How to prevent muscle loss while dieting

Preserving muscle through a diet is essentially vital in the pursuit of overall health and desired fitness goals. When dieting, people usually focus on losing weight; in the process, they forget the importance of maintaining muscles.

Muscles loss results in loss of strength, slower metabolism, and a tone that’s less appealing.

You can prevent muscle loss in such a scenario with great effectiveness by consuming adequate protein, doing strength training exercises, and maximizing nutrient intake.

How? Read on for practical tips and science-based methods to help you avoid muscle loss at all costs as you progress in your dieting journey.

1-Don’t cut too many calories

As we hopefully all understand by now, in order to lose any amount of body fat, you need to create a caloric deficit. And that means you’re going to need to reduce your calorie intake below maintenance level so stored body fat can be burned for energy instead.

The thing is, that deficit can be classified as small, moderate or large based on how far below maintenance you go and how much you reduce your daily calorie intake by.

Now, while each degree of deficit has its own pros and cons, a moderate deficit of about 20% below maintenance level tends to be ideal for most people.

Why not a larger deficit? Why not reduce calories by a lot more and make fat loss happen even faster?

Well, aside from its worsening metabolic slowdown, hormonal issues, hunger, mood, sleep, libido, lethargy (and more) and simply being harder to actually sustain… another major downside of a large caloric deficit is that it will have the largest negative impact on training and recovery.

And that means that reducing your calorie intake by too much will increase the potential for strength and muscle loss.

For that reason, I’d recommend most people stick with no more than a moderate deficit. Those who are already quite lean and looking to get really lean may do better with an even smaller deficit.

2-Eat more protein

If you don’t already know, protein is the nutritional stimulus for building muscle. So, when cutting calories, it should be from cutting protein food sources.

In A study of men who were both cutting calories and exercising. Those who followed a high-protein diet lost 10.56 pounds of fat and gained 2.64 pounds of muscle. Meanwhile, those who followed low-protein diet with the same number of total calories lost 7.7 pounds of fat and gained less than a quarter pound of muscle.

For optimal muscle growth, people should consume between 0.4 to 0.55 grams of protein per kilogram of their body weight at every meal based on a recent study.

3-Focus on strength training instead of cardio

I know that you may hear the opposite as most people say that in order to lose weight, you have to focus on doing tons of cardio.

But, cardio training has almost no effect on building or maintaining muscle mass as it works on aerobic muscle fibers, which will increase oxygen extraction, not necessarily change muscle mass.

And you may still lose muscle mass if that’s the only way you’re trying to lose weight.

On the other hand, strength training not only the best for building muscle, but also effective at attenuating declines in muscle mass when in a caloric deficit.

Strength training also triggers the short-term production of hormones such as human growth hormone and testosterone that aid in muscle retention and building.

Related: How to burn more fat with weight training (even more than cardio)

4-Do HIIT workouts

HIIT (High-intensity interval training) such as sprints on the treadmill or stationary bike, is effective at burning calories both during exercise and afterward through excess post-exercise oxygen consumption.

Not only that, it guards against muscle loss by activating type-2 muscle fibers over type-1s unlike steady-state cardio.

Also, with the right work-to-rest ratio, HIIT can even build muscle. A study found that, over the course of a three-week training program, people who exercised at a 1:1 ratio gained significantly more muscle than those performing 2:1 intervals.

So, for every second you spend sprinting, spend that much resting before your next bout.

5- Follow The low-carb diet

A low-carbohydrate diet is unnecessary for weight loss, and may even impair muscle maintenance and potential growth by limiting exercise performance.

However, in one study found that when women followed a 1,700-calorie diet for 10 weeks, those who maintained a (1.4 : 1) carbohydrate-to-protein ratio (171 grams of daily carbs 125 of protein) lost more fat while losing less lean muscle mass than those who maintained a (3.5 : 1) carbohydrate-to-protein ratio.

But, you don’t need to go as low as the study did retain muscle mass while losing fat, though. An easy 2:1 ratio is ideal. So however much protein you eat, eat double the number of grams of carbs.

