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Someone asked me, “do you lose muscle when you lose weight?”

They wanted to know if dieting is what causes muscle deterioration.

The short answer is, “yes.”

But the full answer explains why weight loss rarely ever lasts.

Here’s a major drawback to major weight loss.

When you lose a lot of weight, your metabolic rate falls.

What that means is that you’re less likely to maintain your new weight because your metabolism isn’t able to keep up.

The hardest part for most people to believe is that something they see as healthy really hurts them.

But why does losing a lot of weight drop your metabolism?

It’s because while you’re losing that weight, something else pretty negative is also happening.

That mass weight loss is also causing you to lose muscle.

Your body loses “fat-free mass,” or otherwise known as “lean mass.”

So, what is lean mass?

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Well, lean mass is who you are — it’s your organs and your muscles.

It’s your glands.  It’s your nerves.

All of these highly important parts of you are made up of lean mass.

If you didn’t realize that — you’re not alone.

Most people don’t know it or don’t make the connection.

And they go on these calorie restrictive diets that hurt them.

All of this lean mass gets lost when you go on low-calorie diets.

Ideally, it’s best if you can focus on just losing fat, and not losing any lean mass.

How you diet is crucial to keeping lean mass.

Because as you stay on a low-calorie diet, you lose lean mass.

And that means that your resting metabolic rate also falls.

So then you go about your day, and your body is burning fewer calories than it burned before you started dieting.

It’s a pretty significant problem — especially when you remember that you want to burn MORE calories while trying to lose weight.

Here’s a study to explain what happens.

In this study, researchers looked at people who had lost 60 to one hundred pounds.

There were two groups of dieters.

One group was made up of contestants in the TV show “Biggest Loser.”

These participants had gone on a high exercise, low-calorie diet.

The other group lost a huge amount of weight by getting bariatric surgery, otherwise known as gastric bypass surgery.

You can see exactly what’s happening in this chart:

The column to the left is the BLC group, the Biggest Loser Contestants group.

The larger white area in their bar shows that they had more fat loss.

On the right is the RYGB group, which is the gastric bypass group.

The white part of the bar there is smaller and the black part bigger.

That shows that they RYGB group lost less fat than the BLC group — but they also lost more lean mass!

Gastric bypass comes with a fairly strict low-calorie diet.

So both groups would have had similar eating plans.

The difference is that the Biggest Loser group pursued a lot of exercise as they lost weight.

They exercised along with their low-calorie dieting.

The exercise appears to have saved the lean mass from damage.

It seems essential that if you use a reduced-calorie, you exercise to maintain your metabolic rate.

Without exercise, your metabolic rate falls as you eat less because the body digests your lean mass to fuel itself.

This is the reason why diets alone are so poor.

Most people practice reduced calorie dieting, and they lose lean mass.

So they end with less healthy organ and muscle mass than when they started.

And now their metabolic rate is much lower, too.

You need that lean mass to have a good metabolism… the more lean mass, the more calories you burn.

So all that lean mass loss is just setting you up to regain your weight.

This is why dieting is such a disaster.

It’s also why losing weight by itself can be very counterproductive.

If you lose weight the most the way most people do, you are losing muscle mass as well as fat.

Your metabolic rate will be much lower when you’re finished.

It’s the worst of all worlds.

Watch for tomorrow’s newsletter.

I’ll focus on diet for losing weight and building muscle and maintaining your metabolic rate as you lower your calories to lose weight.

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Matt Cook is editor-in-chief of Daily Medical Discoveries. Matt has been a full time health researcher for 26 years. ABC News interviewed Matt on sexual health issues not long ago. Matt is widely quoted on over 1,000,000 websites. He has over 300,000 daily newsletter readers. Daily Medical Discoveries finds hidden, buried or ignored medical studies through the lens of 100 years of proven science. Matt heads up the editorial team of scientists and health researchers. Each discovery is based upon primary studies from peer reviewed science sources following the Daily Medical Discoveries 7 Step Process to ensure accuracy.