Should we worry so much about preserving "Lean Mass" in people who got obese on the SAD?
A few years ago now, researchers led by George Bray of Pennington did a classic overfeeding study, to interesting result. I blogged on that study in some depth here , but I'll include a brief summary now: Metabolic ward study Determined weight maintaining caloric intake over a period of 13-25 days on a standard diet P/F/C% of 15/25/60% The average maintenance calories for all participants was 2414 cals. Overfed ~40% of calories or ~950 cal/day for 8 weeks. Carbs in the overfeed were slightly less than absolute amount at baseline, and were 40% of total overfeed calories. Total caloric intake for overfeed averaged 3375 cal/day, where excess calories came from fat and protein only. The macro ratios of the overfeed diets in P/F/C% were: LP-6/52/42, NP-15/44/41 and HP-26/33/41. Below is the summary table I made for the calories and absolute quantities (grams) of the three macros: