Can You Grow Muscle & Lose Fat Simultaneously?

The latest issue of a certain Fitness Magazine claims - like most Fitness authorities and Personal Trainers these days - that you cannot build muscle and lose fat at the same time.

Lets test that theory with a hypothetical situation. Imagine a 180kg man with 60% bodyfat. He's eaten nothing but 'fast food' and hasnt exercised in 10 years. He used to be an elite athlete who weighed 120kg with 15% bodyfat. If you do the math, that means he's now got 30kg less muscle than he used to have; and 90kg more fat.

Now, don't you think that maybe its possible, if you cleaned up his diet and got him back in the gym, that this man might be able to regain some of his lost muscle while losing some of his new fat? Do you REALLY believe, as Personal Trainers would try to have you believe, that its just absolutely 100% impossible for that to happen? That there is no way this giant, fat man couldnt get back into the training he once did and regain some of his former condition?

Of course he could! Its happened time and time again in the public eye with boxers, football players, wrestlers and all sorts of athletes. Its not an unusual phenomenon for an athlete to get back in shape; building muscle and losing fat at the same time. Thats just the normal process of EFFECTIVE TRAINING AND DIET!!! Fat people can turn into athletes simply by training for it!

But maybe you are thinking "thats muscle memory" or "its different when they've been there before". Really? Then lets say my hypothetical fat-man hadn't been an elite athlete previously. Does that really change the argument? Is it really so hard to believe that getting a sedentary person to train with weights and eat a clean, nutritious, high-protein diet might result in some muscle gain with some fat loss? Of course it will! It regularly does.

Maybe you are thinking "but its different for a really fat person". No its not! Yes its easier; but it doesnt change human physiology. The fact is, its either biochemically possible to simultaneously drop fat and build muscle, or its not! And as it happens, it IS biochemically possible to reduce bodyfat and build muscle. As proven by every athlete that got out of shape and then got back into shape. And as proven by every sedentary person who decided to fix themselves up by training hard and eating well. Its not that it CAN'T be done; its just that most people FAIL!

The only reason someone won't be able to simultaneously lose fat and build muscle is because they aren't training and dieting appropriately! As you get leaner and more muscular it does get harder and eventually your options get more and more limited and unhealthy. But it is biochemically POSSIBLE.

So any Trainer who tells you that you can't lose fat and build muscle simultaneously is really saying that THEY DON'T KNOW HOW because they've FAILED to ever achieve it! Which also means: the advice they are offering is WRONG!

Simultaneously losing fat and gaining muscle CAN be done. It regularly IS done. And now you know why you need to ignore every word spoken by any person who says it CAN'T be done!

They Call It 'Lifestyle'?

Pretty much everybody wishes they could eat whatever they want without getting fat. Unfortunately, pretty much everybody knows that the human body doesnt work that way.

So society has been taught to 'pay' for dietary indulgences by 'burning it off'. In effect, for every TimTam you eat you are sentenced to a couple of hours of monotonous, soul destroying aerobic exercise while forgoing all other food. In essence, you try to fix your malnourishing indulgence by sacrificing nourishment.

Some people have embraced this methodology with a rabid tenacity. They so love their TimTams and wines and cheese and whatever other non-nutritious poison that their friends like to share, that they'll happily starve and spend almost every non-working hour of their day running, riding and doing aerobics classes just for the luxury of being able to semi-indulge.

This way of living is so popular that its been given a positive descriptor: 'Lifestyle'.

So to clarify, to many, 'lifestyle' means constant hunger plus exercising for 2-3 hours of every DAY so that they can spend 2-3 hours per WEEK poisoning themselves.

2-3 hours per DAY of mindless, purposeless, goalless punishment for 2-3 hours per WEEK of pointless indulgence...

Apparently thats a desirable 'lifestyle'.

Despite the countless hours of exercise, very few people wind up with good bodies as a result of their 'lifestyle' living. For all of the punishment, they still lose the battle against the alcohol and malnutrition. As time goes on, their 'lifestyle' ages them at an accelerated rate while affecting their mental and emotional function. Any sane person wouldnt be surprised at this. But 'lifestylers' just panic and push harder.

