Spinning Too Many Plates
Some Right Ways and Wrong Ways to Lose Weight
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
The first time I laid down on a bench press, I was in high school, about 16 or so. I had gotten pretty good at doing pushups from doing martial arts for a couple of years (for some reason, they always had us doing plenty of push-ups), and I felt confident that there was some translation in the strength to bench press. Naturally, I was curious to see what I could do. I worked my way up to 135 lbs., which is the bar plus a single 45-lbs. plate on either side, which was a big deal for teenage boys, a serious coming-of-age moment, much like that first kiss or the first time behind the wheel. I was able to squeeze out 8 reps. I felt good, and it all felt solid, which is what I’d now call having integrity. The foundation was there. The last couple of reps got a little slow, and it got difficult, but I felt capable.
Flash forward more than 15 years [1]. I had worked my bench press into the 300s. It wasn’t something I maintained. It came and went, but what I could maintain was being able to easily do double digits reps with 225. I may have had a modicum of strength, but I was very overweight.
I started dropping weight at the very beginning of 2019. I changed the way I ate which allowed me to create a sizeable energy deficit without being too hungry. I had a ways to go, so I kept at it. I was working out and lifting weights the entire time. After a few months, though, I noticed that my strength was starting to stagnate. Then, it began to regress. Weights were getting heavier, and I was losing reps on exercise sets.
One year after starting my journey, I was still at it. During my weight loss, I hit my skinniest and lightest during the shutdowns of the pandemic, when gyms closed, and we gym-goers had to take a break from lifting weights. Where I live, in Texas, the shutdowns came a little later than other states and cities and didn’t quite last as long.
Still, it was less than two months in total that I had a layoff from weight training because I was unable to work out in a gym. Like most people, I didn’t have any workout equipment of my own, but the small gym I went to was actually lending out some gear. I was able to borrow two dumbbells—one 35 and one 50-pounder. I did as much as I could, along with body weight exercises, but I could tell pretty quickly that I was just not accumulating the work volume and the intensity that I had been prior to the shutdowns. My strength had already been on a downward trend because I had been overdieted—too energy restricted—for several months already, and, like everyone else, I was unprepared for the transition, so I was not able to maintain the same level of stimulus to my muscles without my usual routine.
I did, however, continue dieting during the shutdowns. All over the news were stories about people gaining weight. Not me. I kept dropping weight. I was actually hitting new territory. It was even coming a bit faster, and I wasn’t exactly sure why. Happy enough with the “progress”, I rolled with it, even though I wasn’t seeing my body change the way I was hoping.
In May of 2020, when the gyms reopened, one of the first things I did was hit the bench press. I remember this day vividly. It was 7:30 am and already stuffy from the near-summer morning heat, and I was excited to go to a gym. It was actually one that I had never been to. (I had joined a gym where we can go to different club locations.) I was the only one in there for most of the time. Inside the club, the refrigerated AC was cool and comfortable.
Alone, I laid down on the bench and warmed up with the bar. I worked up to 135 lbs.—again, that’s the bar and a single 45 lbs. plate on each side—which at this point should have been part of my warmup. Even considering the layoff, the lift off the rack was unexpectedly heavy. Three reps in, I knew I was in trouble. It wasn’t the proper moment to analyze the situation, but I could feel a lack of integrity, like my body had forgotten how to handle a heavy load. I almost put it back after the fourth rep, but I grinded out two more reps—yes, grinded—before barely getting it back on the rack. I sat up, huffing and perplexed, wondering what the hell had just happened. The first time I did this weight, when I was a completely untrained teen, I did eight reps, but now, I had barely gotten out of six. And here I was pushing 40 and felt like I had struggled more than when I had lifted over 300 lbs. a few years earlier.
As I said, my strength had already been steadily declining throughout my weight loss, which was a concession I was willing to make. I thought, quite presumptuously, that I would just build it back up later—after the diet and the weight loss, which I had no idea of when that might be. I had had cycles of gaining and losing modest amounts of strength plenty of times, and I was confident that I could get it back. But this current level of low-strength—this level of weakness—was new territory. I had reached a point that was far beyond the downward trend that I had been experiencing. I had gotten weaker unexpectedly and surprisingly fast. Honestly, it was scary.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I had learned more about how the body responds to dieting and realized some of the errors of my ways.
