One of the biggest mistakes people – both males and females – make in their pursuit of physique improvements, whether that is fat loss or muscle gain, is not ensuring that their nutritional program supports their goals. Sounds logical – doesn’t it?

If you want to lose fat, you have to eat in a way that supports fat loss. If you want to gain muscle, you have to eat in a way that supports muscular gains. Yet look around your gym. How many people ever really look much different? I’d say not too many. It’s not for lack of trying in the gym, as I’m sure you see many of the same people week in and week out and they certainly appear to be working hard. They’re lifting weights, they’re doing their cardio, but for some reason, they don’t look much different. Why? Nutrition! Their diet doesn’t support their goals.

Now if you stopped and asked any one of these individuals what their goals were, they might say they’re trying to get bigger … and leaner. That’s what most of us tend to want, but the problem is trying to do both at the same time. I’ll keep this simple, but basically, to lose body fat you have to be in a caloric deficit at the end of the day. You can get there by dietary restriction (eating less calories than your body requires to maintain its current weight); by exercise; or by some combination of both – the latter being optimal.

Contrast that to the goals of gaining muscle. You need to be in an energy surplus to gain muscle. That begs the question – how can you be in a caloric deficit and a caloric surplus at the same time? You can’t. They’re mutually exclusive positions. Now maybe you’ll argue the point of simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain with me – what we affectionately term a “recomp” – but let me try a little logic. First the easy one: does it make sense that the body would be forced to call on fat stores (an energy reserve) when it’s getting a lot of calories? There’s no reason to.

On the flip side, when you’re eating in a deficit, your body is trying to survive. You’re not providing it with enough energy to sustain itself, hence the need for it to call on fat reserves to maintain metabolically active tissue and bodily functions. Ok, pretty straightforward. But to bring some logic back into the equation, does it make sense that your body would go through the trouble of adding more metabolically active tissue – muscle, which needs to be grown AND sustained – when it already doesn’t have enough energy/calories to sustain its present self? The process of adding size to the body is an energy costly process. That’s a huge strike against those who state their goals as being simultaneous fat loss and muscle gains. More often than not, you’re going to be disappointed.

Now does that mean that one can’t ever gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat? No, it doesn’t. However, it is very unlikely unless you fit into one of the following categories – you’re a “newbie” just starting out, you’re coming back from a lay off and as such are basically in a de-trained state, or you’re new to “effective” training.