When occasionally these skinny-fat, depressed, malnourished people are shown Biologic Labs solution - just 2-3 hours per WEEK of purposeful exercise coupled with a diet so nutritious that they will never feel hungry with the result of measurable fat loss every week and a reversal of all of the systemic damage they have done - we always wind up with the same complaint:

BUT WHAT ABOUT LIFESTYLE???

Indeed!

Bodybuilder FAQ: Supplements for Massiveness

QUESTION: I want to get massive and with so many prouducts on the market I'm not sure where to start?

ANSWER: Thanks for your email. I can answer you equally directly: the PRODUCTS on the market have absolutely nothing to do with your getting massive or not. Anything legal you can buy from a shop will make no difference at all.

Food makes you massive, period. Protein powders and weight gain powders are a source of food and nothing more.

Hard, heavy training can ensure your massiveness is massive muscle and not just massive fatness; but only if your training is successfully making you massively strong.

If you want to be properly, muscularly massive, your entire focus should be on achieving a 300kg-400kg deadlift. With that, you will probably have the back and legs for a 250-350kg squat and the chest and shoulder structure for a 180-240kg bench press. And anyone who can dead 350kg, squat 300kg and Bench 200kg is pretty damn large!

Supplemental pills and pre-workout drinks etc are irrelevant and unnecessary. Anybody who told you they got huge because of a legal product is lying or not telling you the rest of the story!

Hope that answers your question and saves you a truck load of wasted money.

The Great "Calorie Balance" Swindle Part 2

Regardless of your exercise, feeding your body nothing but colourised, flavourised, preservatised, nutrient drained processed foods will probably make you sick and fat irrespective of your calorie intake. That is why the biggest, fattest people to walk into Biologic Labs are never big calorie consumers; they are completely malnourished by ‘fast food’; and full of ‘pollution’. That is why Milton Spurlock got so fat and so sick in the movie, ‘Supersize Me’. He wouldnt have gotten that sick and that fat from the same calories of organic rice and almonds! The ‘calories’ weren’t the issue!

It is ridiculous to expect your body to look and perform the same regardless of the quality of your nutrition. Tim Tams do not compare to organic eggs for nutrient supply nor the body that results; even if the calories are the same! Neither does KFC compare with free-range chicken breast and rice!

Our bodies are designed to change in order to keep us alive despite all the dumb things we do! If you feed it a leaf of lettuce per day and tell it to run for 6 hours per day, it will adjust to become able to do that; or until it falls over dead. Your body doesn’t need to burn fat to find fuel. It can just stop using fuel that should be used to keep you healthy! So adaptations to starvation and overtraining might involve losing weight. Or they might not. Either way, the response will not be a mechanical reduction in stored fuel; it will be an adaptation to your actions and therefore probably not all what you expected!

The smart option is to use the adaptive nature of your body positively. Rather than trying to “waste away the body you hate”, work to “build the body you want”. Looking strong/‘athletic’ and healthy is a function of BEING strong/‘athletic’ and healthy! That means quality nutrition and quality strength exercise. Not starving on a treadmill!

The positive adaptations - ie those changes your body makes to itself to yield an improvement in physical ability and capacity - require a range of resources (ie nutrients) from food, to meet the needs of your training. Some resources (nutrients) are absolutely critical; others are highly significant; others are just nice to have. If you can find and feed your body ONLY the perfect balance of critical, significant and nice-to-have resources, you will watch yourself transform rapidly and positively in the direction your exercise stresses require it. And you will ultimately be able to improve your body to an extraordinary extent. Basically, your body will adapt to become a physical manifestation of its purpose and environment. If your purpose becomes pure strength and your environment is richly nourishing, your body will reflect it with low bodyfat and taut muscularity. It would be ridiculous to expect a replication of such bodily perfection with a baron diet combined with soulless, purposeless exercise (eg ‘cardio’)!

