how does your body handle switching from a calorie deficit to a calorie surplus?

[dansmith11]

Hey, this may be a stupid question, but I'm having a hard time figuring this out.

What goes on in your body when you switch from a calorie deficit to a calorie surplus, and vice versa? How fast can you switch back and forth?

Well it makes sense that you cannot gain muscle and lose fat at the same exact time, how long do you really need to switch from being in a calorie deficit to being in an anabolic state? I mean can your body really know how much you will be eating at your next meal, or the next day, next week?

I may be way off on this, but I would think that your body just uses what it has at the moment. So if you say, workout, then have a calorie surplus for the next 24 hours after, you'd be in an anabolic state and building muscle, correct? then the next 24 hours, you put yourself in a calorie deficit, and lose some fat, then repeat. So you’d be building muscle one day, and losing fat the next, then repeat this process. Or is it more complex then this? Am I missing something here? Does the body need to be in a calorie surplus for X amount of time before it says, hey, I have the extra resources available to build some extra muscle mass?

[DKing]

This is the concept behind a lot of carb cycling diets and a program called maximum muscularity by a couple of the guys at Rugged Magazine. The thing is, it takes 3,500 calories to build a lb of muscle (actually that might be the number for fat but it has to be around there) so its going to take a really long as time doing it this way. The other thing is that when you cut cals you don't drop only fat and when you increase cals you don't build only muscle so you could end up largely spinning your wheels without going anywhere.

It might work for you but the people who do this tend to have gone through a couple regular bulk/cut cycles to know how well your body responds to different stimulus.

But hey, try it out and see how it goes, it might work great and you will make me look dumb.

Danny

[Johnka]

Generally it's good to ramp-up your calories over an extended period when going into a bulking phase to prevent initial fat gain.

As for the rest of your question, I've found that the body is a very complex machine, and very capable of adapting to nearly anything you throw at it. So eating 3500 k/cal could conceivably keep you at the same weight as 2500 k/cal under certain conditions.

My strategy is to keep it simple. Add food when you want to get heavier and eat less when you're trying to drop fat. Let the scale and calipers be your guide.