Bodybuilders refer to dieting down as “cutting”, which is how I like to think of it also. A “diet” has different interpretations, timetables, and can be confused with dietary patterns: mediterranean, keto, vegetarian, and so on. A cut, however, is a calculated, finite period with a specific target in mind. For bodybuilders, it’s usually a look and not simply a number on the scale. If anything, bodybuilders track bodyweight so that they have a proxy of their desired look, what that look parallels on the scale.
Bodybuilders focus on their look because the body has a way of masking our true weight changes. If you don’t currently weigh yourself regularly and then start to, you’ll notice that your scale weight fluctuates from day to day, but within a given week, as long as you’re not eating or doing anything extraordinarily different, you should see a range of a couple of pounds if you’re more or less weight stable.
Also, bodybuilders like to track how their look changes at a given bodyweight. If everything goes well from one year to the next or from one competition to another, a bodybuilder hopes to be slightly more muscular and slightly leaner at any particular bodyweight. This change reflects one’s body composition, the ratio of fat tissue to non-fat tissue. Fat tissue is obvious, but the non-fat, referred to as fat-free mass (FFM) or lean body mass (LBM), includes bone, connective tissue, the weight of organs and blood. Even hydration levels will add to a person’s FFM.
Tangent: When you hear about certain actors gaining 20 or 30 lbs. of muscle in a matter of months for roles, most of that is categorized as FFM, but muscle it ain’t. Yeah, maybe they’ve gained that much bodyweight, that much scale weight, but most of that is hydration (water), stored carbohydrates—called glycogen—and the weight of additional food in the gut. It could also be that they’ve used inaccurate methods of tracking these changes and/or are listening to people who don’t know the difference. (It’s more marketing.) To put on even ten pounds of muscle in a few months might be possible but not really practical or realistic, at least not naturally anyway. You’d have to be in a hard energy surplus to maximize the situation for that kind of muscle gain, most likely be a novice and untrained, and most other things would also have to be optimal: stress, sleep, recovery, protein intake, not to mention training would have to be on point, providing the optimal stimulus.
I will always proselytize for the virtues of resistance training for overall health and fitness, but if you really want lose weight the right way, you need to lift.
Anyone who advocates a “diet”—that is, any way of eating that puts you in an energy deficit that results in weight loss, a “cut” as we’ve referred to—that does not also advocate you doing some form of resistance training should, from my not-so-humble position about all of this, be avoided.
If you get into an energy deficit and don’t regularly challenge your muscles, your body will pare down your muscles during that deficit. The more pronounced and/or the longer the deficit, the more muscle you can expect to lose.
It’s wild.
Fortunately, there’s a lot in the weight loss literature to elucidate all of this.
In one paper that reviewed protein sparing [2]—that is, muscle-sparing—therapies in obese individuals on weight loss diets, the authors highlighted some of the literature on weight loss and its impact on body composition, such as a 1967 study that followed participants on 16 days of total fasting (without exercise). Using densitometry to track body comp changes, the study found that, of all the weight these poor folks lost, less than 15% of it was from adipose tissue. The math is simple: the remaining weight loss came from FFM.
After two weeks of not eating, however much weight is lost, I’m sure we’d all want more than 15% of it to be from fat. Also, this would be a negative change in body composition, meaning that you would effectively carry nearly the same amount of fat weight, but now you would have much less lean mass, which is the primary determinant in your metabolic rate, which affects how much you can eat to remain at a certain body weight. If you were to have a moderate energy deficit for two weeks, and the inverse were true—losing 15% of FFM—I’d still say that you were being too aggressive. If you were cutting for several months, a 15% reduction in lean mass is on the order of what you should expect, but that’s after several months.
Another systematic review and meta-analysis of some of the weight loss literature [3] examined the effects of dieting in different conditions, such as: in isolation; in concert with endurance exercise, that is, cardio work; and in concert with resistance training. The analysis focused on adults from 18 to 65. Unsurprisingly, this analysis found that FFM retention was strongest among dieters who regularly did resistance training as they dieted. These folks outperformed dieters doing endurance training and even outperformed those doing endurance and resistance training. However, all of these groups did better than just the dieters at retaining lean mass.
In yet another review of the weight loss literature [4], researchers covered a lot of territory, including “diets” or “cuts” that don’t use a reduction in energy/food intake for weight loss but rather inducing it through exercise activity. Even cardio exercise will mitigate the reduction in FFM compared to energy restriction on its own. Resistance training pretty much protects against any losses in lean mass. Even adding exercise to a large energy deficit will be protective: “Exercise added to a low-calorie diet program appears to have similar body composition effects to those observed in the non-diet exercise studies: increases in relative fat loss and no change or a reduction in FFM losses.”
