JJ Virgin explains why losing muscle during dieting backfires: it triggers metabolic adaptation, making weight regain almost inevitable. Muscle acts as a "sugar sponge" that improves insulin sensitivity and boosts your resting metabolism. To preserve it, train each major muscle group 2-3 times weekly and monitor body composition with DEXA scans or tape measurements.
So when you lose fat, you'll never just lose fat because you also have some things that are just supporting the fat. Remember, fat is alive, but that's only like 3%. 3%, like if you lost 10 pounds of fat, you would only lose like 0.3 of a pound of that supporting the fat. So what we want to do is we're losing weight is we want to minimize the amount of fat-free mass we lost— we lose, and we want to really hold on to, or better yet, we want to build skeletal muscle. And here is why. Muscle— and these are said very carefully because I want you to be able to remember them, right? Muscle is your metabolic Spanx. What does that mean? That means it's going to hold everything in tighter. By the way, you know, if you're worried about, I'm going to lift weights and get bigger, it doesn't happen. You lift weights, it holds everything in tighter. Muscle requires more energy to be on your body because muscle is constantly in this breaking down and building up, breaking down and building up. It's very energetic. So that is why it's metabolic spanks. It's going to give you a better metabolic rate. That's how many calories you burn, right? But it's also a sugar sponge. This means that it gives a place for carbohydrates in the diet to go rather than get stored on your butt or your thighs or your belly as fat. And along with being a sugar sponge, it is the first place that you can start to restore insulin sensitivity. When your body is better at hearing insulin, then it's going to have better blood sugar control. One of the things that these weight loss drugs do is these weight loss drugs help you have better blood sugar control. So resistance training is one of the ways that we can do this. One of the things that can happen when you go on a diet is that you'll start to lose muscle, right? You'll lose muscle and you'll lose fat. Here's why this is a problem, and I actually talk about this in another YouTube video where I talk about weight rebound, and it was all based on a, a that looked at The Biggest Losers 6 years later. And the deal is, is if you lose muscle and fat, you're going to have this thing called metabolic adaption after the diet. This is where your resting metabolic rate is lower than it was before the diet. This is always going to happen. What you don't want to have happen is have it be lower than it should. So we have a predicted resting metabolic rate that should be based on our body composition, but what can happen here is if you lose more muscle it'll be even lower than it should be, which means that it's going to be a lot harder to maintain that weight because now you can even eat even less calories. And in fact, one study showed that people who had stopped using semaglutide gained back on average two-thirds of the weight that they lost on that drug within one year. So think about this though, if all of a sudden you're losing fat and muscle and then gaining back mainly fat, can you see how that's really going to disrupt your whole metabolic rate, because losing muscle and then gaining back fat means you're never going to get that metabolic rate back up to where it was. So that is the really key important thing here, is we want to make sure as we're going through this that we are holding on to our building muscle, right? We are minimizing any of that muscle loss. And you want to make sure that you don't gain the weight back, and especially don't gain that weight back as fat, because again, if you do that, now you're worse off than before you went on the drug. Okay, so the question I hope that you're asking right now is, how do I avoid this? And I'm so glad that you asked this because it doesn't have to be this way if you put the right diet and exercise parameters in place. But here's what it has to start with. It has to start with information. The first thing you're going to want to do is ideally go get a DEXA scan. Now, a DEXA scan traditionally has been used for bone density, and we go in and find how your bones are doing, right? But it can do so much more than that. A DEXA scan can actually go in and it can look at how much muscle you have, how much skeletal muscle you have, where that skeletal muscle is, like are your arms and leg— legs even. It can also look at your visceral adipose tissue and your overall body fat. So in the perfect world, you get a DEXA. If you can't do that, or for ongoing measurements, you're going to want to get a bioimpedance scale for home. And a bioimpedance scale sends a little wave up through your body so it can check the resistance to the wave to identify how much of your body is fat-free mass versus fat. Now, these scales now can predict how much of that skeletal muscle and how much of the fat is actually this visceral adipose tissue. So ideally, get one of the scales that really breaks everything down for you. Now, the scale is predictive. It's not, it's not an absolute, right? The only way to know this for sure would be to do a cadaver dissection, and that kind of negates the whole purpose of this. However, if you're doing the same thing every day, it's going to give you really good relative change, and that's what we're looking for. That's what you're going to want to monitor. So you're going to want to get a bioimpedance scale and you're going to want to use a tape measure around your waist and around your hips, because if you lose weight without losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. And I want you to vigilantly monitor your fat-free mass and especially your skeletal muscle. Here's the thing: we can only lose 2 pounds of fat a week, basically, and we have a little bit of fat-free mass supporting that. So realistically, we want to really make sure that we are focused on holding on to and building muscle as we're losing fat, which might mean that your weight is changing much more slowly, but you're improving your body composition, and that is everything. Okay, so one key part of this is that you're going to need to do resistance training, and minimally you're going to need to move each major body part 2 days a week. 3 would be better. Let me walk you through those. So we have upper body pushing, upper body pulling, and hip and thigh hinging. So upper body pushing, this involves your chest, your shoulders, front of your shoulders, top of your shoulders, your trapezius, and your triceps, right? Pushing exercises, things like a push-up, a chest press, an overhead press, are simple things that you could do. And by the way, those are simple things that you could do at home. Yay! Next ones are upper body pulling. That would be things like a pull-up or a bent-over row, things that involve your bicep your lats and the back of your shoulders. Hip and thigh hinging, things like a squat, a step-up, or a deadlift. Now here's the thing, in order for you to build muscle, you have to go to near failure. So the ideal range is going to be somewhere in the 8 to 15 rep range and doing multiple sets. And I also explain this in another video which we'll, we'll link to below. But if you can't lift heavy, if you're afraid of injuries, work with a trainer ideally. But what you can do is you can do longer sets like 20 to 30 repetitions, and then you could use blood flow restriction cuffs so that you still get that failure. So there's always a way to do this, but it is mission critical to have that muscle. To help maintain or build muscle and help with satiety and blood sugar, let's talk about diet. So these drugs work to mimic what peptides produced in the gut do to help with satiety and blood sugar balance. Now we can do that with diet, and we need to focus on some gut microbiome rehab too, because these peptides are produced in the gut. Your gut's all messed up, going to have trouble producing it. So
