From an email, promoting a webinar: “How to keep your thigh muscles from turning into belly fat in one minute or less.”
I’m picturing hamstring and quadricep cells migrating, like the westward expansion, until finding a comfortable spot in the belly where they assimilate and become belly fat cells. (I wish my sketching abilities let me draw that out.)
Even without that ridiculousness, once a cell is specialized (e.g.: a muscle cell), that’s the only kind of cell it can be. (That’s why stem cells are so highly valuable—they’re not yet specialized.)
So migration or not, muscle cells don’t and can’t turn into fat cells.
Often, we lose muscle and gain fat at the same time because of simultaneous changes in diet and exercise (or reduction in exercise with no corresponding reduction in diet), but they don’t turn into each other.
You can lose muscle and gain or not gain fat.
You can gain muscle and gain or not gain fat.
They are independent of one another.
The other piece to that original sentence is: in one minute or less? How often? I’m not going to the webinar to find out! But I’m sure it’s not a once-and-done, even with a horribly click-bait-y title.
My advice for keeping your thigh muscles from turning into belly fat? Use them. Walk, run, hike, climb, swim, dance, squat, lunge, etc. Often.
I’m picturing the migration like wildebeests in Africa crossing the muddy crocodile-infested river … if they survive they turn into … fat cells?!?!
Pseudoscience… well we will continue to push our bodies to keep up the muscle cells while eating well to keep down the fat cells now that we know there is no great migration.