Fact: Say a novice starts to work out. In all but a very small percentage of people, weight will be gained. This is especially true in those that do not supplement a cardiovascular/aerobic workout and proper diet in addition to weightlifting regimine. While it's true that weightlifting will cause you to lose some amount of weight in fat, that is offset by the fact that muscle is more dense than fat. I'm talking about "lean muscle", in your words, although I don't from where you dervie your terminology. You don't gain or lose fat in corollation to muscle gain/loss. Let's take the equation "mass = density X volume", for instance. Yes, you will lose some fat, but it is harder to break down than muscle is to build up. So what are we left with? A moderate loss of high volume, low density fat will equal slow loss fat mass. Thus, due to fat's low density, not a whole lot of weight/mass will be lost even though it looks deceivingly like it has since a large volume was lost. A respectively higher gain in both muscle density and volume happens rather quickly and masks the remaining fat subtlely. Thus you have gained respectively more muscle mass than you think and have loss respectively less fat mass than you think. In other words, I think that your theory that all the wieght you've gained recently is completely in muscle (or "lean muscle"

) is full of shit. You still got a long ways to go, fatty.