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army1987 comments on The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet - Less Wrong
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Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn't exactly to become skinnier last time I checked. (The caveat is that muscle is denser than fat, so if you gain muscle while keeping your total weight constant you'll look skinnier.)
No, downwards. For anyone with a significant amount of fat and underdeveloped muscles.
It usually isn't. Yet this is not incompatible with body building being an efficient form of weight loss.
I don't understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely "look skinnier" rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier... doesn't it?
I was using skinnier as a one-word shorthand for ‘less heavy’, but you're right that a volume-based definition is closer to the common understanding than a mass-based one. (Cf massive which is also about mass in technical speech but about size in colloquial speech, though for a different reason.)
(Plus, in most cases of people trying to lose weight, they would actually care more about fat mass than total mass if they fully understood the difference and could measure both.)
(In Italian we have a phrase falso magro lit. ‘false lean [person]’ for people who weigh more than one would guess by looking at them.)
But... wouldn't that make them truly lean? Or falsely fat?
Dammit... I meant “more than one would guess”. Fixed.
Also, a person with lots of muscle definition won't look "fat" even if they weigh much more than average. They won't look skinny either, but large-and-muscular is generally considered healthier and more attractive than large-and-flabby.
The parenthetical distinction was between 'losing weight' and looking (and even being) skinnier. ie. Gained weight, lost volume and subjectively appear to have lost even more volume.
Bodybuilders generally aim to build muscular mass through a cycle of high-intensity workouts under high-calorie conditions alternating with near-fasting (along with some even sketchier practices), but that doesn't say much about weight training in general; modern bodybuilding is incredibly specialized and has little to do with any kind of athletics.
By varying diet and the conditions of training, it's possible to use weights to increase endurance, build muscle mass, burn fat, or build strength, and while these all overlap to a certain degree they're not really all that strongly linked. An exclusive focus on one will tend to improve that one much faster than the others.