Why Do People Change Body Composition?
In previous articles, I’ve addressed the issue of What Does Body Composition Mean?, shown folks how to do Body Composition Calculations, examined Body Composition Numbers and looked at methods of Measuring Body Composition.
However, something I haven’t looked at may be a much more fundamental question which is this: why do people want to change their body composition? That is, what reasons (good or bad) might people have for wanting to change their body composition in the first place. That’s the topic of this piece.
While the overall goal of body recomposition typically means losing fat and/or gaining muscle there are some situations where gaining fat or losing muscle may also be desired. I’ll look at each topic below.
Why Do People Want to Lose Fat?
At any given time, some ludicrous percentage of the population is trying to lose weight and/or fat. I’d note that if you’re unclear on the distinction, you should really read What Does Body Composition Mean? before you go any further. As I noted above, the motivations or reasons for this goal can vary significantly depending on the population you’re looking at.
It’s probably safe to say that bodybuilders and other physique athletes are the ones who are at least the most visible in terms of their extreme levels of fat loss; they are often the most successful as well. While their goals are often also vanity driven, the simple fact is that reducing body fat to an appropriate level is required for competition purposes. In the case of bodybuilding, this can often reducing body fat to what are unhealthy levels.
A male may reach 3-4% body fat on competition day, females have been measured in the single digits as well although few will maintain those levels for very long. This does some nasty things to hormones and women can do real damage to their health if they try to maintain that level for extended periods. As noted, most don’t but some try.
Figure and fitness has become more relaxed in recent years with higher body fat levels and ‘softer’ looks being the goal. But fat loss is usually a primary goal for these types of individuals (it’s not a stretch to say that they are professional dieters).
Even bodybuilders with no interest in stepping on stage typically wants to keep their body fat levels low enough to have some definition (to be ‘buff’) in the common parlance; this is often accompanied with a desire to gain muscle mass. These folks don’t typically like to hear that body fat often has to increase to some degree to make optimal gains in muscle mass.
Female physique types, who are usually less interested in massive muscles in the first place (there are exceptions, females who want to be massive and/or beastly strong) and tend to be more concerned about just looking good.
Performance athletes frequently want to drop fat (or sometimes just weight) to either improve performance or simply make it into a specific weight class. Clearly, in some cases, losing fat and/or weight helps performance by increasing the strength/power to weight ratio. Endurance athletes tend to benefit from being lighter because the less mass they have to move against gravity, the faster they go. There are occasional exceptions (heavyweight rowers come to mind).
However, taken to extremes, dropping too much weight or fat can cause performance to plummet. Whether this is due to the reduced weight/fat per se or simply the effort (excessive + dietary restriction) required to make it happen is difficult to determine and probably both contribute.
For sports performance, there is usually an optimal level of bodyfat but optimal isn’t the same as minimal. Many athletes get confused about the distinction.
Many weight class athletes will dehydrate (sometimes severely) to make a lower weight class and there are some horror stories associated with this if it’s done incorrectly. There have been some deaths associated with this practice and severe dehydration is no joking matter. If nothing else, dehydration past about the 2% of total weight level tends to hurt performance. Which won’t stop athletes in these sports from doing it if necessary.
Mild dehydration generally only requires a couple of days of low-carb, protein only diets and caffeine and is usually reasonably well-tolerated. More extreme levels of dehydration can require prescription diuretics and near death experiences; what a lot of people don’t hear about is the IV fluids used to rehydrate these athletes after they get off the scale.
Returning to physique athletes, bodybuilders often dehydrate themselves to improve appearance, to look more ‘cut’; by reducing the water underneath the skin, muscle definition is improved. Stories of problems with heavy-duty diuretics, ranging from cramping to passing out and death, are out there.
Of course, not everyone wants to lose fat for athletic, performance or bodybuilding reasons. While many will pay at least lip service to the idea of losing weight or fat for health reasons, let’s face up to the facts: the grand majority of people who pursue fat loss do it for vanity driven reasons. Put bluntly: they want to look better naked. Which isn’t necessarily a bad goal, mind you, but let’s at least be honest about it.
Related to this, some people tie in their sense of self-confidence with their physique; when they’re lean they’re confident, when they’re not, they’re not. Others are doing it to meet some societally driven idea of ‘perfection’ or ‘beauty’. I’ll leave argument over that to the sociologists.
It’s worth mentioning that while this used to apply primarily to women, there are an increasing number of men showing issues with eating disorders and other unhealthy eating and training habits (including a massive increase in elective plastic surgery for men). At one point it was thought that eating disorders only occurred in men but this is clearly not the case. Both anorexia and bulimia are potentially fatal.
