Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 101: Creatine caused me to gain weight!
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations Podcast. And in today's episode, I want to talk about how creatine caused me to gain weight. So I thought this would be a good one to talk about because I have definitely seen people caught out by this before. So what we're gonna throw in is a little bit of context and a little example of what creatine tends to do when you start supplementing it and why it's not something to worry about. But it will cause a little bit of an increase in weight for most people. So in my case, I have not been taking creatine for quite some time for no other reason than I'm bloody forgetful and it just hasn't been something on my mind. So I noticed the packet in my cupboard and thought, my goodness, I don't know if I've taken it five times this year, which isn't ideal because creatine is an absolutely excellent supplement for performance. So it's really, really, really useful in the context of in context of explosive efforts, ⁓ things like a sort of sprint, for example, really short sprint that is. ⁓ it's really useful in kind of like explosive efforts, and it's definitely useful as well for something like adding a rep or two to some of your sets in a training session. That's what it's going to allow you to do. It is not a complete game changer. You're not gonna suddenly take creatine and ⁓ be twice as strong. It's not like Popeye's spinach. It's just enough to make a little bit of a difference to performance. But there's plenty of research that supports it. It's one of the it is the most researched supplement of all time. I think if you consider caffeine as well, obviously it's not really purely a sports supplement, it's got other benefits as well. But if we just kind of look at kind of sports supplements, that that was kind of the predominant use of creatine, that's where it's most useful. So you know, in practical terms, what are you gonna get out of supplementing it? Well, what you might get is you might get an extra rep or two across a couple of sets in a session, which doesn't sound like that much. But let's say I get six reps across an entire session more. And then I'm training two to three times a week, let's say even twice a week. Well that's 12 reps per week. Over the course of a month that's 48 extra reps I wouldn't have done. Over the course of a year we're talking about six hundred reps extra. It's not insignificant, right? It's not nothing. So it does add up. And it also tends to be the case that when we supplement creatine, although this is somewhat of an indirect effect, that because we are able to do a couple more reps, your progress in terms of building muscle is also faster. Now there's lots of kind of different indications of how much muscle this would be. I've seen anywhere up to sort of 10% suggested, I've seen sort of 5% suggested, then closer to seven. But let's work on the basis that it's even 5%. If someone said to you, after a year of training, so you've done 52 weeks of training, ⁓ let's say, just obviously you take holidays, but let's say you've done 52 weeks of training for simplicity's sake, or 50 weeks of training for simplicity's sake, you get to the end of the year and someone says, ⁓ by the way, if you've got a bonus here, here's an extra two and a half weeks worth of progress. Well, you would bite their hand off, right? Because that's two and a half weeks of progress in terms of how much muscle you've built. Now, even if you're listening to this and you're like, well, my goal right now is is more about weight loss and fat loss. It's not really about muscle gain. There's absolutely a hack in here where the more muscle mass you have, you will be in better shape at higher body weight, which is really useful to know. And what that means is if I'm 80 kilos when I first start and I start training and I train really, really hard, instead of having to get to 70 kilos to be in really good shape. I might be able to be 71 and a half kilos to be in good shape, or even maybe 72. Now, that doesn't sound like a massive difference, but for anyone who's a little bit farther into the weight loss journey, they might be doing the mass of like, okay, well, if I'm losing 0.4, 0.5 kilos a week, that might mean that at the end of a diet, I get to stop that diet five to six weeks early, or maybe you keep going on to 70, but you just look extra bloody good. That's quite a nice frame for it. And it works in reverse. We're obviously thinking about getting into shape. But let's also contextualize that in terms of staying in shape, right? That extra little bit of muscle allows us to stay in better shape. Now, whilst creatine isn't going to be piling on loads of muscle for you, if someone said to me, here's an extra 5% bonus and all the progress you've made over the year, I'd feel pretty bloody pleased about it. And of course, it doesn't just turn up at the end of the year. It's progressive. It just as you train and progress, you progress at maybe slightly higher percentage than you would if you didn't supplement it. But it's still got a lot of utility. Now What creatine does, if you like, is it is soared in our muscles and it draws water into our muscle cells. So what people get mistaken about, and I've heard this before and it's nonsense, where people say, ⁓ I look a bit watery and a bit bloated if I take creatine. Now, in theory, if you had some sort of digestive issue with it, maybe, but otherwise that's not how it works. It's a bit more like a sponge. You know, if you fill a sponge with water, it doesn't look bigger. Right, it doesn't look significantly bigger. I mean, it does there can sometimes be an effect of like a little bit of muscle fullness effect where we can kind of say, Well, sometimes if someone's really quite