Most replayed moment: Why muscle gain matters more than weight loss | Vonda Wright

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Hello, and welcome to ZOE Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.
Today we're talking about muscle mass. For many people, losing weight is the ultimate health goal. However, focusing solely on lowering the number on the scale often means overlooking something crucial, muscle mass. We know that increasing muscle makes us stronger, but it also plays a surprising role in metabolism and helps keep unwanted fat at bay. Dr. Vonda Wright joins me to explain why improving your body composition may be the smarter goal for lifelong health.

**Vonda Wright** (0:42)
Muscle is a critical vehicle for pulling glucose out of the blood, turning it into the energy our body needs, often to contract the very muscle where it's made. So you can think of it as a glucose sink, as an energy sink for our body.
Which is critical, right? The more muscle you have, the more efficient you are at doing that.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:03)
Why is that important, Vonda? Why does it matter that I've got these muscles to pull in this blood sugar out of my blood?

**Vonda Wright** (1:10)
Well, I'm sure you've spoken many times about the roles of high blood sugar in the body. At a very, very simple level, it's like we're barbecuing our body from the inside out, where high blood sugar causes this chronic inflammation in our body, which is the cause of many chronic diseases, which is high inflammation.
Sugar causes an internal process that produces these substance codes called AGEs, which literally, I think of it as an internal barbecue. It's crystallizing inside of our body.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:42)
Doesn't sound good?

**Vonda Wright** (1:43)
No, it doesn't sound good. It doesn't feel good. High inflammation is one of the reasons people get joint pain, frozen shoulder, one of the reasons we have the highly inflamed process of unchecked diabetes. I mean, all these things work together, and muscle is critical for helping control that glucose balance because when there's too much circulating, it is stored in fat.
There's only so much our liver can store, about 2,000 calories worth, and then the rest of it has to be stored somewhere. I'm going to tell you for sure that I find in joints where we shouldn't have this because I'm an arthroscopist, fatty stores, it's like putting fat into the closets, because there's no where else to put it. We have so much excess energy, our body has to store it somewhere, it stores it in fat, and then it shoves the fat a lot of places. You should not have big layers of fat in our shoulder joint, in the other, the hip joint, for instance, but yet I find it there pretty frequently.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:44)
And so having more muscle helps pull this glucose, this blood sugar out of your bloodstream and helps to fight what you're describing?

**Vonda Wright** (2:50)
That's right, in a more efficient way, instead of just storing it in any convenient but unhealthy fat globule.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:58)
What goes on to our muscles if we decide to go into a calorie-restricted diet, which is, I guess, the way we've all been told we should lose weight historically. And even today, right, if you start to use these GLP-1 drugs, you still end up not being hungry, so then you go into this sort of calorie restriction.

**Vonda Wright** (3:15)
What happens to our muscles? Well, we know that when we just calorie restrict, we lose, depending on who you read, 20, 40, 50 percent of the total weight on the scale in muscle. We will lose fat, but a large portion of what we lose will be muscle because our body has a hierarchy of needs.
Our body perceives certain tissues like bone and muscle as not only functional but storehouses.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:48)
You're saying it sort of as though it's obvious, but that's pretty shocking. I generally would think about it as like, well, you lose fat because after all, you're still walking around.

**Vonda Wright** (3:58)
You will lose fat, yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:59)
I think many people like me will be surprised that you would lose any muscle at all.

**Vonda Wright** (4:03)
Well, listen, when people are sick in the hospital for a week, it's estimated you can lose nine percent of your muscle mass from laying still.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:10)
Nine percent in a week?

**Vonda Wright** (4:12)
Cachexia and being ill and drawing from your muscle as a source of energy can lead to profound changes. If I put a cast on your leg for one week and you're not contracting that muscle, your body will view it as non-vital and will start using it, and you will have atrophy. It's interesting what the body does because, back to the hierarchy of needs, in a situation where we're calorie-restricted, our brain still is a very hungry organ, and needs energy, and your body is going to take it from somewhere. So if we're not in taking enough food, our body is going to start using the store houses to convert to energy for the brain, to keep it alive, for the heart, to keep it alive, right? The vital functions.