Hello, this is Monica Reinagle, and you're listening to the Nutrition Diva

Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. We're talking about a

question that comes up a lot. What's the best diet strategy if you're trying to

gain muscle and lose weight at the same time.

And a little bit later on, I also have a listener question

about whether or not following a vegan diet

makes it harder to gain lean muscle tissue.

After all, protein is key to muscle synthesis and

vegan diets are generally lower in protein than diets that include some animal

products. We'll get back to that just a little bit later in the podcast.

Joseph recently emailed me with a common dilemma. He writes,

We're told that we need to reduce calories if we want to lose fat and to eat more if we want to gain muscle.

So what's the best diet strategy if I'm trying to do both at the same time? The answer depends on whether you're primarily interested

in changing your body weight or your body composition. The two are not at all the

same thing.

Changing your body weight requires changing the balance between how many calories you take in

and how many calories you burn.

If you want to lose weight, you'll need to burn more calories than you eat.

If you want to gain weight, you'll have to take in more calories than you burn.

And obviously, if you want to stay about the same weight, you're looking for an equilibrium between calories in and calories out.

Now there are a lot of ways to change the balance between calories in and calories out. You can adjust calories in by changing what and how much you eat.

You can adjust calories out by changing how much you exercise and move around during the day.

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