lean, I've had a few clients who have kind of got to end the weight loss phase, then started creating them. Because they were so lean, when they've started supplementing it, their muscles look a little bit more noticeable, they look slightly more defined, but it's pretty marginal unless you are very, very lean. You really do have to be quite lean. I'm not sure I'm lean enough right now. To notice that kind of difference. I think you have to be really quite lean. But that would be something that can be kind of useful to know is that when people say, like, ⁓ I don't want to be bloated, it doesn't work that way. It's drawing water into a muscle cell. So like it it just doesn't work like that at all. So just good context that it's drawn into intramuscularly, which means you don't have to worry about that side of it. You're not gonna look bloated because of creatine. Again. With the exception is if someone for whatever reason, although this would be very rare because creatine's very well tolerated, creatine monohydrate is very well ⁓ well tolerated, ⁓ if you had digestive issues with it. But that's true of anything, right? If you're having something that didn't make you feel good, then you would just stop. Because you're not going to be sticking with it anyway, are you, long term? So it's not really relevant. But what it does is it does draw more water into the cell, which tends to mean that you get a weight spike. Now, what we can do is a bit of an analysis is how likely are you To get a weight spike? Well, it kinda depends on the person. If I was a big red meat eater, it's likely that I'd be getting a little bit more dietary creatine in. Therefore, I probably, probably wouldn't need to take sorry, I I probably wouldn't respond so much to creatine because I already have some. I'm probably gonna still get some response because you know maybe my levels are at 50%. Let's make it really simple at 50%. So I get some benefit from it, but What I'll probably see is a relatively small spike in the scales. Cool. Whereas in my case, I do eat red meat, but I don't eat it very often. Not by some sort of very deliberate kind of choice or anything philosophically. I just don't eat it all that often. ⁓ I maybe have red meat like once a week, something like that on average. I was kind of actually trying to look and see because I was like, I wonder how often I actually do eat it. I really like venison because it's super high in protein, it's very lean, and it's not too bad for the environment at all because obviously Scotland deer. Lots of them, they have to get called anyway, et cetera, et cetera. But we won't go into all that. ⁓ but it's a little bit better for the environment than something that's like imported ⁓ from another country, for example. Like it can be a little bit less fuel fuel ⁓ fuel demand there and carbon emissions and all the rest of it. If you want to get into that equally you might not care, and that's absolutely fine too. Just whatever is appropriate to you. But the thing that's important here is that when it comes to your sort of response to creatine and the amount of weight spike, it will depend on your dietary creatine. If you rarely or never eat red meat, well, actually it's quite likely your creatine levels are low. If you're dieting, it probably means your creatine levels are lower because on average you are eating less food, full stop, right? So these things all make quite a big difference to your kind of responsiveness to it. Now, if you look at kind of my lifestyle, I am right now and have been for a little while in a deficit. So I've been dieting for a little while. I don't eat a lot of red meat and I exercise very regularly. So four gym sessions a week at the moment. Basketball for somewhere in the region of four to five hours a week. Most training sessions are between an hour and a half and two hours. So very intensive ⁓ sort of sessions. Actually, I I had to move to a new basketball team, which is the topic for another podcast, I'm sure. ⁓ there's no drama. It's just my my team is basically didn't have enough players to enter the league this year, very sadly. ⁓ as a a few of the guys had to kind of move on, ⁓ had kids and blah blah blah blah blah. So I've had to kind of go to another team and did ⁓ did a practice last night and it's fair to say I cannot move my legs. I ⁓ ended up staying for two sessions because there's basically two different divisions of team and I'm trying to figure out which one I should go into. And ⁓ anyway, long story short, you know, two and two and a half hours of training is far too long. but what's really important is if I look at my lifestyle, I'm very active. I train a lot, but I don't have a lot of red meat, so it's very likely my creatine levels are quite low. And this seems to be the case because my weight has shot up by about two kilos. Now, usually when I take creatine, I see about a kilo and a half jump, but this is a quite a big jump for me. And that's very suggestive of the fact that my creatine levels are particularly low. In fact, again, I was thinking to myself, they're probably pretty bottomed out right now through a lack of creatine in my diet. So this is really important. And yes, you can get creatine through food and people sometimes talk about, ⁓ you could just have red meat. It's completely impractical to get five grams. I can't remember off the top of my head, I actually meant to do this before the podcast, how many steaks you have to have just to get your creatine like levels up a day. It just doesn't work. Don't know about you, but it's slightly impractical to have a steak a day. Never mind two or three to get enough creatine. It's just not not gonna work, right? So what we need to be practical about is, you know, sometimes people say, ⁓ but can just get it from your diet. Well, in creatine's case, you, much like