Skeletal muscle is a topic not often talked about in dietetics. It allows us to move and function in our environment. Take a look at your arm as you make a fist. You can see your forearm muscles activate. Some may have larger muscles than others, but they all play the same role. So, what does muscle have to do with nutrition and long-term health?

Muscle’s role in nutrition

Most people have heard that muscle weighs more than fat, but it also requires more calories to maintain. If you’ve ever talked with a personal trainer you probably have been told in order to lose weight you need to gain muscle. 

That’s because having more muscle can raise your metabolic rate which in turn will help you lose weight. In the long run, more muscle helps maintain your metabolic rate at a higher rate making it easier to maintain your new weight. 

Muscle also acts as a sink for blood sugar. The more muscle you have the greater ability to uptake excess sugar from your bloodstream. This is great news for people suffering with type 2 diabetes. 

It’s also great news for anyone with a sweet tooth. Not that you should go on a sugar binge but having more muscle gives the excess sugar a place to go instead of being stored in fat cells.

Okay, let's gain some muscle

In order to gain muscle, you have to do two things. Apply stress to the muscle through resistance and increase your calorie intake. 

Lifting weights is the most common way to stress the muscle but there are other alternatives as well. For instance, walking or running up a hill utilizes your own body weight and gravity as resistance to the leg muscles.

Other forms of resistance exercise include:

• Gardening (digging, pushing a wheelbarrow, moving bags of soil, etc.)

• Cleaning (heavy scrubbing, washing windows and mirrors, putting away dishes, etc.)

• Playing with your kids or grandkids (they like to be picked up, a lot!)

Keep in mind that these types of alternative resistance activities won’t result in you looking like the hulk. However, they will help maintain your muscle mass as you age which is more important since we start to lose muscle every year starting in your 30’s.

If you repeat any resistive activity frequently enough while increasing resistance overtime, you will gain strength and muscle mass.

The second part of gaining muscle makes a lot of people worried as it requires you to eat more calories. This is especially confusing for people trying to lose weight as you should be cutting back calories. 

For a long time, it was thought that you cannot lose weight while also gaining muscle. However, new studies have been able to show that you can actually do both. 

If you keep your protein intake at 1 gram per pound of body weight or higher while on a decreased calorie intake and apply resistive stress to the muscles, you can gain muscle and lose weight. (Check out the past blog on protein for more info on its importance to our body).

This is assuming that you are progressively lifting heavier weights and stressing the muscles properly. Of greater importance, a higher protein intake of 1 gram per pound bodyweight, helps minimize or prevent muscle loss during weight loss. 

Losing muscle when losing weight is common and results in a greater weight loss amount. However, less muscle means a lower metabolic rate which already decreases with a lower overall body weight. 

This can increase the amount of weight loss stalls you experience and make it harder to maintain your new weight. 

If you experience weight regain, it typically will consist of fat with very little muscle gain. This results in a lower metabolic rate than before your weight loss, making it even harder to lose the weight again. Eventually putting you into a vicious yo-yo weight cycle. 

The key takeaway

In addition to muscle allowing us to move and do daily tasks, it keeps our metabolism at a higher rate as we age and acts as a sink for glucose in our blood. 

We start to lose muscle after we hit our 30’s and this contributes to weight gain as we age. By applying stress to our muscles through mechanical resistance we can minimize loss and even increase our muscle mass.

You can minimize muscle loss and even gain muscle while losing weight with a higher protein intake of 1 gram or more per pound of body weight. 

At a certain point in life, once you lose a substantial amount of muscle it becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to regain it. This is why it’s so important to increase protein intake as we age and keep physically active with resistance-based activities on a daily basis. 

If you want help with losing weight, gaining muscle or maintaining muscle as you age contact me at dietitian2go@gmail.com or schedule a 30 min free consultation to get started.

Written by: Adam Skowyra MPPD, RDN, LD