dianeseattle
Member
What is bigger, a ton of feathers or a ton of rocks?
We all know that it would take way more feathers in terms of volume, to add up to 1 ton.
But how is that different from the belief that muscle weighs more than fat? The truth is that sometimes fat weighs more than muscle.
Look at it this way. First thing you need to know is what fat looks like. You know what muscle looks like if you eat meat. But fat comes in many forms, from lard to Crisco.
Muscle is lean and fat is bulky and diffuse. Fat generally takes up more space than muscle. Even though muscles get larger as they are used, you don't necessarily gain weight. Most exercise that ordinary people do is designed to improve muscle tone. But people are continuously baffled by how to get rid of fat.
Musclemen who compete for the biggest muscles and the hardest tone have to gain a lot of weight to do that. But if they don't keep it up, they lose all muscle tone and what remains is fat.
As obese people work out, they burn calories and get some muscle tone. They don't usually want to develop a six pack or a pair of deltoids you could bounce a nickel off. Most of us actually could not do that.
Exercise heats up the calories and assists the body's metabolism. But as you are exercising, you are generally not building very much muscle, although you may be burning a lot of fat. Muscle never usually enters the equation because in order to build muscle, you have to work your muscle specifically.
Whether muscle weighs more than fat occurs as an individual result. A lot of people diet in order to get lean. Their body fat percentage goes way down. But they don't measure any sort of percentage of muscle toning or growth.
If you put a stick of butter next to a quarter pound of hamburger, what would you learn? Wouldn't they weigh exactly the same? And wouldn't they take up approximately the exact same amount of space? I haven't done this experiment so I don't have the answer to that question. But I would probably put money on them weighing the same.
It's made extra difficult by the fact that hamburger contains a certain percentage of fat, but you can't remove the fat so that you can weigh just the lean. On the other hand a stick of butter is a solid quarter pound of fat and nothing but fat.
A few of our members here wisely advise us not to look at the scale in order to chart our progress, but get out your tape measure and make a record of how big your waist or neck was before you lost the weight. I used to have a 51-inch waist. Now it's 35 inches. I used to have a 19-inch neck. Now it is 13 inches.
More important than the numbers is the fact that these are two areas of my body where I gain size and fat most easily.
Back in my old fat days, when I'd work out while being extremely dishonest with myself about what I was eating, and I came up a pound or two heavy the next day, I comforted myself by saying, "Well you know, muscle weighs more than fat."
Apparently it doesn't. I don't know because I went on to balloon up to solid grief.
I found the following article in a random search where I asked "does muscle weigh more than fat."
Does Muscle Weigh More Than Fat? The Truth About Body Composition
We all know that it would take way more feathers in terms of volume, to add up to 1 ton.
But how is that different from the belief that muscle weighs more than fat? The truth is that sometimes fat weighs more than muscle.
Look at it this way. First thing you need to know is what fat looks like. You know what muscle looks like if you eat meat. But fat comes in many forms, from lard to Crisco.
Muscle is lean and fat is bulky and diffuse. Fat generally takes up more space than muscle. Even though muscles get larger as they are used, you don't necessarily gain weight. Most exercise that ordinary people do is designed to improve muscle tone. But people are continuously baffled by how to get rid of fat.
Musclemen who compete for the biggest muscles and the hardest tone have to gain a lot of weight to do that. But if they don't keep it up, they lose all muscle tone and what remains is fat.
As obese people work out, they burn calories and get some muscle tone. They don't usually want to develop a six pack or a pair of deltoids you could bounce a nickel off. Most of us actually could not do that.
Exercise heats up the calories and assists the body's metabolism. But as you are exercising, you are generally not building very much muscle, although you may be burning a lot of fat. Muscle never usually enters the equation because in order to build muscle, you have to work your muscle specifically.
Whether muscle weighs more than fat occurs as an individual result. A lot of people diet in order to get lean. Their body fat percentage goes way down. But they don't measure any sort of percentage of muscle toning or growth.
If you put a stick of butter next to a quarter pound of hamburger, what would you learn? Wouldn't they weigh exactly the same? And wouldn't they take up approximately the exact same amount of space? I haven't done this experiment so I don't have the answer to that question. But I would probably put money on them weighing the same.
It's made extra difficult by the fact that hamburger contains a certain percentage of fat, but you can't remove the fat so that you can weigh just the lean. On the other hand a stick of butter is a solid quarter pound of fat and nothing but fat.
A few of our members here wisely advise us not to look at the scale in order to chart our progress, but get out your tape measure and make a record of how big your waist or neck was before you lost the weight. I used to have a 51-inch waist. Now it's 35 inches. I used to have a 19-inch neck. Now it is 13 inches.
More important than the numbers is the fact that these are two areas of my body where I gain size and fat most easily.
Back in my old fat days, when I'd work out while being extremely dishonest with myself about what I was eating, and I came up a pound or two heavy the next day, I comforted myself by saying, "Well you know, muscle weighs more than fat."
Apparently it doesn't. I don't know because I went on to balloon up to solid grief.
I found the following article in a random search where I asked "does muscle weigh more than fat."
Does Muscle Weigh More Than Fat? The Truth About Body Composition