Creatine: Fat Loss Friend Or Enemy?

Losing fat is no picnic (no anti-eating pun intended) so making sure you do everything right can make the difference between poor-to-mediocre results, or good-to-excellent results. Currently you may be using creatine and wondering if creatine affects fat loss, and if so, how? In this article, I’ll tell you exactly the impact creatine has on fat loss so you’ll know whether continued supplementation is helping you lose the lard, or ruining your efforts. Perhaps even more importantly, I’ll also tell you of the ‘false trap’ people fall into when they try to lose fat whilst using creatine and notice bizarre things happening and mistakenly give up.

First, let’s first make sure the ‘rules’ are in place, or nobody is losing any fat.

There is 1 golden rule in fat loss – an unbreakable rule, in fact – which must be understood:

The Golden Rule: You will only lose fat if you are decreasing your calorie intake and/or increasing calories burned through exercise.

Your body simply cannot lose fat under any other circumstance. It’s an energy in, energy out thing. You gained fat by taking in more calories than your body needed, and now to lose fat, you need to reverse the process.

I’ll make the assumption that you are taking (or wanting to take) creatine because you are training in some anaerobic way. To make things simple, when referring to your training, I’ll assume its weight training of some kind, although this applies equally to all anaerobic training – and I’m sure you’re smart enough to adapt the equivalent principles over.

Ok. If you are adhering to the above golden rule, then taking creatine during fat loss is a great idea as it will help you lose fat quicker. I’ll explain why.

Creatine promotes lean muscle mass. Lean muscle mass is the great metabolic regulator of the body. Simply put, the more muscle mass you have, the quicker and easier you can lose fat – and keep fat off. That’s because lean muscle mass ‘taxes’ your body of calories. More muscle, means more calories burned – just by virtue of it being there. Therefore, the key to losing as much fat as you possibly can, as quickly as you can, is to look after the muscle.

You look after the muscle by continued training to remind the body that the muscle is useful to your survival. (Hey, it may be just be a hobby like running/lifting weights or whatever to you, but to your body, any physical task is seen as survival.) Failure to do so will mean you gradually lose muscle, which in turn, slows fat loss, too. This happens because you only ever stand to lose muscle whilst losing fat, because you are in calorie deficit across the board, so the secret is to make doubly sure the body knows that muscle is being used and not to touch it, but to use the fat for energy instead.

Creatine helps fat loss in two muscle-promoting ways:

1. (a) Increasing the volume of work you can get out of your muscles. E.g.: Lifting for 8 sets instead of 4. (b) Increasing the force the muscles can contract at. E.g.: Lifting heavier.
2. Enhancing muscle repair efficiency.

Now, in the case of point 1, continued training is crucial to retain the muscle mass you do have. As you gradually decrease calories, you will begin to lose some size and strength. Creatine will help to slow the decline in training standards in both ways 1a and 1b during your fat loss.

Secondly, as in point 2, because creatine is so effective at making the muscles use the available energy you take in through food for muscle repair, you are at much less risk of having calories being stored as fat, and, this makes sure the muscles are being repaired fully, thus retained. Muscles failing to be repaired through nutrition will diminish rapidly.

About the ‘false trap’ I mentioned…

Those not currently supplementing with creatine, or those who have just started and are unaware of how it works, you need to know something crucially important relating to your fat loss:

Creatine promotes water and nutrient retention in the muscles, therefore while it saturates the muscles fully – as it needs to, to work – you will see your weight temporarily go up.

I emphasized weight because this is not a fat gain. Nor does it have anything to do with fat whatsoever. So, if you’ve just begin supplementing with creatine whilst trying to lose fat, or are planning to, don’t be alarmed when you see this. It’s not uncommon for people to gain 5-10lb of additional weight from this effect alone.

You may, therefore, be doing everything right – and actually losing fat – but you don’t see it on the scales because they are going up while your creatine saturation peaks out. For this reason, I advise you to use callipers to measure your body fat as this is the only true way to gauge fat loss or gain; scales can be affected by too many variables, including the sandwich you had for lunch and bladder/bowel contents.

Conclusion:

As you can see, it really is all about the muscles, and because creatine is so adept at increasing the quality of a workout and repairing muscle, supplementing with creatine during fat loss is an excellent way to increase your results and shorten the amount of time it takes to get trim.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.