The answer to this question or, more accurately, the misconception behind this question, is: no. It isn’t true that muscle changes to fat when you stop working out.

As I mentioned in the article Myths about sports and nutrition: Part 1, muscle is muscle, and fat is fat. There can be no conversion between these two different types of body tissue.

A lot of people say, “Well, I have a friend who was very muscular and he stopped working out and now he has gotten fat.” That observation is true. What they don’t know is how that muscular friend came to be obese.

One might want to ask if he has eaten a hypercaloric diet his entire life, then trained very hard to gain a lot of muscle mass, and after years of this routine, stopped training but his eating habits remained the same.  If this is the case, your muscle mass has decreased because you aren’t working out, and all the extra calories that aren’t being burned are being stored in the form of fat.

As an example, if that same person continues to take in 4000 calories a day, and his physical activity is practically zero, he will only burn off what few calories he will burn off with a sedentary life plus what he burns off through his resting metabolism, which is steadily decreasing. The result will always be a positive energy balance, and he’ll get fatter and fatter.

The solution to this would be for that person to change his diet, cutting the calories, and doing at least some cardiovascular exercise.

This is somewhat difficult for many people who have gotten accustomed to eating too much, because most of them stop exercising completely but continue eating the same way as before.

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Physical inactivity is the biggest public health problem of the 21st century. Yet instead of paying attention to our sedentary lifestyles, we keep on focusing on fatness. Studies have shown that you can be fat and fit. So why are we obsessing about what we eat rather than how much we move? Read this post Clickinkg HERE