losing weight: muscle or fat?

[rawandama]

How do I know if I'm losing muscle or fat? I've lost 6 lbs being high raw, but I feel tired very often. A recent test showed that I'm spilling protein in my urine (lovely, I'm sure you ALL wanted to know!). My concern is that I haven't lost any fat weight, only muscle. :( Can anyone help answer my question??

Thank you for any answers.

[Lisa42]

That's the problem with constantly weighing yourself with a regular scale - it's a mystery number - one cannot tell what one is losing alot of the time. You are better off forgetting a regular scale and getting one that measures body fat and water in the body, or forgetting all of that and going by the way your clothes fit and/or measuring yourself with a tape measure. My advice would be to make sure you eat enough food to give yourself energy to be really active and start using resistance weights for your whole body to tone and build muscle. You could lose five pounds of body fat and gain five pounds of muscle, staying the same weight number, but be a whole size smaller - so try to forget the numbers game for awhile at least.

[rawfigure]

It is hard to tell if you are losing fat or muscle with out having reliable caliper bodyfat tests (hard to find..). One simple trick I used when competing was to measure waist and bicep. If waist stays same and bicep goes down....probably losing muscle...if waist goes down, bicep says same or increases...probably losing Fat ! This formula works pretty good for someone weight training, not sure if a good gauge for someone who is dieting and not training.

[Shai]

I am getting my body fat tested with calipers tomorrow morning, after two weeks of raw. I have been weight training the entire time and the scale says I have lost 7 pounds. I'll compare it to my stats before I went raw.

So I will post back and let you know if my body fat, or lean muscle tissue (or both) has changed.

I'm thinking its all fat!