For most people, even small deviations from perfect dietary nirvana results in massive slow-downs to their adaptive changes and a pronounced ceiling to their body and training progress. Those deviations often seem so ridiculous and so insignificant that they could not possibly matter. But when they do, they just do! How you feel about it - how unfair it seems - doesnt change the reality.

For example, it is typical to see an almost complete stop to fat loss in our clients who add pre-made sauces to their meals. Even diet soft-drinks significantly stunt positive body change. Our clients who regularly eat out - even when they order plain meals - never achieve even 1/4 of the fat loss of our clients who prepare the exact same food in the exact same way, everyday. I cannot tell you why this seems to consistently occur? But the simple answer is: the price of that dietary ‘variety’ and ‘lifestyle’ is a buffer of bodyfat to make up for the nutritional inconsistencies!

The fact is, any food that your body cannot use for a positive purpose is pollution. And one of the worst things about a polluted environment is that it cannot even benefit from beneficial resources. The pollution just seems to have a way of screwing everything up!

The pollution you eat is stored (as fat) and/or uses quality resources to process and ‘clean up’ after. Either way, its a “double whammy”. You got fat AND the food that WOULD have been used for productive ends, won’t be.

So no matter how you or anybody tries to justify that tasty Pizza Hut pizza or Cold Rock ice cream, it IS garbage, its going to make you fat and its going to do nothing positive for you! And counting the calories just does not make the slightest bit of difference to that!

In closing, consider this quote from Jim Rohn: “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment”. Thats your diet!

The Great "Calorie Balance" Swindle

We’ve all heard the ‘Energy Balance Equation’ (or ‘Calorie Balance Equation’). You know the one: “energy in - energy out = weight gain or loss”. Every single piece of fat loss and muscle building advice you read comes back to this simple equation. And yet despite its simplicity and popularity, in the real World, it never works as planned or expected!

Technically, the energy balance equation is 100% accurate and true! The equation is rooted in the laws of thermodynamics: “energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form”. So to argue against the truth of the ‘energy balance equation’ is to argue against the nature of the Universe. However you position your argument, you are wrong! Lyle McDonald offers a great explanation of the equations perfection here on his website

Truth and accuracy, however, does not make an equation useful or relevant. Consider the algebraic equation: A+B = A+B. It is 100% true and accurate. It is also entirely redundant. You cannot use it for anything because it cannot help you calculate either ‘A’ or ‘B’. And an equation that cannot be used to calculate or predict something is, by definition, useless.

And thats the issue with the ‘energy balance equation’. The only interest any fat (or skinny), non-physicist might have with the Energy Balance Equation is to PREDICT a change in bodyweight from diet and exercise. And for this purpose, the equation is completely and utterly useless! For proof of this, have a read through the plethora of respected research articles here at PubMed. Its really no secret that you cannot use the Energy Balance equation to reliably predict future weight gain or loss!

At Biologic Labs, to help our overweight clients lose weight, we typically feed them MORE calories than they were eating before! In fact, we feed them a LOT more! And generally, the more quality nutrition that we feed them, the more weight they lose; all of it from fat! And all with only 2-3 workouts per week and zero cardio.

According to the energy balance equation, increasing calories should ALWAYS cause weight GAIN; and yet, successful trainers can consistently increase calories to cause quality fat-weight loss. The difference is in the QUALITY of what is being consumed.

The reason this occurs is quite simple: your body is an adaptive organism. Read that again:

YOUR BODY IS AN ADAPTIVE ORGANISM!

This is the most critical point to understand about your body. It is NOT a machine! It doesn’t burn a fixed number of “kilometers-per-litre” of fuel. Take less energy in, and your body adapts by expending less energy out. Perform an activity for the purpose of burning energy and your body adapts by becoming more energy efficient; it begins to use less energy for that activity. And your body is almost infinitely adaptable in both of these regards. You absolutely cannot win against it!

But more importantly, your body uses the nutrients you feed it to manifest physical changes in itself to better fit the purpose for which you use it.

Read that one again too:
Your body
uses the nutrients you feed it
to manifest physical changes in itself
to better fit the purpose for which you use it.

