonia ... like cat urine, almost).
- eecc 7y agoThat’s ketosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis
- honestoHeminway 7y agoMore like aceton? Gummi-bears
- craftinator 7y agoTook me weeks to figure out what the heck that smell was; mostly assumed we'd gotten a bad batch of MRE's
- polishdude20 7y agoDid you continue to work out while cutting? Because that reduces the muscle lost. If you're an average joe and you're starving yourself, your muscle will reduce comparably to fat.
- radicalbyte 7y agoAs long as I'm able to lift weights I lift weights. I've never cut significantly though, I'm happy with 15% body fat as a lower bounds - I look good, feel good and am strong at that weight. Maybe I'll try to drop to 12% to see if I can do it sometime, but I'm a long way from that right now (our third kid is 5 months old so I'm back to being a fat-ass).
- craftinator 7y agoI continued to do physical activity. I think your muscles will "shrivel" if you don't use them; they won't be engorged with blood on a regular basis, thus will lose plasticity at a cellular level. Then when you do use them, they'll fill with less blood, and look smaller. It takes a lot to actually lose muscular tissue. Mostly people just lose muscular plasticity, and they appear smaller.