vitamin D, are not going to get enough. from your diet, right? That's not possible or plausible. And obviously vitamin D is slightly different because, you know, we actually can synthesize that through our skin, etc. If you're in a sunnier country, you're more likely to be able to do that, but I live in Scotland. So that's another supplement that people say, ⁓ just go out in the sunshine. Well actually you're probably not going to get enough anyway at this latitude, even when it is sunny and it's bloody well not sunny very often. So the point is is that Creatine supplementation is likely to cause a bigger weight spike in individuals with a lower red meat quantity in their diet, and therefore they're likely to see a bigger weight spike. Case in point, I was sitting at 76.4 pre-holiday. I came back what 2.6 kilos higher. I dropped back down, started supplementing creatine, and my weight actually shot up over the course of two weeks to the tune of two kilos. So I'm actually sitting in the kind of like low 78 again. But it's interesting because to look at progress photos, I actually look a bit leaner than I do pre-holiday as well now. So I feel like I've not only pulled the post holiday weight off, but I've also gotten a bit leaner. But you wouldn't know that reflected in the scales. So I've slightly moved my goals in terms of weight loss now. I'm gonna aim for 74 kilos because I know my baseline has been raised. And that's the way I like you to imagine it, right? Is for a lot of clients. Now most clients aren't going to go up two kilos. You know, I have another client that did, ⁓ when he got to have his weight loss face, he's also quite tall, he's trained for quite a while, has a lot of muscle mass. Obviously, if water is drawn into muscle cells, it stands to reason that people with more muscle mass are likely to have a higher response in terms of weight spikes. And that's again quite proportionate. It makes sense that someone who's taller with more muscle mass would perhaps see a bigger spike. But equally, someone with r not so much muscle mass who just doesn't have much red meat in the diet and doesn't have much dietary creatine will still respond a lot to it. So you kind of want to look through that lens of maybe I've added a kilo to my baseline and that's fine. You just accept that, right? Okay, I don't look worse for it because you don't. You're gonna perform better for it. Long term, you're gonna build more muscle for it. You just have to accept that one kilo spike in the kind of first instance. So that's the way to look at it, is that it's almost like if my baseline previously was 76 and a half, maybe that was my I think my average weight at the time was actually 77. They were just a couple of lows. I think I had two lows right before my holiday. My average weight's 77. My average weight bank went back up to closer to like 78. whatever it was, let's say 79, I now can add two kilos to that baseline. So my original goal with weight loss was to get to 72. Now I'm aiming for 74 because of that. Because I think that I mean, I know that being in a calorie deficit over that time, slightly less aggressive because I've had to slightly tweak my approach, partially to do with the fact that I'm training with his new team. The training sessions are longer, they're also more intensive, so being in a more aggressive deficit will not work for me right now. So I've had to make that tweak. So I know that I wasn't expecting huge drops on the scale, but equally I have been in a position where I know I've been very adherent with my calories, I've stuck to it really tightly, and I can see I'm getting leaner despite the fact my weight's gone up. So it's just a little bit of context about creating an influence. Now that all sounds a little bit negative when you see the weight spike, but yeah, it depends on how you see it. For me, because I'm not emotionally attached to that number on the scales, yes, I want it to go down, but I'm accepting that it hasn't changed my body composition. Like, if anything, it's probably changed it slightly favorably because I'm now going to get a little bit more out of my training. I'm gonna see a little bit of an improvement of performance probably in basketball too. That's great. It's just good context to have that creatine can cause you to gain weight, and that's absolutely normal. If you start taking it in a weight loss phase, you have to be clear with yourself that for two-ish weeks you might see nothing happen on the scales. For some people, there will be lower responders, they don't see a big spike in weight, and that's great, they maybe still see a weight loss. But even for myself, I found that I it basic basically mitigated any movement on the scales at all. Now that's why I have my progress photos, why I have my measurements, because my waist has gone down and I look cleaner in my progress photos, so I couldn't give a damn what the scales say. But it's important context when we go to consider supplementing it. Because what you don't want to do, and I've seen this before because I've spoken to someone who did exactly this, is they came to me for coaching and the diet previous that they'd done they were actually doing quite well on. They'd started supplementing creatine and their weight had gone backwards, they hadn't realized why at the time they got really pissed off and they sacked off their diet. That is the opposite of what we want to do. So I wanted to give some context around that too. So let me know if that all makes sense. If you have any questions about creatine supplementation, then there's going to be a link in the bio to pop me a little message about in sorry, say it again, to pop me a message on WhatsApp about. Creatine or any other future topics you would like me to cover off. Otherwise, hope you're having a great week and speak soon.