Another Fitness Myth Keeping Your Fat
Posted by Joshua Taylor on July 1, 2009
Another classic myth…
“Adding one pound of muscle will burn 50 calories each day.”
When we apply some basic math skills to this myth we find that it is completely illogical, and impossible. Let’s just say someone added 20 lbs of muscle, if this myth were true they would burn an extra 1000 calories (20lbs x 50 calories). We know that there is no way that our metabolism is going be able to sustain muscle mass if we were burning that many calories on top of our other metabolic functions.
Take a look at any college level anatomy and physiology textbook. It will show us that nearly 70% of our total energy expenditures are due to organ processes.
Most of the time there are nice little charts that break it down even further for you.
20% of our energy is used by the Brain
25% of our energy is used by the Liver
18% of our energy expenditure is from muscle
Therefore, your resting metabolic rate is only made up of around 20% consumption by your muscle cells.
In general we can ball park that an average person is around 40% muscle. So in a 215 pound guy would have 86 pounds of muscle.
If every pound of muscle burned 50 calories…
His metabolic rate would be projected at 4,300 calories just for the muscles cells! But, according to our textbooks above that is only around 15-20% of his total metabolic rate expenditure.
So his total metabolic rate would be over 20,000 calories if this well spread myth that a pound of muscle burned 50 calories each day.
So don’t be fooled: Simply increasing your muscle by a pound will not automatically increase your metabolic rate by 50 calories.
Like the catabolic food claim, this sounds great when we are talking about 1 pound of muscle, or 1 apple having the effect, but when we crunch the figures…it’s becomes apparent that it cannot be true.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that building muscle is useless. In fact, it’s essential for health, longevity and looking good, but I’ve seen way too many people justify eating(and drinking) extra calories because of their gains in muscle (and hypothetical gain in metabolism).
To Increasing Your Quality of Life,
JT
P.S. – Don’t believe everything you read, unless of course it has my name on the bottom 
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