Continuing my series on fitness fallacies. I hate this one. HATE HATE HATE. It’s simply not a foregone conclusion. Let’s look at why this is.

Calories Alone Don’t Build Muscle

Simply put: You can’t eat your way to big muscles. You have to do resistance training. Otherwise, you could simply eat eat as much as you wanted, and your muscles would grow accordingly. Since we know that muscles do not grow only as a function of diet, why would it be true that a simple decrease in calories will rob you of your muscle?

Muscles Are a Function of Training

Muscle growth is simply a response to the stimulus of training. Similarly, muscle loss is a response to disuse. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. That’s exactly what happens to people that stop lifting, or break a bone and cannot use their muscles. It doesn’t matter how much they eat; if they aren’t training the muscle, it disappears.

How to Keep Your Gains

Lift. Lift hard. Whether you choose to do circuit training, or low-rep, heavy weight training, just use your muscles. The act of using them sends signals to your body that it needs to hang on to them. It is exceedingly difficult to lose muscle mass when you’re constantly using the muscles. Your body won’t want to rid itself of the muscle. I have experienced this myself when trying to cut a bit of leg mass. It was impossible to do, even on a severely calorie restricted diet, simply because I refused to stop running and playing soccer. I used the muscles, so they stuck around, no matter how much I wished otherwise.

Update: Just to be crystal clear here, if you don’t wish to lose muscle mass, you must maintain the volume, frequency and intensity that you used to obtain it in the first place. This is true regardless of whether or not you are on a diet. Even those people who aren’t on diets will lose muscle mass if they scale back workouts and don’t lift as hard or as frequently as was necessary to build their muscle to begin with.

Caveat

With all of that being said, it is possible to diet your way to less muscle. This happens when you diet so long and so hard that you simply cannot continue working out at the intensity you used to build the muscle. This is one reason that steroid users “deflate” when they stop using. They simply can’t keep up the training intensity that they had when they were on a cycle.

However, this takes a very long and sustained severe calorie deficit (of at least a few weeks, if not months). Simply cutting down to your BMR – 500 calories will still leave you with plenty of energy, provided you have some excess body fat. However, if you get absurdly low (like less than 5%), it will be more difficult for you to maintain the calorie deficit because your body simply doesn’t have a ton of fat reserves available from which to draw energy. At that point, you’ll need the calories. However, when you reach that level, it is also unnecessary to continue dieting.

-Drew

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