Did you get all that? Let me break it down into its 3 essential parts:

Your body is literally comprised of the nutrients you feed it! Your liver isn’t made of ‘calories’! Your heart isn’t made of calories! Your muscles aren’t made of calories! They are all made of complex protein and lipid structures while functioning on a constant supply of dietary elements. Regardless of how many CALORIES you eat, if you don’t supply the necessary components to proper bodily functioning and repair, then your body won’t function or repair properly!!! 


Your body manifests changes in itself. Your body constantly builds-up and breaks-down physical tissue as part of its ongoing maintenance. Any net changes in your form are always the net result of BILLIONS of biochemical processes constantly taking place. Basing your actions on assumptions you make about just 1 or 2 biochemical reactions will ensure you fail!


Your body changes to better fit its purpose. Or, as the Bulgarian Olympic Lifting Coaches used to say: “the body becomes its function”. So if your bodies function is to lift ludicrously heavy weights, then it will try to become muscular. If your bodies function is to run fast for 6 hours per day, it will try to become light and lean. Your supply of the nutrients necessary for the adaptations determines whether your body will succeed. And, of course, if your purpose is to sit at a desk all day and occasionally shuffle on a treadmill for 30 minutes, your body will try to become a lump of fat; and it will probably succeed.

The point of all of this is that the Energy Balance Equation is almost completely irrelevant in the pursuit of a great body. Nutrient supply matching your physical purpose is the key! If your physical purpose doesnt require the body you want and/or your diet doesnt supply ONLY the nutrients necessary to look that way, then you won’t have the body you want! Its obvious, really.

BIA Scales & Bodyfat

A lot of gyms use BIA Scales or devices for measuring bodyfat. They are considered more accurate than doing skinfold tests with a caliper because there is no skill required of the tester. But does that mean they accurately measure bodyfat?

A few years ago I was DEXA scanned, callipered and BIA tested with both a set of BIA scales and a 6-electrode BIA device; all on the same day.

The calipers and DEXA scan both measured me at 8%. The BIA scales put me at 30% before they switched to 'athlete mode' whereby I was 20% bodyfat!

That day, I was the only man on the planet with clearly defined abs at 20% bodyfat!

The tester argued that BIA devices are good; they just don't cater to people like myself with exaggerated muscular development. She then said that all that was needed was an equation based on people like me and then the BIA test would be accurate.

Translation: BIA devices are extremely accurate for measuring bodyfat so long as you already know your bodyfat to begin with.

Translation translated: BIA devices are as useful as a broken compass in a magnet factory during an electrical storm! You should never, EVER base any decisions on their readings!

The Meaning of 'Fitness'

“What is Fitness”?

Greg Glassman asks this excellent question in a recent CrossFit journal. He highlights triathlete Mark Allen as one of the many endurance athletes bestowed with the title ‘fittest man on earth’; despite the fact that Mark would be “crushed” by countless athletes on any measure of strength.

So is strength not an attribute of ‘fitness’. Is a strength athlete less ‘fit’ than a weak endurance athlete? I believe the answer is simpler than that.

‘Fit’ is a synonym for ‘suitable’. If your car is “fit to drive” it means that it should be able to get you to your destination. It should be ‘suitable’ for achieving its basest utility.

And that is what ‘fit’ means in the human context. It means your body should be capable of fulfilling its basest utility, without breaking down.

‘General fitness’ is the human equivalent of a 30 year old car with 200,000km on the clock. It might look like garbage, it might sound like garbage, it might move like garbage, but it should be able to get the job done, so long as ‘the job’ isn’t too strenuous. Its certainly nothing to be proud of and its definitely not something to aspire to!

And that is why ‘Fitness Trainers’ prescribe rehabilitation exercises to able-bodied people. Treadmills, swiss balls, therabands, sit-ups, step-ups, calisthenics etc help people maintain 'the minimum physical capacity to avoid injury'. ie Fitness!

So, just as a pair of jeans that 'fit' don't necessarily make you look very good, ‘Fitness’ training won’t give you a good body. It won’t make you ‘lean’ or ‘muscular’. It won’t even make you any sort of athlete.

‘Fitness’ is training to be the least you can be!