Will I lose muscle when I lose weight?

Nikkiey draws a hard line between weight loss and fat loss. In her video on losing fat without losing muscle, she explains that a program focused only on weight loss will take your hard-earned muscle along with the fat. What you actually want is to shrink the body fat around your muscle while keeping the muscle itself. That is what shows tone and changes your body composition. Chasing the scale alone, she says, tends to leave you looking skinny fat and frustrated. She knows because she was there herself early in her journey: working hard, but not working smart.

On Ep. 179, she explains why quick fixes backfire. Muscle is metabolically active tissue. It never switches off. When you slash calories to around 1,000 to 1,100 a day or less, your body has nothing else to draw on, so it taps into your muscle for energy. As you lose muscle, your resting metabolic rate drops. That stacks on top of metabolic adaptation, where your body slows down to conserve energy during the cut. The result is that keeping weight off gets harder every round. This is why years of yo-yo dieting leave so many women stuck. It's the plan, not you.

The fix she keeps coming back to is food. She calls carbohydrates a key macronutrient for building and recovering muscle, especially if you're training hard, and warns that restrictive approaches like keto may work short term but aren't sustainable. She shares the example of Cheryl, a 57-year-old client whose carbs were raised from 270 grams to 330 grams while she held her weight. Give your body what it needs, Nikkiey says, and your metabolism can come along with you.