Posts tagged diet
Dear Oprah,
I’m sorry to hear about your high metabolism. Have you tried indulging some of the high-calorie foods you feature in your “Favourite Things”? I think that tub of caramel popcorn will help pack on some weight.
But, seriously, bulking works, you’re probably just doing it wrong. If you are not gaining weight, its because you’re not eating enough.
Use a spreadsheet to keep track of your caloric intake each day for a week. Now add 500 calories each week until you start gaining weight. This is your new caloric goal.
You’ll need to re-evaluate your caloric intake every 20lbs as your needs will increase the bigger you get.
Good luck, Oprah.
alphaqueer asks:
I just looked at your cutting diet post and I’ve got to ask a really naive question: what do you eat Monday through Saturday? To me, it just seems like meat and vegetables, which must get boring. Do you have some meal ideas/templates you could share?
Unless you can afford to eat out every meal, eating bulk-cooked meals gets boring quickly. I’ve written before how I’ll convert a multi-course French dinner into a day of bulking meals…but that sort of cooking is really involved and time consuming.
My mealplan with pup is a little different. He cooks a couple nights a week, and on Sundays I do bulk meals for both of us to last the remaining days.
I usually get a few kinds of root veggies (rainbow carrots, beets, golden beets, shallots, etc) and roast them at high heat in a oregano/macadamia nut oil/salt/pepper/balsamic vinegar dressing.
Chicken and steaks are marinaded in a few different marinades for flavour variety. Chicken breasts are roasted in the oven. Steaks are prepared in a pan following this recipe.
I usually make adobo with the chicken thighs, or coq au vin if I have some red wine laying around.
Salmon I roast with ghee, garlic, raw soy sauce, and shiitake mushrooms.
I’ve had a few folks ask me for an outline of my current training routine, from sleep, supplements, protein, to the workout. This routine is suitable for folks who want to lose fat without sacrificing muscle in their weight loss, or for people that want to simply maintain. This regimen has worked so well for cutting fat while maintaining muscle, that I’m going to try using it when I bulk by adding more calories and a complex carb like quinoa.
This is a pretty rough overview of my daily routine. (Sundays excluded, because thats cheat day). I have only been doing this routine for the last three weeks and can’t fully vet it yet, but initial results have been promising.
The Daily Routine
- 10:00pm - 08:00am: sleep (goal is 8-10hrs)
- 08:00am - 08:30am: breakfast superfood shake, AEG stack
- 11:00am - 11:30am: eat lunch, protein shake, AEG Stack, Animal Pack Daily Vitamin
- 01:00pm - 02:00pm: gym (read about my new workout here)
- 02:00pm - 02:10pm: post workout shake
- 04:30pm - 04:45pm: eat meal, protein shake, AEG Stack
- 08:00pm - 08:45pm: eat dinner, protein shake
- 09:45pm - 10:00pm: bedtime shake, AEG Stack
- 10:00pm - 08:00am: sleep (goal is 8-10hrs)
Diet Guide
My cutting diet is a traditional carb-restrictive diet:
- No simple carbs (breads, corn, fruit, rice, etc)
- No fruit (it’s important to emphasize this, but we can have not-sweet fruits like tomatoes and avocado)
- No milk, soda, or juice. Ever. No exceptions. (Fructose and HFCS cause the body to produce albumin, which binds to testosterone and makes it inert)
- No artificial sweeteners. They’re worse for you than the real thing. (Put down that diet snapple tea, pup)
I follow this carb-restrictive diet Monday through Saturday, where Sunday is cheat day. Cheat day is this glorious day where I am required to eat carbs and junk food till I feel sick. (Photos from previous cheat days here and here). It’s important to do cheat day to prevent your body from going into starvation mode, slowing down your metabolism and making your body cling to fat. Binging on carbs after restricting yourself from them triggers a cascade of hormones; your hypothalamus is happier, your thyroid is happy, you make more testosterone, and your metabolism stays high. (Note that you can’t just binge on carbs all the time, this metabolic response only happens after carb fasting).
I’m also trying to get more probiotic rich foods (like kombucha, kraut, kim chi, etc) into my diet because of the numerous benefits they provide for weight loss, muscle gain, and keeping you happy.
Supplement Legend
Breakfast Shake
The recipe for my superfood breakfast shake can be found here. I’ve started adding a cup of frozen spinach to my breakfast shake as spinach is high in lipoyllysine which has been found to increase GLUT4 transport of nutrients to surface muscle tissue. (This means more of the food you eat becomes muscle instead of being stored as fat).
