I received a great question over the weekend about dieting and losing muscle.
To paraphrase the question, it was quite simply, “If I am not losing muscle mass while I am dieting, then how come my upper arm has lost a quarter inch in girth?”
Well, to get to the bottom of this problem we need to look at some very basic math.
Lets take a 16 inch arm as an example…
( I apologize for the bashed up knuckles and hairy armpits)If you took my arm and cut it in half right through the middle of the biceps, this is what it would look like…
(A hypothetical cross-section of my arm, labels included)
You will notice that my arm circumference can be described as circular. If we remember all the way back to grade 11 math class, we might remember that we can calculate the circumference of a circle from its radius and vice versa (I say ‘might’, because I had to look it up on google)…
(The radius is the distance from the center of your arm all the way to the skin on the outside)Since we know that the circumference of a circle can be calculated by the equation Circumference = 2(pi)radius, we can determine how much (or little) of a change is needed to the radius of the arm to create a quarter inch loss in girth…
So for a 16 inch arm like the one in the picture above, the radius would be 2.546 inches. For that same arm to lose 1/4 of an inch in its circumference, the radius would have to be reduced to 2.507 inches, a loss of a little less than 1 mm.
So if I lost a little less than 1 mm of subcutaneous fat from my arm (which is more than possible, and barely detectable with most skin fold calipers) I could lose a whole 1/4 inch of my arm measurement without actually losing any muscle mass.
Fat loss happens everywhere,
BP
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