Muscle Weighs More than Fat

Stop me if you've heard this one before. You're dieting and you watch the scale and see that you lose nothing despite your efforts, or worse, you're gaining weight. You complain to a friend about it and she says, "Well, muscle weighs more than fat."

Yes, there was a recent comment that said this, but that's not what prompted this blog post. I was thinking about this because while at Barnes and Noble the other day I found a book in the new releases discussing diet myths and this was one of them.

I didn't get a chance to read it or find out the "truth", but I saw the myth.

When I do get the book...it's cheaper online...I'll probably post something about it.

I did a quick check online for information on fat and muscle. The obvious answer I found was that they weigh the same. One pound of fat is the same as one pound of muscle, just like a pound of feathers weigh the same as a one-pound pile of sand.

I found some information at sites like MSN Health and Healthscience. A quick Google for "does muscle weigh more than fat" yields plenty of hits...just a word of advice: if you're looking this up because you heard this through the grapevine and want to find information on it, avoid hits that take you to forums where any yahoo is posting the same rumor over and over. It's often counterproductive.

Anyway the sites I read about the topic seemed to agree on a couple key points:

One, fluid levels vary your weight more than fat or muscle gain and loss.

Two, if you were gaining muscle without using the stuff that comes in bottles or syringes, you were taking in more calories than you needed to maintain your body weight. It is implied that if you're dieting and taking in fewer calories than necessary to maintain your body weight then you aren't gaining muscle mass since you need more raw material from which to actually build the proteins comprising muscle tissue.

Articles I found also implied that muscle is denser than fat, so it is possible to have a similar weight while losing inches. The only problem is that it takes time to gain significant muscle mass. So if you're gaining three or four pounds in a week, it's either water weight (or some kind of fluid weight) or you're just plain eating more than you think.

The healthscience site even said that "The amount of muscle someone may gain in a year on a truly healthy diet without supplements/medication and/or excessive protein, is actually quite small and for a women (sic) may be 8-10 lbs in a year and for a man a little more. Divide that by 52 and that is about what you may be gaining in a week, on average."

Like I said, I'll probably revisit this topic a bit if/when I get that book on myths for dieting. But I thought this would be a little food for thought. I know I've been thinking about it ever since I read that blurb on the book jacket.