Can someone clear this up for me: Do you need to be in calorie

My understanding is that you need to be on a surplus to gain muscle

Putting on muscle whilst lowering my body fat. God I love cutting.

>>42529184

so you can be in a deficiency while gaining muscle?

Yes, you need a surplus. It's simple physics: Your body needs raw material to build any new tissue (muscle or fat, doesn't matter) , and literally the only possible source for this is food you didn't already burn as energy.

And the opposite is also true. If you're in a deficit, your body MUST make up the difference somehow by burning tissue, (otherwise you'd literally starve to death in your sleep.) This is primarily fat, but as you lose weight, your body will also say "now that we're lighter, we don't need all this muscle to carry our fat ass around" so it will burn that too. You can slow that process down (but not reverse it) by lifting heavy weights.

If you eat "at maintenance", you can slowly do both (mainly because you're never truly be EXACTLY at maintenance, you'll always be slightly over or under) but this will be less efficient over time than just committing to one or the other.

There is some indication that Intermittent Fasting can help that "slow recomping" process be more efficient.

>>42529296
making noob gains whilst cutting is possible and satisfying (as a noob)

>>42529334
muscle can be built in a deficit (if you're a relative newfag) or at exact maintenance due to lipolysis, but it's far less efficient than on a surplus (basically doesn't happen on a deficit unless you are untrained or detrained)

also muscle loss on a cut is vastly overstated, most people just start out much fatter than they care to admit to themselves and when they end up 20lbs lighter than they imagined when they hit 10%, they come to the conclusion that they lost muscle, leading to needlessly cautious cuts (the old 500 cal deficit recommendation)

look up Martin MacDonald and his stuff on setting deficit size on a cut

>>42529334
What if you're fat