Fat and Muscle: The War Inside Your Body

Here’s the cold hard fact— you can’t replace fat with muscle. It doesn’t work that way! You can’t turn fat into muscle, and muscle will not degenerate into fat. They are completely separate materials in your body. Instead, the activity level of your body determines which of these is likely to grow and shrink.

As far as density, muscle is much more dense and weighs significantly more per unit of volume. Fat is bulky and its cells are much larger. It takes up almost twice as much space as muscle. Two people standing next to each of completely different sizes can weigh the same. If one person has a body fat level of 22% and the other more muscular person has a body fat level of 14%, the person with 14% is going to appear far slimmer than the other individual. It’s just that the weight in the slimmer person’s body is more dense.

This is why going off purely your body weight is also another mistake made by the average person. This is why it is important that if you are measuring the effect of “fat-loss” diets, you need to have body fat tests to truly understand your progress.

Fat tissue is more bulky than muscle tissue, so it occupies more space under the skin. Thus, one pound of fat tissue actually has more volume (and will appear larger) than one pound of muscle tissue.

Secondly, muscle tissue utilizes more calories than fat tissue. This is why individuals who have plenty of lean muscle mass often lose fat so easily. Their body is rapidly burning off calories even when sleeping just because of all that muscle tissue.

What’s more is because of this elevated metabolic rate, these people also often find that they don’t put on body fat nearly as easily as someone who doesn’t have that much muscle tissue, so they tend to stay lean.