Is it possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time?
Body recomposition (gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time) is feasible, but NOT for everyone. It can occur in:
- Sedentary novices with high % fat and little muscle who are just starting to train. But, the more physical fitness a person develops, the more difficult it will be to maintain this pattern in the long term.
- People with exceptional genetics.
- Experienced athletes who stopped training for a while and resumed their physical activity.
- People who use steroids.
And those who are not in that group, right? There are variants, but in principle: no. If you are not there, you can reduce your % fat and try not to lose muscle, or you can increase your muscle mass and try not to gain too much fat in the process, but doing it at the same time is complicated, since both processes have different requirements and hormonal environments.
To reduce your % fat you must be in a caloric deficit or consume fewer calories than you need per day, and to increase muscle you must be in a caloric surplus, which means eating more calories than you need per day. In deficit, the processes of catabolism (degradation) exceed those of anabolism (synthesis) and vice versa.
There are strategies such as carbohydrate cycling (increase carbohydrate consumption on intense training days and reduce it on rest days or moderate training), but it requires complex processes that vary with each phase and require planning by experts.
This strategy seeks preservation rather than muscle growth, while minimally losing fat. It is usually used by people with ideal % muscle and fat and who only want to make small adjustments or maintain themselves.
What is clear is that no matter how much you achieve it: you will gain less muscle than if you were bulking and you will lose less fat than if you were in deficit and it will be a slower process than if you did one phase first and then the other.
Building an athletic body takes time and patience. You don't want to have it all at once. The ideal is to focus efforts on 1 objective at a time for satisfactory results.