chrisw77's Journal, 02 January 2021

Chrisw77: Muscle doesn't just appear out of thin air. You need to give your body the "ingredients" for building muscle, which means protein. You need to take in enough protein for growth and repair, and then a surplus of protein in excess of that baseline amount which your body can then use for building muscle mass -- provided you are also doing sufficient strength exercise to prompt your body to use that protein surplus for building muscle instead of storing it as fat. In addition, you will need to cut back on your carbohydrate intake AND increase your fat intake (a moderate amount) so that your body will burn its own fat instead of burning its own muscle tissue for energy. On top of this, you will also need to really stay hydrated and bump up your intake of water -- burning fat and metabolizing protein can really put stress on your kidneys, so you will need to really make sure you are getting enough water for your kidneys to stay healthy. One word of advice -- you should not try to do this quickly. Slow and steady wins the race, as they say. The formula for an healthy man who is trying to build muscle mass would be at least 1.6 or as much as 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass. So, if you weigh 80 kg (175 lbs.), you would want to take in at least 128 grams of protein, or up to 192 grams of protein (spread out throughout the day, of course). Again, this pre-supposes that you are engaging in strength building exercise and taking in adequate water, and limiting your carbs. So, yes, you need to have a surplus of calories, but that surplus needs to come in the form of protein, not carbohydrate. 

Linking a review paper of the physiology of muscle hypertrophy below, with the forewarning that it gets REAL knitty-gritty (like, molecular level knitty-gritty). I don't know much about building muscle but I do love molecular physiology. Growth hormone is one of the key regulators in muscle hypertrophy *and* there is ample evidence demonstrating that it spikes under conditions of fasting/prolonged caloric deficiency. Muscle hypertrophy is weird because you aren't making more muscle cells, you're just adding more volume to the ones you already have, and while this does cost energy, maybe it's a negligible amount in the grand scheme of things, and the impact of GH/other anabolic hormones compensate for the deficit? Evolutionarily speaking, our ancestors would have been pretty screwed if we weren't able to continue to stay strong during times of prolonged fasting/famine, so it makes sense to me that the cellular machinery would reflect this. BUT a lot of this is postulation on my part. Thanks for the quiz. =)  

Right, the link: https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/Fulltext/2010/10000/The_Mechanisms_of_Muscle_Hypertrophy_and_Their.40.aspx 

You can certainly add muscle while dieting. As long as protein and quality of training is in check.  

There you go, it's the creatine for sure. I noticed a good bump from it this time. 

Oh my pleasure, I love this sort of stuff too! Glad you found it interesting. I've enjoyed reading the discussion here, as well. =)