Muscle doent weigh more than fat, thats a myth a pound of fat weighs the sames as a pound of muscle. When i was at weight watchers one of our meetings was about diet myths x
Sort of. Mark is also correct. But as with most things there's a bit more to it......
Muscle is actually
denser than fat as it contains less water, so although a pound of anything weighs the same as a pound of anything else, a pound of muscle takes up less space than a pound of fat.
There are a couple of muscle/fat things that you need to consider if you are doing a VLCD.
The first is that if you don't do resistance exercise you will lose muscle as well as fat. This particularly applies if you do a lot of cardio (stuff that makes you sweaty and out of breath and gets your heart pounding) cos this burns both but on a VLCD you won't be eating sufficient amounts of protein to replace the lost muscle. However, it also applies if you do no exercise at all. The more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism and the quicker you lose weight. So by overdoing the cardio (or not doing any exercise) it's quite likely that you will actually sabotage your diet by slowing down your metabolism..........
If you base your exercise, especially in the early days, on resistance and strength training you will burn fat and build muscle. This can have a few effects on your diet. More muscle will boost your metabolism and help speed your loss. BUT there's the weight/mass thing to consider as well.
If you convert fat to muscle then for the same
volume (not weight) of muscle that you had of fat you will have the same measurements and weigh a bit more. In other words if you weigh more and haven't lost any inches you have probably built up some muscle and will see a better loss over the coming weeks cos you will have boosted your metabolism. For the same
weight of muscle as you had fat it should take up less space so you should see some inchloss.
Everybody is different and your body will do this conversion from fat to muscle in its own unique way. You need to measure your inches (and if possible your body fat and muscle percentages) to see how it will work for you.
Some people can excercise quite vigorously on a VLCD with no ill effects and it helps their loss, others (unfortunately the majority of us from what I have read) can't.
So basically there's no one answer to this, as with so many things it will vary in each individual. You need to find out by experimenting what works for you and go with that in terms of how much and what sort of exercise to do.
Resistance exercise is easy to do and you don't need any special equipment. Squats, lunges, situps, pressups will all help. Here's a link to get you started:
Easy Exercises - Work every major muscle group in your body
Hope this helps.
