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> Unless you're a competitive weightlifter or similar, you're unlikely to see significant enough muscle loss with very significant calorie restriction over the

> Unless you're a competitive weightlifter or similar, you're unlikely to see significant enough muscle loss with very significant calorie restriction over the kind of time frames people would stick to very strict diets like that for it to matter much. I've always done weightlifting, although not competitively, as general support of the fitness regime (which may include other sports or not). What I've observed is that when a dieting cycle goes bad, a short time after the end of it (to allow glycogen and water levels to come back to normal), I end it with approximately the same weight before the start. If/when I observe an increase in measured fat (which happens most of the times, on bad diet cycles), then muscle mass went down.

vidarh 5y ago
If a diet ends up with little enough weight loss that you'll just bounce back to the same weight, the changes are small enough that I really doubt you can reliably say much about change in muscle mass. For me the bounce back at the end of a diet is pretty much always ~2kg, so a "loss" below 2kg is really not an actual loss, but easily accounted for by less fluid retention and less food in my system. Yes, you're likely to lose some, but again I'l stress: not much for it to matter much for most people. Especially when the point of comparison is not doing nothing but just dieting slower. You'll lose muscle mass while dieting slower too. I've seen little to indicate there's a particularly meaningful difference in proportion other than for pretty advanced lifters for whom a "meaningful" difference in loss is much smaller than for most people. When I was pushing my body to the max every week, then the difference mattered to me too. But most people are not there, or anywhere near those kinds of limits.