For the purpose of nutrition and training, the body is composed of 3 variables that are what we manipulate with our efforts in the gym and the kitchen.
It’s fundamental to understand, at the very least, which ones they are and how they fluctuate through time to objectively evaluate that scale in the bathroom (or wherever you have it), and be able to discern between the weight that we care and the one we don’t, and truly comprehend what’s going on!
So first, let’s take a look at them and briefly check out what they are.
Body composition
Lean body mass (LBM)
Listed first because it’s the most important, this component of our body refers to our bones, organs and muscle tissue. As we can see, muscle tissue is, in the LBM, the only one we can manipulate through nutrition and training.
That’s why when we talk about LBM we mean muscles, the ones that give us that greek god(dess) look that we all want. So we will call them muscles from now on.
Body fat or adipose tissue
Generally speaking there are two types of body fat: Brown Adipose Tissue and White Adipose Tissue. Brown adipose tissue is irrelevant for this article, and has no impact for our purposes in a diet.
White adipose tissue can be further subdivided into: visceral, subcutaneous and essential.
But for simplicity’s sake and practical purposes we’ll simply call it fat, because it’s the part that we are interested in (and we can) manipulating for health and appearance intentions.
Water
“Lose 10lbs in a week with this revolutionary diet of delicious and natural shakes”
We’ve all heard about these diets, seen them in magazines, watched the commercials, and of course they plague the internet. And they work, the disappointment is in what and the how.
Remember that we are mainly made out of water, and that water can be manipulated to a degree through hydration methods; sodium, glycogen, and other compounds that that promote either hydration or dehydration. For this reason is that the scale can vary so much from one day to another. More details below.
There’s another variable worth mentioning, gut content. Depending on the types of food one consumes, we may be holding several pounds in there, which after a diet change will increase/decrease.
Fitting the pieces
So, we can sum up that we have three components that are: muscles, fat, and water. Now that we know the elements that make up our body we can go on to understand how we can vary them
The vast majority of people want (and should, with some exceptions) lose fat, gain muscle, and don’t misinterpret the fluctuations of water.
It’s that simple, and the confusion of which we’re gaining or losing can be big for impatient people. If there’s anything that successful people have in this world is: patience and consistency.
Now, how do we know in which way we gain one or the other? This is a good point to begin, understanding what needs to be done to gain or lose each.
Muscle
To gain muscle tissue we have to subject the muscles to a strength stimulus, that will generate an appropriate metabolic response. This is typically done with resistance exercises, what we call weightlifting.
This, along with a calorie surplus diet (in general) and sufficient protein, is going to generate the proper environment to synthetize new muscle through time.
To lose muscle in general (I can’t think of any reason someone would want this, except Christian Bale in The Machinist) you would have to stop strength training, do a lot of cardio, and couple it with a calorie deficit that includes very little protein. Advice: don’t do it.
Fat
To gain fat you only have to eat a calorie surplus, this excess in general terms will be converted to fat through time as well.
This is without considering resistance exercises that, as I mentioned before, makes that some of that surplus be used to create more muscle. That way (albeit simplified) you guarantee that the majority of what you eat in excess is converted to fat.
To lose fat, same as with muscle, you only need to create a calorie deficit that will force your body to use it as energy.
For these reasons is that, on average, someone is either losing or gaining weight. When we dedicate ourselves for a time, to one thing or the other, we see those results as long as there is consistency.
And water? You may ask.
Well, the fluctuations that we see in the short term (between days mostly) in any of the cases, are due to water and hydration. And to understand this in more details, let’s get to the next section.
Understanding the gaining rates
Muscle
We can’t really gain lots of muscle naturally, there is a limit on how much we can synthesize muscle tissue in a given period of time. This makes sense, as building it is a costly process for the body all in all.
Assuming that we are taking care of all the elements in a decent enough training program, a well-planned diet, really good genetics, and experience in weightlifting (benefiting the beginner), it seems that the maximum amount we can expect to grow is around 2lbs a month.
This obviously excludes being on gear, hormones and steroid use truly skews things up. Now, don’t let this discourage you, to the contrary if you are a beginner, you have an awesome first year transformation waiting for you.
2lbs may seem little on the scale, but the changes in appearance are more noticeable, especially as the months pass by.
Fat
On the other side, gaining bodyfat is going to depend of our net calorie intake in direct contrast to our energy expenditure, which in turn will depend on our metabolism, and this varies from person to person.
To put this in perspective, let’s do a little math:
1 pound of fat has approximately 3500Kcal. That is, simplifying, that we need to eat 3500Kcal in excess to gain a pound of adipose tissue (assuming that all calories are being stored as fat, which is not always the case).