Of course, some individuals want, have to or need to lose fat/weight for health reasons. High blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, Syndrome X (aka Type II diabetes), arthritis, etc. are all often positively impacted by even moderate amounts of weight loss. Research suggests that as little as a 10% weight loss (e.g. 20 lbs for a 200 lb person, 30 lbs for a 300 lb person) can drastically improve health parameters.
Why Do People Want to Gain Fat?
It’s interesting to note that in many non-modern cultures, fatness is not the social negative that it tends to be in the Western world. Women are frequently moved into fattening tents prior to marriage, and one culture even has a ritual fattening period that signals a boy’s growth into a man. I’d note that there’s no real trick to this: they accomplish this fattening by making the victims eat a lot and sit on their butts all day.
It’s probably fair to say that in most Western cultures, it’d be a little unusual for someone to specifically want to gain fat; there are always exceptions. Here are a few.
For some athletes (especially female) increasing bodyfat may actually be healthier for them in the long-term. Studies show that women’s hormones (and men’s for the record) can be severely disrupted under certain conditions (usually the combination of a low body fat and excessive caloric restriction) and this can cause bone loss and other problems at a very early age. Studies of female gymnasts have found bone densities similar to that seen in severe osteoporosis in old women. This is not a good thing.
For other athletes, such as a football lineman or a sumo wrestler, the quality of weight gained may not be as critical as just being a walking human wall. Carrying extra fat may actually be beneficial since it can provide some protection against the other large men who are going to be running into you at high speeds with violence on their mind.
Of course, gaining fat for the sake of gaining fat is almost always a poor idea health-wise (and there has been an alarming increase in death at a young age among athletes in sports where the body weight requirements keep going up and up and up), unless someone was unhealthily lean in the first place.
But sports performance and optimal health aren’t always compatible. If being 350-400 lbs (with 40% body fat) is required to be a pro football lineman and make the big bucks, so be it. I’d note that taking the fat off after they retire is often a real problem for these types of athletes. They tend to be so used to eating everything in sight that the idea of not doing so is a very rough change to make.
Finally, sometimes non-athletic individuals need to gain weight or fat as well. Although relatively more rare, some individuals are unhealthily underweight or underfat. I’m not talking about the anorexic eating disorder types (who need to be medically supervised during their weight gain) but folks who simply can’t seem to gain enough weight to be healthy, energetic and vigorous. This tends to be a small percentage of the population but anybody who reads this site regularly knows that I’m all about completeness.
Why Do People Want to Gain Muscle?
The same individuals who typically want to reduce fat for either cosmetic or performance reasons frequently want to gain muscle mass for the very same reasons. Bodybuilders may need (or simply want) to gain muscle mass to improve their size and overall shape. This may be overall size increases or just increases in specific muscle groups for reasons of symmetry and balance.
Performance athletes may find that performance increases with more muscle and strength although how much of each depends strongly on the type of sport. Many athletes (e.g. sprinters) have to balance out the requirement for strength and power with carrying too much body weight. It is often a fine balance. Other sports aren’t quite as demanding for that balance and if more muscle mass leads to more strength and power, performance often goes up.
For some athletes (especially endurance), too much muscle mass is a hindrance and will slow them down beyond a certain point. Heavyweight rowers tend to be an odd exception since their weight is supported by the boat. As with body fat, optimal levels of muscle mass, enough for efficient performance, but not so much that it slows the athlete down is the goal for these athletes.
There are also athletes who can’t gain too much muscle because of aesthetic requirements of their sport (i.e. gymnastics and figure skating).
Even the general public is often interested in some amount of muscle mass gain in this day and age. Like fat loss, most of this tends to be driven by cosmetic reasons. Males want to ‘be buff’ and females are finding that even small amounts of muscle mass drastically improve their appearance.
Of course, there can also be health benefits to gaining muscle mass. Massive amounts of research is focusing on the muscle loss that can occur with aging and finding ways to improve muscle mass (usually through training and nutritional intervention) in an increasingly aging population is key is important for both health and functional reasons (e.g. being able to carry your own groceries or get up out a chair without help).
Of course, in extreme situations such as wasting (cancer, AIDS, etc.) maintaining muscle mass is of equal health importance. As it turns out, the loss of too much muscle mass will cause death and finding ways to slow or stop the loss of muscle that occurs is of huge importance.
Why Do People Want to Lose Muscle?
Possibly even more rare are the situations where someone wants to lose muscle. Frequently these are ex-athletes who have no desire to maintain their muscle mass once their competitive days are over.
More commonly are athletes for whom losing muscle mass may actually improve performance. Generally these tend to be endurance athletes who, for some reason, gained excessive amounts of muscle mass (either deliberately or through involvement in another sport) often in non-functional muscles.
A big upper body is typically a hindrance for an athlete such as a road cyclist since it’s just dead weight to be hauled around the course. Losing it may improve performance.
