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

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. 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  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. Vonder Wright joins me to explain why improving your body composition may be the smarter goal for lifelong health.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  And why is that important, Vonder? Why does it matter that I've got these muscles to pull in this blood sugar out of my blood?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure you've spoken many times about the roles of high blood sugar in the body. And 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 substances called AGEs, which literally I think of it as an internal barbecue. It's crystallizing inside of our body.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Doesn't sound good.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  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. And I'm going to tell you for sure that I find

• 2:17Speaker 01

  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 nowhere 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.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  And so having more muscle helps pull this glucose, this blood sugar out of your bloodstream and helps to fight what you're describing.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  That's right, in a more efficient way, instead of just storing it in any convenient but unhealthy fat globule.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  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. What happens?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  To our muscles?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Well, we know that when we just calorie restrict, we lose, depending on who you read, 20, 40, 50% 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

• 3:38Speaker 01

  our body has a hierarchy of needs. Our body perceives certain tissues like bone and muscle as not only functional but storehouses.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  You will lose fat, yes.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  I think many people like me will be surprised that you would lose any muscle at all.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Well, listen, when people are sick in the hospital for a week, it's estimated you can lose 9% of your muscle mass from laying still.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  9% in a week?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cacexia 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's gonna take it from somewhere. So if we're not in taking enough food, our body is gonna start using the storehouses to convert to energy for the for the brain, to keep it alive, for the heart, to keep it

• 4:56Speaker 01

  alive, right? The vital functions. Muscle is is an accessory.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Does that change depending upon how much body fat you have? So if you're living with obesity and so you have a lot of excess fat, does that mean in that case it only takes it from your fat? Or do you have muscle loss?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's my understanding you have muscle loss no matter where you start. The absolute poundage may be different, but the percentage is similar. If we want to minimize muscle loss during the period when we're calorie restricting, then we need to feed ourself enough protein so that we have the protein building blocks to maintain our muscle mass. We should also be lifting to try to build muscle that we feed with the protein as we calorie restrict. Because for instance, you can eat a lot of protein on a 1,500 calorie meal plan, right?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  So if your if your maintenance is 1,800 calories and you're trying to restrict by 300, you can still eat a lot of protein within that number of calories. You know, you have to choose, you have to eat lean meats and and lean sources, but it's pop completely possible.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Vonda, I want to come back to this thing about weight versus body composition. You've mentioned muscle loss, but at this point, I'm not clear how that fits in with not just looking at the bathroom scales.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  What you see on the outside is not what's going on on the inside. And I'm gonna give you two examples on opposite sides of the spectrum. So a number of years ago, I was invited to go to a fashion week in New York. And I had never gone and it was amazing and I was a little out of my element. But I looked around me at all these willowy women, like they were as thin as could possibly be and wearing these clothes. But there was very little evidence at the time. I mean, now models are different body shapes. At the time, I did not see any muscle definition. And we know there exists a phenomenon called skinny fat.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Meaning you look skinny, you may weigh a hundred pounds. But if you do body composition, you have very low lean muscle mass. So that's on one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, which I see more often in my orthopedic clinics, is when I take a picture of someone's knee, for instance. And in X-rays are meant to identify bone. But you can see the shadows of the other tissue. So if we have an elderly person who is skinny, often what I see are the bones. I see a couple inches of fat on the outside in a leg that has a total volume that's small. And really thin ribbons of muscle in the quadriceps,