For those nerds like me, that are wondering why 3500Kcal and not ~4100Kcal, since 1gr of fat has 9Kcal, the answer lies in that adipose tissue is made up of more than fatty acids, in a fat cell there is water and other trace biological machinery. Yeah, moving on…
If someone has, for the sake of simplicity, a daily maintenance of 2000Kcal, he/she would need to eat 500Kcal in excess every day to gain 1lb of fat a week, so about 2500Kcal total every day.
This at the end of the month would be around 4lbs of fat gain. The fat gain will then depend mainly on the amount of excess we have on average in the span of weeks.
It can be as extremist as it’s humanly possible, or subtle as the months go by, but in a real sense, a couple of pounds a month is pretty common in many cases where there’s a disinhibited change in the diet.
Once again, this assumes that the person is NOT weight training, when we add this to a weekly routine, some of those extra calories are going to be used to regenerate and build muscle tissue, not fat.
Side note: the calculations in terms of calorie consumption are not exact as I explain above, we have complex metabolisms, and the variability of response in each of us, to a deficit or surplus, is big and appreciable.
But this being something completely individual, the explanation stands as an applicable generalization that we can agree to be a good predictor, and ends up being very precise. In the end, nothing beats good tracking practices to assess real life changes.
Water
Lastly, the changes in water weight can be drastic and in very short periods of time. It depends on hydration, muscle glycogen, and water retention in general.
In the age of low carb diets, fluctuation in water is pretty common, so much that is used as a marketing scam. Carbs provide the body with glycogen, which is stored in the liver and muscles.
Every gram of glycogen stored binds 3 grams of water; inversely, every gram of carb used releases 3 grams of water. A little more math:
Assuming that someone, through a low carb diet and some exercise, drains some 500gr of glycogen, we now know that along with it they will be releasing 1500gr of water, that’s over 4lbs of weight! And this is feasible in only two days or even less.
But then again, these 4lbs are not fat at all, 25% is glycogen and the other 75% water.
In the same way, when carbs are resumed in the diet (a party night, for example, when you decide to be human, enjoy and eat some sweets and other carb goodies), the weight comes back or even goes over, given that the body tends to overcompensate a bit more.
The next day you step on the scale, realize that having some fun the night before gave you 5 pounds of weight, decide your diet sucks and that you ruined it in one night, you say fuck this and go open a box of cookies and some ice cream.
And all along it was water playing with your mind.
The interesting thing is that none of that was fat (alright, maybe a bit if you went crazy in the party and decided to eat half the table), and to a degree those carbs that you reintroduced to your body were important to maintain good performance at the gym.
Now, sodium intake affects water retention and hydration; alcohol has some diuretic effects; coffee does the same (according to some), and some food supposedly have these effects as well. Women, thanks to their menstrual cycle, tend to have fluctuations in water throughout the month as an added bonus.
On top of all of this, there is an effect where, people who are losing fat, fat cells fill up with water after their fatty acids have been released, another way to retain water, and after a couple of days or weeks there is an emptying overnight, and suddenly we lose weight.
Bottom line: Water retention can be annoying and confusing when tracking weight.
Solving
So, let’s put in perspective this whole deal of bodyweight, gaining rates, types of fluctuation and show what we can expect from each in the span of days, weeks and months.
To illustrate this, let’s make some estimates based on someone that weighs 190lbs (I will omit a lot of factors in these calculations just to make it practical) to see how much weight can change on each component.
Muscle:
- Gain: 2lbs a month or 0.5lbs a week (again, with appropriate diet and training).
- Loss: 2-4lbs a month or 0.5-1lbs a week, maybe a bit more (with an aggressive calorie deficit, marginal diet, and no resistance training, a terrible idea).
Fat:
- Gain: Assuming a considerable surplus, 8-10lbs a month or roughly 2 pounds a week (I’m sure even more depending on one’s capacity to eat in absolute excess, a bizarre case).
- Loss: 8-10lbs a month or 2lbs+ a week (with a harsh calorie deficit that may carry more risks and negative effects than benefits, some cases may be the exception, like obese people, but in general population this idea applies).
Water:
- Gain and loss: 0-15lbs in a couple of days or more.
I think this gives a good idea of the capacity to lose/gain one component or the other given some extreme circumstances. Even then, the amount of fat and muscle we can gain or lose in days or even weeks is pretty low compared to water.
So, when you see the scale go up or down dramatically between days, don’t drown in a glass of water.
Thanks for reading, questions are always welcomed in the comments.
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