Am I possibly losing muscle?

#1

Hi there,
I already submitted one post with my introduction here
In short - I started 10 days ago. I am 194cm (6´3") male, 45 years, 126 kg (278 lbs), 25,4% fat.
Everything seems to be going fine, I am steadily losing weight, keeping carbs under 20g, no major cravings (unless I torture myself watching sugar food porn on TV), almost no side effects.

What I find curious though is that I am not losing any water.

I thought I would keep track of weight at the begining, so I weigh myself every morning after I get up.

My weight keeps decresing steadily (125,2; 123,8; 123,4; 122,4; 122,1; …120,5) - HURRAY!,
Fat percentage keeps dropping as well (25,4; 25,0; 24,8; 24,6; 24,4…23,9) double HURRAY, right?
However water keeps steadily rising a bit - from 51,2 up to 52,3). I know does not mean anything as the water can fluctuate, especially at the beginning and I am fine with that.

However, using basic math, it seems that I lost 4,7 kg overall, 3 kg of that was fat and nothing water. Logically that means I also lost 1,7 kg of muscle. And if I take into account the water increase, that makes it a total of 2,8 kg muscle loss in 10 days.

At first I thought it was just the inaccuracy of the scales, but if that were the case, I would be seing numbers going up and down randomly. Instead I am seeing a slight decrease every single day for the past 10 days for the total weight and fat and the opposite for water.

Maybe I am calculating this wrong and there are some other factors coming into play which the scales do not take into account, but if not - is there something I can do to reverse this as soon as possible?

As I wrote in my initial post, I am not eating as much protein as I possibly should, but as far as I can tell, the range for “OK” levels of protein is fairly wide and I am sure I fit into it every single day.(around 130-140g/day in the first 4 days days, around 150-180g/day the remaining days.

And apart from going to the gym 4 times a week (1 hour lifting weights) I sit on my ass at work all day long every single day, so I should easily get away with the lower range of the protein intake.

I am still far from being fat adapted, so since I go to the gym at 7am before work I drink a 79% protein about an hour before the work out. I don´t know what would happen if I went on an empty stomach at this stage.

Any ideas what is happening or where I might have missed or misscalculated something?
Could this be because I only eat twice a day - around 9:30am and then around 4 pm (plus the protein shake at 6:00am on the work out days) and my body is incapable of processing such high amounts of protein so quickly?

Thx a lot in advance for any responses.

(Pete A) #2

What are you using to measure and be able to say you’re not losing water? To be frank, I’d not fret a bit about it. It’ll all work out in the end… I’d claim the victory of a loss of scale weight and carry on. If you are in a place where you want to monitor every indicator so often, it’s easy to get caught up in it.

Congrats you’re doing great!

#3

I am simply using a scale which also measures body fat and water content. Not sure how accurate those are though.

(Running from stupidity) #4

Really REALLY inaccurate for most people most of the time. I’d just use the scales for weight and not try to micromanage the process based on the rest of the trickery it spits out - just follow the basic principles.

(Todd Allen) #5

I have a smart/impedance scale that’s one of the higher rated ones on Amazon. It measures weight well but everything else is bogus. First it requires one to enter age, sex and height. This should be a clue that it isn’t able to measure fat, muscle, bone or water rather it looks those things up from a table. In my case I have a genetic muscle wasting disease and it over estimates my muscle and under estimates my body fat each by about 15% compared to my dexa scan results. I wondered well maybe it just got a wrong starting point that could be adjusted for but at least the impedance might track change that could useful. Then I did another test. I weighed myself, took an extremely hot bath and weighed myself again. The bath caused an 8 lb drop in weight, surely almost all water loss due to sweating, but the scale reported a big drop in body fat % and little change in water. My reported body fat % should have gone up as I undoubtedly lost little to no fat from taking a bath and with the weight drop my body fat is now a larger percentage of my total weight.

If you want to know if you are losing muscle do an activity that you can measure/track in a consistent fashion such as weight lifting, the number of pushups you can do in a fixed time or the time to sprint a fixed distance.

#6

I was kind of dubious regarding the scale accuracy, but I thought that as long as I use it at the same time of day, under the same conditions, the inaccuracy would be the same every time.

I do not really care if the scale continuously shows extra 5 or minus 3 kg (I can still see the progress),

I thought it would be similar with the fat and water. And the daily results kind of supported that - I mean such nice number sequences for weight, fat and water, without any deviations… It makes you wonder if it is not real.

In any case, I will keep doing what I have been doing and not worry about the numbers anymore and will keep an eye for any drops in strength instead - just in case.

Thank you guys for your comments, I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

(Banting & Yudkin & Atkins & Eadeses & Cordain & Taubes & Volek & Naiman & Bikman ) #7

Try drinking a quart of water before weighing/measuring bodyfat. Helps with accuracy to be hydrated.

I only take bodyfat percentage at night, while I weigh scale weight in the AM. I ensure proper hydration for the composition measurement while not weighing a bunch of food that I haven’t fully digested yet.

(mole person) #8

It’s true that these scales are hugely inaccurate but even if they weren’t a change like this would be expected. It’s telling you the percentage of your body that is water not the total weight of your water. Since the percentages will always equal 100% as you drop fat the % of water could go up even if the absolute amount of water stays exactly the same.

Here is an example:

Start values:
Total weight = 200 lbs
Fat 60 lbs = 30%
Muscle 60 lbs = 30%
Water 60 lbs = 30%
Bone 20 lbs = 10%

Lets say you lose 20 lbs of pure fat and nothing else changed in absolute weight.

Total weight is now 180 lbs

Fat 40 lbs = 22.2%
Muscle 60 lbs = 33.3%
Water 60 lbs = 33.3%
Bone 20 lbs = 11.1%

I hope this helps.

#9

Can’t add anything to that ^ , but I do want to say, 1.7kg of lean mass and 1.7kg of muscle are two different things and you don’t want to conflate them.

Lean mass also includes bone, skin and organs, also scar tissue, tumours, hair… And you’re in a state where autophagy can happen, which means your body finds it easier to consume unwanted lean mass that isn’t serving you.

Skin particularly is a huge organ that can make up 1/6 of your body weight, so I read anyway, so as you get smaller, because you’re in keto you should consume that skin, get tighter with less issues of excess skin left over when you get to your goals, and some of that ‘lean mass’ counts as that.