Gaining Weight While Losing Fat

OneWayAround

I'm about 6'0 and 13'7. I have a bit of a belly but my arms and legs aren't that big. I want to gain weight up to about 14 stone but with muscle, I know if I eat right and do a proper weight program my arms and legs will grow but is it possible to lose my belly while eating more?
What sort of diet should I be looking at to acheive the results I desire? Losing fat has a lot to do with diet I know but is there any exercises I should be focusing on to lose my belly fat. I'm not just talking about sit ups, is there any exercise that is deadly for this? Or any other tips? Thanks very much.

smcgiff

OneWayAround wrote: »

I'm about 6'0 and 13'7. I have a bit of a belly but my arms and legs aren't that big. I want to gain weight up to about 14 stone but with muscle, I know if I eat right and do a proper weight program my arms and legs will grow but is it possible to lose my belly while eating more?
What sort of diet should I be looking at to acheive the results I desire? Losing fat has a lot to do with diet I know but is there any exercises I should be focusing on to lose my belly fat. I'm not just talking about sit ups, is there any exercise that is deadly for this? Or any other tips? Thanks very much.

Advise you to google cutting then bulking. Gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time
is not possible in most situations.

TouchingVirus

Spot fat loss doesn't happen, so there are no exercises to target your gut - it'll get smaller as you lose bodyfat. Once you're down to good bodyfat levels (the cutting) look at bulking. Cutting requires eating less calories than you need to use up the fat stores, bulking requires eating more than you need. Doing both at the same time is pretty much impossible

Burkatron

OP,Have a look at lean gains take on intermittent fasting, plenty of people getting good results off of this! I've put on 10lbs without noticeable fat gain since January! (I'm not saying I haven't put on fat before anyone starts)

Read the guide http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html

Vomit

Gaining muscle while losing fat- a lot of people say the answer is no, straight away. But the real answer is yes, in the practical sense. One has to define what 'same time' means. Is it the space of 24hrs? Or a week perhaps? You can clean up your diet, increase your cardio and slowly but surely lose the fat, without losing muscle. Slow and steady is the key, as there are no shortcuts.

smcgiff

Another time people can lose weight and gain muscle is at the very start of a programme when they are starting from an over weight position. To be clear, while in the cutting phase it's important to keep up training and weight training, otherwise it's fat AND muscle that's lost during cutting.

To keep things simple and suitable to most people it's best to cut then bulk when looking to make serious muslce gains.

There's a fair amount of people at gyms that can lift serious weights, but have huge bellies and no definition. Great, if that's their goal.

OneWayAround

Thanks for the replies. I googled cutting then bulking and read some interesting articles. Basically it is possible to gain weight while losing fat but only for certain people as others have mentioned. Them being overweight beginners and people who had muscle before but lost some through injury or whatever, the muscle memory helps build back muscle while losing fat. I suppose I'd better get cutting then.

OneWayAround

Instead of starting a new thread I said I'd ask this here.
Should someone with my goals have a low carb - high protein diet? I've googled and there's so much stuff that I don't know what to think.
Does anyone have a link to a good low carb - high protein diet? From what I've read and heard the opinions vary on what foods should be left in or added to the the diet and what should be cut and excluded from the diet.
Thanks.

TouchingVirus

As somebody with half of your goals (cutting) and a lot of work to do on them, yes you should be looking at a low(er) carb, high(er) protein diet. Somewhere around 40%/30%/30% (Protein/Carbs/Fats).

Another thing is how much in total you're eating when cutting - you should use a calculator for that. You can find one here. Put in No Exercise/Desk Job/Couch Potato. You'll get your TDEE - take 20% off it. That is what you should be eating to lose fat. You can eat a bit more on training days if you're hungry but not too much more - try always keep it lower than your TDEE. You will have to adjust the amount over time since your TDEE gets lower when you lose weight.

Let's not go too mad on the whole what you should and shouldn't eat because it never works, you need to educate yourself and that can only be done by experimenting over time - just make sure that you track what you eat using MyFitnessPal or whatever and that at the end of the day you're eating those ratios pretty much every day.