Knowing when to cut or bulk

[Mental_Hernia]

I have this up in the Workout forum as well, but I haven't gotten any responses there.

With so many of you having bulked or cut ( or both! ) in the past, how do you actually decide when to do either of them?

I have lost about 40 pounds over the last year and a half or so, and I'm not sure which to do. I still have some fat left on my stomach ( or it may be excess skin from being overweight )

Do I cut until I have a semi-flat stomach, and then add on the muscle? Or start bulking and hope that muscle will 'fill in' the skin/fat?

[ColdSore]

I used to be fat too, and it will take alot longer than you think to loose that last bit of gut...what i did was kept eating lean and healthy, but ate enough to gain more muscle. Once you add more muscle your body will burn the fat off better, then go back into a cutting phase. The added muscle will tighten your skin some also.

[TANK01]

I'd say build more muscle, the more muscle you have the higher your BMR becomes, and the higher your calorie usage becomes.
Just my opinion.

[Short_Guy]

IMO, I'd get as lean as humanly possible then embark on a very careful, very controlled, bulking diet.

I recently shed a large amout of bodyfat and I've been ever-so-carefully monitoring my intake while doing German Volume Training for the past 4 weeks and I've managed to keep off all the fat while gaining ~4 lbs. of muscle by watching what I eat (I'm @ 9% bf right now).

Sure, I might not be gaining as much muscle as I could (actually, I'm pretty damn sure that's the case) but I guess the real answer to your question would be what's more important to you: quantity or quality and how fast do you need to get to either goal.

[Mental_Hernia]

So if I should be as lean as possible, does that mean pretty much no flab? A flat stomach?

Right after losing the weight ( I didnt even think about muscle ) I looked terrible; my face/jaw were so skinny looking, I almost looked sick/malnurished. Muscle has made it look better, but I still have weight to lose.

[Short_Guy]

I would certainly advocate being as lean as possible/tolerable, this way you'll know for sure, even w/o regular bodyfat testing, how you're reacting to calorie increases.

For me at least, it's much more apparent when you gain muscle and/or fat when you start from a very lean base, rather than guessing most of the time when you start out at a higher level of bodyfat and constantly wondering whether the weight you've gained is fat or muscle (unless, of course, you monitor your bf% on a regular basis). Of course some people don't care about packing on the fat with muscle and then dieting it off later (I used to be one of them), but after 3+ months of hardcore dieting, I don't look forward to getting back on that wagon again for as long as humanly possible.

Besides, the leaner you are, the bigger you'll look: I lost 18 lbs. of fat (~9% bodyfat) and all my friends think I'm much bigger now even though I've only gained about 4 lbs. of new muscle--can't complain about that, I don't think.

That's my two cents