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Comment by atarian | Hacker News Reader

Fat is actually one of the last things the body burns during starvation. Your muscles usually go first.

Not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation_response

> the body burns fat after first exhausting the contents of the digestive tract along with glycogen reserves stored in liver cells and after significant protein loss.[2] After prolonged periods of starvation, the body uses the proteins within muscle tissue as a fuel source.

I'm pretty sure Fat goes first. You mostly loose fat when fasting. It's not till much much later that you loose muscle (BMI has to reach a really low level for that to happen)

Talk to any bodybuilder and they'll tell you that for every 4kg of fat you lose you'll also drop 1kg of muscle.

So yes it is mainly fat but some muscles will be lost at the same time, especially if you have a high muscle mass.

As a Marine who has gone through many, many building and leaning cycles, I call BS on this. When you drop that fat, you aren't actually losing muscular tissue (at least not much). I've gotten down to Olympian levels of body fat, 9-10%, and what you are losing besides the fat is water weight. Your muscles shrink because they hold in less blood; your body regulates this to keep blood pressure normalized with all the decrease in fatty tissues. At less that 8% (on average, for men at least), most bodies will start to break down and metabolize muscle tissues (started happening to me around 9%, and was NOT a fun experience).

Yeah, came here to say this (was in the Army). My experience is the same. When it started to happen you could actually smell it (smells like ammonia ... like cat urine, almost).

That’s ketosis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis

Took me weeks to figure out what the heck that smell was; mostly assumed we'd gotten a bad batch of MRE's

I've always been a fat-ass (somewhere from 15-25% BF) so I've also never experienced considerable loss of muscle tissue (at least as far as the scales tell me) - however the body-builder club are at 6% body fat when cut and at what, 12-15% when bulking? They are absolutely going to metabolize muscle tissue when cutting.

Did you continue to work out while cutting? Because that reduces the muscle lost. If you're an average joe and you're starving yourself, your muscle will reduce comparably to fat.

As long as I'm able to lift weights I lift weights. I've never cut significantly though, I'm happy with 15% body fat as a lower bounds - I look good, feel good and am strong at that weight.

Maybe I'll try to drop to 12% to see if I can do it sometime, but I'm a long way from that right now (our third kid is 5 months old so I'm back to being a fat-ass).

I continued to do physical activity. I think your muscles will "shrivel" if you don't use them; they won't be engorged with blood on a regular basis, thus will lose plasticity at a cellular level. Then when you do use them, they'll fill with less blood, and look smaller. It takes a lot to actually lose muscular tissue. Mostly people just lose muscular plasticity, and they appear smaller.

are we all bodybuilders here? I don’t think you can compare.

This makes no sense. Why would the body prefer to break down a functional store of energy when has access to a non-functional one?

Pretty sure that’s exactly the purpose (evolutionarily speaking) of fat. It’s an intermittent store of energy to fill in the gaps between the sporadic meals we evolved eating.

It just makes so much sense that when food is plentiful (peak season) you want to be able to pack on the fat in order to get you through the cold season when food is scarce.

It also makes sense that we eat more heavy, carb-wise, in the winter and lighter foods in the summer, with spring and autumn being the transitional periods. Its to sustain our body fat, or move it into the direction of the next season. A lot of body in the summer makes it hotter (undesired; already hot), not much body fat in the winter makes it colder (undesired; already cold).

And it isn't only that. Squirrels even harvest so they got food in winter. We've also learned to maintain foods, such as sushi with rice, or with salt or acid so it wouldn't go rancid. Plus, like I said, there's "winter vegetables" which are high on carbs, low on water.

Because the functional store requires energy to maintain? Getting rid of it reduces the daily caloric need.

Pure speculation

It depends on which variant of PPARG you have.

You do have a source? I d heard the opposite.

i've read that your earlobes are the first to go

Yep, and the process is hard on the kidneys.

Which one, muscle or fat burning?

Breakdown of muscle tissue releases proteins that are damaging to the kidneys. It's called rhabdomyolysis. Excessive exertion, infections and starvation can cause it.

Rhabdo is no joke people. Drink your water, pace yourself when working out, an don't let any heavy objects fall on you.

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