• 7:53Speaker 01

  which should be one of the most robust muscle groups of our body. So age is not a factor in skinny fat. But what I also see is this phenomenon of you have a very wide leg. It almost goes beyond the scope of our X-ray. You have normal sized bones in the middle. There's no such thing as big boned. You're like, oh, you're not big because well, if you're a big person, you have bigger bones. But proportionally, it's still about 15% of your total weight. So you have the bone in the middle. You have these thick rinds of adipose tissue, three, four inches on either side of again, very wispy muscle.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  I would love to switch to, okay, I'm sold on all of this, Vonda.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  You've given me this story about why I'm going to throw the scale out of the window and focus on, you know, how I can improve that body composition. Now help me to understand practical, actionable advice about how I do it.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  The first thing I want people to do is become students of themselves. You should not take my word for it. You should not take your word for it. You should become voracious readers of solid information. And you don't have to go all the way back to the scientist papers. Many scientists, you have them on all the time. So choose who you listen to wisely, number one. Number two, become an observer of your body, right? Data is okay. We're talking about a scale. Maybe you, for a short amount of time, use a CGM so you can know how the piece of bread affects your blood sugar, makes how you feel. Be an observer. Maybe you get some actual blood work done because you've never bothered before because you feel fine.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  When I'm taking someone into the OR and I'm asking them their, their medical history and their midlife, and they say, "Oh, I'm good. I don't have any problems." I say, "Is that because you've know that? Because you've had an exam and some blood work? Or because you've never darkened the door of a medical office in your life? There is a difference, right? So after you learn, get some data, then you can build a personalized program for yourself, right? Number four is, no matter who you are and what your age, you must learn to lift weights because we're not agrarian. We're not lifting logs in the field or pigs over the fence. We're just not. But decide what your goal is, right?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  If you want endurance, you can lift very light weights for a lot of reps to failure. I mean, you can get to failure with a five pound weight. You just have to lift it a lot of times.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Let's say, Vonda, that I'm like, I have no interest in lifting weight. I just, I, you got me through the door with like, I'd like to lose weight, but then you told me I shouldn't focus on weight. I should focus on body composition.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  What do I need to do to do that?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Your cardio needs to be 80/20, 80% base training, 20% high intensity sprinting. That's about two, two days a week. And you need to lift weights, not for endurance, not a lot of reps, lightweight, not for hypertrophy, which is a little heavier weights, but 10 to 15 reps in general per set, unless your goal is hypertrophy. In aging, my whole focus is longevity and aging. My goal is strength and power. Strength, meaning what I can lift in a single lift. Power in what I can lift over time. Because I am trying to keep you from falling down.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I am trying to keep you independent in your home and not end up in somebody else's care because you're too weak to get up from a chair or climb your own stairs or open the pickle jar and make your own food, right? So to lift for strength and power, you have to lift heavier. And the ranges on those lifts are three to six reps for four sets. To build muscle for strength and power, four reps times four sets. Because if I get to near failure in four reps, meaning with good form in the power lifts that I do, I can do, let's do bench press.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  I can do four reps of bench press and I'm almost a failure. I can eke out five, it's going like this, one side's going down, but I'm not doing six. So to get to this place where I'm capable of lifting heavy, if you're starting from zero, it takes time. When I decided to recompose my body after perimenopause, I had lifted most of my life. I knew how to do it. I just went to trying to lift heavy. But if you're stepping away from the couch for the first time, you need to work through lifting light first, learning how your body works, learning the proper lifting technique before you attempt these. And then this is a great time to hire a trainer to show you,

• 12:52Speaker 01

  because there is, technique is critically important when you lift heavy.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  What sort of exercises do I need to do within this hefty lifting to achieve?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of ways. And so I base my lifting and the lifting that I prescribe for people on powerlifting. The upper body push pull, so some kind of bench, some kind of weighted pull. Lower body push pull, which means squats and deadlifts. I prefer myself and for people to do them with bars and iron. You can do them with free weights. So those are the four core lifts that we do the heaviest, four reps, four sets. Because they're compound, they take multiple joints, multiple body balance. They take muscle, multiple muscle groups. To support that, the way we prescribe is the supplemental lifts, and I'll describe that.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  We can do eight or 10 of those. Not to failure. So for the, for the bench press, for instance, if I'm going to do it's fifth bench press day and I'm going to start with that as my heavy sets to round out the day in upper body, I might do three or four sets of eight to 10 biceps, triceps, lats, delt, rows, right? To augment this, to support the heavy lift I do. So that is the basic formula.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  That's all for this week's recap. At Zoe, we believe that when it comes to your health, small changes can actually add up to a big improvement over time. And that's why we developed Daily 30, the gut supplement that's specifically formulated to become your new daily healthy habit. You simply add a scoop to any meal once a day to support your health and increase the plant diversity in your diet. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. To make Daily 30 part of your gut health routine, simply visit zoe.com/daily30. See you next time.