A pound of muscle does not burn 50 calories a day

You will see that figure everywhere. The real number is about 6 calories per pound per day, so the popular claim is off by roughly eight times.

The confusion comes from lumping all lean tissue together. Your organs do most of the resting burning: heart and kidneys around 440 calories per kilogram per day, brain 240, liver 200. Skeletal muscle is only about 13. Muscle is a lot of your body weight but a small part of your resting burn.

Lifting is still worth doing, and resistance training does raise resting burn by around 96 calories a day in the research, which is more than the tissue alone explains. It is a real effect, just not the mechanism you have been told.

The better reason to lift while losing weight is what you keep. Training plus enough protein means more of what you lose is fat and less of it is muscle.