6-Maintain your strength gains

You must have heard of lifting heavier weights to build muscle, but lift lighter weights with higher reps when you want to lose fat. And they explain “That’s why the, get lean and get toned”.

Guess what!!

It is the absolute WORST thing you could possibly do when you’re trying to avoid losing muscle.

In reality, you lift heavy weights to build muscle, and then lift that same heavy weight if you want to actually maintain that muscle.

Lifting heavy and getting stronger is what signals your body to begin the muscle building process. As for a fat loss diet, just maintaining your current levels of strength (same weights and reps) is what now signals your body to maintain muscle.

If that signal goes away, your body’s need to keep your muscle tissue around goes away right along with it.

Related: lifting heavy and still skinny? (here’s why)

7-Reduce training frequency

A caloric deficit is really an energy deficit, and while this is the most important factor for losing weight, it kinda sucks for all things training related to recovery and performance.

What that means is, the workout routine you were using to build muscle, increase strength or make whatever other positive improvements to your body under normal circumstances has the potential to be too much for your body to handle and optimally recover from in the energy-deficient state it is currently in.

The key training requirement for maintaining muscle is simply maintaining strength. The problem is, if you’re using a workout routine that you aren’t properly recovering from, the opposite of this is going to happen.

How do you avoid all of this? Simple. By adjusting your weight training program to compensate for the drop in recovery that comes with being in a caloric deficit.

It could be easily done by reducing your training frequency by doing a 3 day workout split instead of the 5-6 day split you were doing.

This way, you will give your body enough time to recover from your workouts and keep your strength levels on point.

Related: Stronglifts 5×5: The best weight training program for a beginner

8-Take care of pre/post workout nutrition

As mentioned, recovery and overall training performance in general become worse as a result of being in a prolonged caloric deficit.

And if you haven’t heard, the entire concept of pre and post workout nutrition is built around improving these very aspects of training and recovery.

That makes the meals you eat before and after your workouts just as important when your goal is losing fat without losing muscle as opposed to just building that muscle in the first place.

So, what should you eat during these meals?

Simple, consume a nice amount of protein and carbs within 1-2 hours before and after your workout. No need to make it any more complicated than that.

9-Try calorie cycling

calorie cycling refers to is eating more calories on certain days (typically training days) and less calories on other days (typically rest days).

This is done primarily by manipulating carbs and/or fat, as protein is something we want to be high every day… especially when our goal is to lose fat, NOT muscle.

With calorie cycling, you’d be in a larger deficit on certain days, but then a smaller deficit or possibly even NO deficit at all on the other days (this is also known as a refeed). However, at the end of the week, the total amount of calories consumed would still be the same.

The theoretical purpose for doing this is to improve everything from training performance, recovery and calorie partitioning, to hunger, metabolic rate and of course… our ability to maintain muscle and strength while we lose fat.

10-Take Diet Breaks

Your body doesn’t really like being in a caloric deficit, and as anyone who has ever tried to lose any amount of fat already knows, your mind sure as hell doesn’t like it either.

There are a ton of physiological and psychological aspects of being in the energy-deficient state. From the drop in recovery and performance to the changes in leptin, ghrelin, testosterone, cortisol, insulin, thyroid, metabolic rate and more.

And that brings us to the concept of the diet break.

The exact definition of what a diet break will vary based on who you ask, but I think of it as a 1-2 week period where you come out of the deficit and back up to maintenance level.

taking diet breaks will allow your hormones and energy levels to go back to the normal levels, which will get your body to it’s healthy state and prevent it from burning off your muscle gains.

What you need to know…

Therefore, prevention of loss of muscles while on a diet for gaining or maintaining strength, metabolism, and achieving a well-chiseled body is essential. Muscle mass can be effectively preserved with a diet focused on protein intake and resistance training when losing weight from other sources. A successful diet is not one where the number decreases on the scale but when muscle health and overall well-being are maintained. Follow these strategies for achieving your fitness goals without losing muscle mass.