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Anonymous
you're looking to get one generic answer but there's more than one factor at play.
increasing your muscle mass will cause your body to require more energy to maintain, thus upping your metabolism. that just means the more muscular you are, the higher your metabolism will be. your body will want to maintain equilibrium and you'll probably just end up eating more, retaining the same fat-to-weight ratio. on the other hand, if you don't eat enough or don't eat right, then your muscles wont even develop in the first place.
what this basically sums up to is that increasing muscle mass alone is not the way your body cuts fat. you have to do cardio to burn fat - that is: exercise that keeps your heart rate around 60% of maximum, which is not the same as killing yourself at a dead sprint for 5 minutes and also not the same as strolling comfortably for a couple hours.
your body consumes a certain amount of calories just by you being alive, there are little BMR calculators online that tell you just how much that is. after you look up that number, make sure that the calories you eat in a given day, minus the amount you burn off is less than that number, i.e.
calories consumed - BMR - calories burned from exercise < 0
also, consuming these calories in the form of 5 or 6 small meals spread out evenly throughout the day will keep your metabolism in optimal condition. Eating 2 or 3 big meals a day will usually just slog down your metabolism instead (men's fitness describes metabolism as a fire, which you should throw a log on every few hours to keep the flame strong, as opposed to dump an entire wagonfull of wood in there and snuffing out the fire). if you do it right you'll have energy throughout the day instead of feeling tired and sluggish all the time and you'll actually have the energy to exercise when you need to.
if this is too much to read, the one thing to take away from this is to burn off more calories than you eat
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