If you're someone who lifts weights regularly, cutting your calories by 10% helps you lose about twice as much fat as eating just enough to maintain your weight — and you’ll still gain the same amount of muscle and strength.

If you're an experienced lifter, keeping your calories steady won't change your body much. To lose fat or gain muscle, you need to eat less or more than your body needs, on purpose.

If you have more body fat, you can safely eat fewer calories to lose fat without losing muscle, but if you're already lean, you need to be more careful with how much you cut your calories.

If guys who lift weights eat even a little more than they burn, they might still gain some body fat — and eating a lot more makes that even more likely.

In simple terms, this means that doing resistance training with either medium or heavy weights leads to about the same amount of fat loss in young women who are new to exercise over 8 weeks. Both types of workouts can help you lose fat.