Question: How many calories can be burned by a pound of muscle?

Answer: One pound of muscle burns about five calories in a 24 hour period when the muscle is at rest.

This fact is contrary to what is commonly stated. You may have heard that anywhere from 10 to 50 calories can be burned by a pound of fat in a 24 hour period.

Why is there confusion?

The Katch-McCardle Formula used to calculate metabolic rates shows that a persons daily metabolic rate can be calculated as: 370 + (21.6 X LBM(kg)) = Calories burned in a 24 hour period.

Many people think that, if a kilogram of muscle burns 21.6 calories in 2 hours, a pound of muscle must burn about 10 calories.

This is not true.

A pound of lean body mass is not the same thing as a pound of muscle. Lean body mass includes everything in your body that isn’t fat, which means that the calculation includes highly metabolic tissues like your liver, heart and viscera.

When you add lean body mass to your body through resistance training, you are adding muscle mass. You aren’t adding mass to your organs. And even though you have more muscle in your body than organs, they only share about half of the metabolic work.

For every pound of muscle you gain from working out, you can expect to burn an extra five calories in 24 hours while your body is at rest.

Adding muscle to boost your metabolism may not work like you would like it to. If you want to burn fat, rely on your diet.

Counting calories is a very difficult task, even during clinical research.

Good research will use tools such as diet records and food frequency questionnaires to identify changes in eating patterns instead of measuring calorie intake.

Measuring the amount of calories you’ve consumed in a single day is nearly impossible. If someone tells you they ate 3,125 calories in one day, they probably actually ate anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 calories.

Research trials show that there is a 30 percent margin of error when calories are counted – and the more a person eats, the bigger the margin of error becomes.

Calorie counting tools and software should be used to identify trends – not to measure the exact number of calories you eat.

To learn more about this, watch this video:

It is important to keep track of calories consumed, but obsessing over the exact number of calories you consume is a recipe for diet failure.

“How much weight will I lose with Eat Stop Eat?”  I am asked that question often.

You can find my answer to this question in the FAQ section at the end of Eat Stop Eat, but I will also answer it here:

You should be able to consistently lose one to two pounds per week when you follow the Eat Stop Eat lifestyle.

Many people report that they have lost as many as seven pound per week by following the program, but these are exceptions.

Some people lose three or four pounds per week during the first couple weeks of the lifestyle, but this is mostly due to the loss of inflammation, excess water, and some fat mass.

While some people do lose an impressive amount of pounds during the first couple months of following the Eat Stop Eat lifestyle, don’t be fooled into thinking that the program is a starvation or a crash diet.

Eat Stop Eat is designed to create sustainable weight loss. Strive for long-term weight loss success, and look for trends in your weight losses and gains. (Remember that your weight can fluctuate by as much as two or three pounds in just one day.)