Fat or muscle?

When it comes to personal fitness some people want to lose fat, some people want to gain muscle and some people want to do both. Of course there are other priorities but fat loss and muscle gain are pretty common. What’s interesting is when people want to both lose fat and gain muscle simultaneously. Pulling that off is challenging to say the least. In the process of losing fat, you usually wind up losing some muscle. And in the process of gaining muscle, you usually wind up gaining some fat.

Losing fat while gaining muscle is difficult. Just holding steady with body fat while gaining muscle is difficult. To gain muscle, you usually have to allow for some fat gain as well. Otherwise, if you want to gain five pounds of muscle you may spend the better part of two years if you insist on not gaining any fat. Whereas you may be able to pull off five pounds of muscle in 6 months if you accept some gains in body fat as well. Once you have the five pounds of muscle you can slowly work on cutting the fat, if it grew to an unacceptable level, without losing much of the muscle gain.

The same is true in business. You can focus on cost reduction to save money with existing lines of business and perhaps boost profit margins a bit. This is like cutting fat in the gym. You can also focus on investments that build new products and services, like gaining muscle. But doing both at the same time is difficult. If you try to cut costs while making investments, you wind up taking years to make the gains that you could have made in a matter of months if you accepted the fact that you had to spend some money. Like gaining a pound of fat to gain five pounds of muscle.