gosh dang word limit. to continue
Now that you've seen these data, I think that the take-home message for dieting should be as follows.
1. Always use exercise in conjunction with diet to promote loss of fat and preservation of lean mass.
2. Always consider your initial body fat before deciding how severe your diet should be.
3. When starting a diet with a high level of body fat, your diet can be more restrictive and/or severe since you will lose the fat preferentially.
4. As you diet and get leaner, you should adjust your calorie deficit so that it is actually smaller. So if you start a diet eating 1000 calories below maintenance, as you get leaner, your daily deficit should decrease to 500 calories per day.
5. If you don't decrease your calorie deficit as you lose fat, you will begin to lose an unacceptable amount of lean mass.
Weight Gain Experiments
In several experiments, subjects were overfed to varying degrees in order to produce weight gain. Here are the results of these experiments, which have shown that when overfed, initial body fat level is also important:
Initial Body Fat Caloric Intake Lean Mass Gained (% of Weight Gained) Fat Gained (% of Weight Gained)
10 kg (22 lbs) Overfeeding 70% 30%
20 kg (44 lbs) Overfeeding 30% 70%
40 kg (88 lbs) Overfeeding 20% 80%
These striking differences in the ratio of LBM gained to fat gained illustrate the need to start an overeating phase while lean. In the leanest subjects, there was a 2 1/3 pound muscle gain for every 1 pound of fat gained. However, for the fatter subjects, 4 pounds of fat were gained for every 1 pound of muscle gained.
From these overfeeding studies, it's clear that lean individuals gain less fat and more muscle when overfeeding when compared to their fatter counterparts. Since these subjects were not exercise trained, adding exercise would have probably lead to a shift toward more muscle gain with less fat gain. Exercise has a nutrient partitioning effect, shuttling nutrients preferentially toward the lean tissues. As such, you'd expect more lean gain during exercise training and overfeeding. However, either way, the trends would probably remain and fatter subjects would gain more fat during overfeeding than lean individuals.
One of the coolest things about this article is that a predicative equation was generated that allows us to calculate the amount of muscle and the amount of fat that we can expect to gain, based on our initial fat weight. Check it out.
Lean Mass Gain / Weight Gain = 10.4 / (10.4 + initial fat weight (kg) )
In addition, this very same equation is valid when dieting for the prediction of muscle loss and fat loss.
Lean Mass Loss / Weight Loss = 10.4 / (10.4 + initial fat weight (kg) )
While not flawless, these equations are handy tools for estimating how much LBM and fat you may gain or lose when underfeeding or overfeeding. In addition, they allow us to decide whether it's a good time to try to bulk up or not.
Therefore, for someone who is 92 kg (200 lbs) and 5% body fat (4.6kg fat), about 70% of the weight gained during an overfeeding phase can be expected to be lean body mass (10.4 divided by 10.4 plus 4.6 is equal to 0.70), while the remaining 30% is expected to be fat weight. However in someone who is 92kg and 10% body fat (9.2kg of fat), 53% of weight gained will be lean body mass.
Keep in mind that the opposite is also true. If you're 92 kg (200 lbs) and 5% body fat (4.6% fat), about 70% of the weight lost during a dieting phase can be expected to be lean body mass.
So perhaps a good idea is to only overfeed when relatively lean and to diet hard only when over fat. If you're 200 lbs and around 10-15% body fat, these equations predict that about half the weight you gain will be fat and half will be muscle. If you try to gain when fatter than 15%, much of the weight you gain will be fat mass.
I must offer a word of caution, though. Remember that these equations were mostly generated using diet alone. The addition of weight training and cardio would have changed things up a bit. In addition, these numbers may be different if supplements are used. Some supplements change nutrient partitioning parameters (alpha-lipoic acid, fish oils, presumably Methoxy-7, etc); others preserve lean body mass when dieting (ephedrine, caffeine, etc); and others increase protein synthesis (anabolic steroids and androgens). Any of these factors can change the exact ratios.
However, as I said before, the basic principles remain. When dieting, the leaner you get, the less your calorie deficit should be or else you'll lose more LBM than necessary. And, when bulking up, your best bet is to start lean, as most of the weight you gain will be LBM. If you start fat, much of your weight gain will be fat gain.
Although this was a roundabout way of answering your question, the bottom line is that it looks like it is better to diet down first then bulk up rather than the other way around.
this was from john berardi off his website
