Gaining muscle / burning fat dichotomy... am I missing something?

[durron597]

Reading a lot of the posts on here make it sound to me like burning fat requires negative calories, while building muscle requires positive calories. Both of these statements seem pretty obvious to me... except there seems to be a big dichotomy: what if I want to build muscle AND burn fat at the same time? Like, really dig deep into the fat reserves while still getting my body to build muscle. Is it even possible? Should I be focusing on one or the other whichever is more important to me with respect to my diet, or can I work on both approximately equally at the same time?