All this may seem counterintuitive. Muscle is not easy to build and is important for health and fitness. So why would the body get rid of it in energy restricted conditions?
Beyond a certain amount, a very minimal amount, muscle is not essential. In fact, it’s an extravagance. The body would prefer to use the limited and therefore more valuable energy that it does have to power what is essential: the brain and nervous system, the cardiovascular system, the liver and the kidneys. The body effectively downsizes during energy deficits. And if you’ve gone too hard for too long, the body will preferentially take any surplus energy when it does come in and put it right towards the long-term savings: more fat.
If you want to lose weight, you probably want to drop body fat and only body fat. If you lose muscle proportionally to fat weight, you’ll just look like a smaller version of your current self, which you may be okay with, but as you reduce lean mass, you reduce your metabolic rate, which means that you’ll need to eat less to maintain that now smaller body. If you start eating more, you easily gain fat. Now you are fatter and carry less muscle. If you go through a couple of cycles of this as with yo-yo dieting, each cycle effectively results in you having less lean mass, and as weight regain is a sure thing with unskilled dieters, you’ll also become fatter.
It sucks. Believe me. I’ve been there.
If you go way too hard with an energy deficit too soon and/or for too long, you might just be burning through muscle, like I did during the shutdowns, which will also reduce your metabolic rate, decreasing energy needs, and you’ll get weak. During the latter half of my weight loss, I probably experienced a lifetime of muscle mass loss, most of which from the two months during the shutdowns when I was not lifting adequately and still dieting too aggressively.
It took me a couple of years to build it back. And it was not easy, especially at first.
If, however, you drop body fat and maintain lean mass, that’s what will give you the shape and look you’re after. You’ll have a larger ratio of muscle to fat, which will create more surface area for the fat you do have to cover. That means you can actually carry a bit more fat but look leaner. It allows your metabolism to stay where it is and therefore also allows you to maintain eating a satisfying amount of food for energy.
To protect against fat-free/lean mass losses during energy restriction—during cuts, which should be targeted and limited and finite—you need to lift weights.
If you’re new to lifting weights, know that it doesn’t matter much what you do or how much or little.
Just go somewhere where you can push, pull, or move something heavy, that is, heavy for you. Do it a few times. Take a break for a couple of minutes. Do it again. Repeat. Be sure to hit all of the major muscles, and do it at least twice a week. That’ll get you most of the way there. You can streamline things as you go, learn, and get better.
And especially do it if you’re deliberately restricting food and purposefully trying to lose body fat.
First, though, as always, my advice is to establish your baselines first: how and what you eat and how you move and how often you do it.
If you drop weight before mastering your baseline and maintenance, you’ll likely achieve some success, but will you be able to maintain it? When your baseline’s on autopilot, then you’re ready to attempt a cut.
Maintaining a weight is one kind of skill. Cutting is another kind. Trying to drop weight and body fat before you’ve nailed your maintenance is asking too much of yourself too soon, trying to learn too many different things simultaneously—trying to spin too many plates at once.
One of the first steps to achieving the body and health you want is being patient.
Another first step is to go lift something heavy.
Correction: upon first publishing this, I had written: “Flash forward 30 years.” It’d be cool to be pushing 50 and benching in the 300s, but I’m not quite there yet.
Thomas, Dylan, Istfan, Nawfal, Bistrian, Bruce, and Apovian, Caroline. “Protein Sparing Therapies in Acute Illness and Obesity: A Review of George Blackburn’s Contributions to Nutrition Science”. Metabolism. 2018 February; 79: 83–96. doi:10.1016/j.metabol.2017.11.020.
Clark, James. “Diet, exercise or diet with exercise: comparing the effectiveness of treatment options for weight-loss and changes in fitness for adults (18–65 years old) who are overfat, or obese; systematic review and meta-analysis”. Journal of Diabetes & Metabolic Disorders (2015). 14:31 DOI 10.1186/s40200-015-0154-1.
Heymsfield, Steven. Gonzalez, Cristina, Shen, Wei, Redman, Leanne, and Thomas, Diana. “Weight Loss Composition is One-Fourth Fat-Free Mass: A Critical Review and Critique of This Widely Cited Rule”. Obes Rev. 2014 April; 15(4): 310–321. doi:10.1111/obr.12143.
