If I carve a pound of muscle out of your thigh then carve a pound of fat out of your ass and put them on a balance scale it would read equal. If I did the same weight experiment with lead and feathers it would also be the same. So, just to be clear, I weigh an ounce of lead and an ounce of feathers. Are you following me? It's like that old joke about a plane crashing on the boarder of two states and the question is where are the survivors buried? Don't get all twisted up with muscle and fat or lead and feathers, focus, instead, on the weights. Pound and pound or ounce and ounce.
So how about getting to what is different between muscle and fat, aside from the obvious? Okay, sure. Returning to the pound of each, now that we know they weigh the same, what you'll find is a difference in density. Muscle is far denser than fat just as lead is far denser than feathers. With muscle being denser than fat it will take up less space. But a 180 pound man with 5% body fat will weigh the same as a 180 pound man with 40% body fat. One will be lean and muscular while the other will be on the frumpy.
I think what people are misunderstanding is the difference between weight and mass. Weight is related to the pull of gravity. Mass is related to the amount of matter something has. Muscle will have more mass because it has more matter than fat. But if equal weights are measured they will be the same.
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