In this vein, there is a story that is often told about Lance Armstrong who, after losing a large amount of weight (including some upper body muscle mass) due to his bout with cancer, was a much better cyclist because of it. In this case, losing non-functional muscle could only improve his power to weight ratio.
Finally, as I noted in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1, extremely obese individuals often gain some lean body mass (some of which is muscle) in the process of becoming obese. Most obesity experts expect, and don’t necessarily mind, that that ‘extra’ lean body mass is lost when weight is lost. In fact, up to 25% of the total weight lost may come from lean body mass without anybody getting too concerned in that situation.
Hi Lyle
i am not sure that it is a good thing for obese individuals to have up to a quarter of their weight loss as lbm. i see no benefit. muscle mass is important as people age. i think that statement comes from the proponents of low calorie, low fat, high carb inefficient diets.
Martin
If your 400 pounds, and I have been there, you need tons of muscle to just get around. My lean body weight exceed my Ideal Body Weight at the time, since I did not want to be a body builder the muscle came off some with the fat, actually some the muscle moved from places that it was needed to support tugging myself around to places I developed working out as I was losing. You don’t intentionally try to lose muscle mass, it just happens when you drop a tremendous amount of weight.
“Finally, as I noted in Weight Training for Fat Loss Part 1, extremely obese individuals often gain some lean body mass (some of which is muscle) in the process of becoming obese. Most obesity experts expect, and don’t necessarily mind, that that ‘extra’ lean body mass is lost when weight is lost. In fact, up to 25% of the total weight lost may come from lean body mass without anybody getting too concerned in that situation.”
The 25% lost is only partially muscle mass and represents an EXTRA 25% that they gained while getting fat. Just like I said above.
“i think that statement comes from the proponents of low calorie, low fat, high carb inefficient diets”
I totally agree, I can’t stand people who promote caloric restriction as a means to lose weight effectively; I mean what are they thinking?
Martin, obese people who diet down to a “normal” BMI standard will lose significant amounts of LBM mostly because, as Lyle stated, this was additional LBM that was procured during their extended high calorie intake as well as the resistance from moving around a couple of hundred pounds of lard.
Realize that even “protein adequate” or the “high protein” diets you apparently favor will fail to prevent some of the LBM lose during dieting when large amount of fat loss are needed (unless you want to do it verrrrryyyyyy slowly). Keep in mind this is muscle mass that is easily lost because it is superfluous. Baseline LBM is more resistant to atrophy than acquired additional LBM, sort of like homeostasis or regression to the mean. And we’re talking about obese individual who need to create significant caloric deficits to achieve very large reductions in body mass, not bodybuilders who need to retail every ounce of muscle for aesthetic purposes. In this population it’s about getting them to create the largest sustainable caloric deficiency while maintaining various health parameters.
Granted, at isocaloric amounts “high protein” diets may help with satiety and compliance and these are conversations worth having (Lyle has written several articles about the benefits of high protein diets) but probably will only marginally impact the loses of LBM in the obese population.
Re: obese people and muscle mass
I am a formerly obese person who took perhaps a strange approach to this while losing weight. I weight trained my upper body but not lower. The reason was that my legs were already pretty strong from carrying around my obese self, and I had developed large “fat person calves” as a result. I wanted to have more normal looking legs so I did not train those areas, and lost about 1.5″ off my calves. I can wear normal boots now and it sounds silly but it’s nice to be normal. However the weight training added a bit of muscle on my upper body (thanks newbie gains!) and so my total LBM has actually gone up slightly as body fat percentage has gone down (as verified by a Tanita scale with hydration controlled for as best as possible). The added upper body muscle I think helps balance out my proportions and gives some shape to my back and arms. I also like finally having upper body strength instead of being “all legs.” And having more muscle on my frame means I am at a smaller size than when I was last at my current weight and my metabolism is better.
Anyhow that’s been my experience with body recomposition and the rationale behind my approach.
Quick question:
Generally speaking, at what body fat % will a man’s hormones begin to get messed up (like testosterone, etc)? I’m sure it varies, but I mean in general terms.
Kevin: It does vary and often separating out the actual body fat levels from what’s required to reach that level (e.g. the training and diet) can be difficult. That is, the intensive training and caloric restriction is probably part of the problem as much as the body fat level per se (certainly this has been shown in terms of females and menstrual cycle disturbances with calorie balance being the primary driver). That said, I think most naturals athlete will have trouble much below perhaps 8% body fat for men will start to cause problems.
Colleen: Good point. And it is worth mentioning that much of the increased LBM (at least in terms of muscle mass) does tend to be in the lower body. Which makes sense, carrying the extra weight around (up and down stairs, etc.) is essentially a stimulus for muscle growth. In my experience, overweight individuals often had extremely strong lower bodies for that reason. Your approach actually makes a good deal of sense.