Comment by isitmadeofglass
3 years ago
> You'll build muscle which will increase the resting metabolism
This is another myth. Even if you put on a serious amount of muscle, the change to your daily calorie burn is insignificantly increased in the larger scale of things.
Don’t to strength training to lose weight, so Strength training to get strong.
The change in metabolic rate is a homeostatic adaptation of the body due to increased energy expenditure due to exercise. You can measure it in a metabolic chamber, and 200-300 calories per day during rest time is not unusual for male athletes.
I don't know if I can accept that offhand because high levels of muscle atrophy is a human adapted trait specifically to save calories for the brain. If muscle maintenance costs were so insignificant why would we have adapted a trait to make us physically weaker?
This is anecdotal but the difference between what I can eat working on a farm with having lots of muscle mass and sitting around on a computer with that same muscle mass was not really significant. But the difference between sitting at a desk with a lot of muscle mass and sitting at a desk with noticeably less muscle mass is night and day in how much I have to eat. With small and inconsistent amounts of strength exercise to maintain a bit more muscle mass again, my caloric expenditure went back up, far beyond what is lost from the exercise itself.