Normal Protein Shakes
My protein shake is a combination of 70g Optimum Whey Protein, 10g L-Glutamine, 15g Creatine Monohydrate, and 10g BCAA.
Bedtime Shake
Sleep is a fasting period of 8-10 hours, so it’s important to eat a protein that is not so quickly digested. Pup introduced me to Casein Whey and I now use that for my bedtime shakes. It’s disgusting tasting.
Daily Vitamin
I take the Animal Pack Daily Vitamin with a meal each morning. The can says you should take two, but that seems unnecessary.
AEG Stack
Based on Timothy Ferris’ alternative to the Ephedra Stack (PAGG), the AEG Stack is an interesting combination of three supplements:
- 500mg Alpha Lipoic Acid: ALA is pretty amazing, it’s a powerful antioxidant, free-radical hunter, it recycles vitamin C and E, and removes toxic metals from the body (mostly iron and mercury). But for our purposes, the most interesting thing ALA does is it acts as a nutrient partitioning agent, directing glucose preferentially to muscle tissue and away from fat tissue in people who exercise. (Source). In short, ALA diverts nutrients to your muscle tissue while starving your fat cells.
- 400mg EGCg: is the active ingredient in Green Tea that increases your resting metabolism 4-6%. It also decreases GLUT4 transport of nutrients to fat cells and causes fat apoptosis. Fat cells commit suicide when you take EGCg. Reducing the overall number of fat cells (instead of just decreasing their size) will prevent you from rebounding when you go off diet.
- 600mg Garlicin: This 2003 study took two groups on a high carb diet, one was given a high allicin supplement. After 3 weeks, those taking the allicin supplement did not gain weight, compared to those without the supplement that did gain weight. I couldn’t find the method of action for allicin and preventing fat gain, but Timothy Ferris says it worked for him, so I’m taking it too.
My weight loss is starting to slow, so I’m adding probiotic rich foods to my diet. Like kraut and kombucha. Maybe kimchi if I can find a brand I like.
Ugh. Fermented foods are so smelly.
Anonymous
How do I eat 10,000calories/day and lose weight?
I don’t eat carbs or dairy, and don’t drink soda or juice. I’m also only getting, like, 6-8,000 calories/day right now.
Not all calories are treated the same by your body:
- Dieters who get 70%+ of their calories from fat (ketogenics, inuit, etc) lose substantially more weight than people who get 70% of their calories from carbs (Americans).
- Dieters who get 70%+ of their calories from protein (atkins, slow-carb, etc) also lost a lot of weight, thought compared to high-fat diets, the weight lost was mostly fat, with many dieters gaining muscle weight and lowering their bodyfat%.
Today was a glorious cheat day. Though, not as carb-insane as last week’s cheat day, it was still pretty awesome:
Chocolate Chip pancakes and four-cheese omelet for breakfast, beef bourguignon (to go), miscellaneous bad snack foods (for our drive up north), brown rice bowl with steak (it might not sound bad, but this is comfort food for me), five-dozen medium oysters, an amazing cheese platter by my pup, Italian food, and gelato.
Anonymous
That’s how I used to do it: I would simply cut back my calories from 8-10,000 calories/day to about 3,000. The weight loss was dramatic…but I would end up losing a lot of muscle as well.
I’m doing it a little different this time. I’m still trying to eat 8-10,000 calories/day, but I’ve cut carbs and dairy. I’ve lost quite a bit of fat while retaining all the muscle I gained bulking. It’s working really well.
When I start bulking again I’m going to keep this diet but try introducing brown rice as the only carb. Last time I got fat eating too many simple carbs.
Sunday is cheat day. We are *required* by the diet to stuff ourselves with carbs till we’re sick. It helps you lose weight. Really.
Started the day with ihop pancakes (NY cheesecake and cinnamon bun, they were disgusting), then ate 12 different street food dishes at cooking class, had Jamba Juice, and finally deep dish Hawaiian and cheese sticks.
This is how you get abs, folks.
Costco shopping list:
Blueberries, shiitake mushrooms, garbanzo beans, lentils, quinoa, black beans, bean beans, kidney beans, acai juice, raw almonds, raw walnuts, organic steaks, organic chicken thighs, Greek yogurt, more beans (variety mix), coconut milk, pomegranate seeds, grapefruit.
Phew. Let the cutting begin.
Last day of bulking
Or in other words, eating everything in sight. Once we go back to SF I will go on a cutting diet with Master, wish me luck!
It’s funny. Pup will get all huffy about how he thinks he’s gotten too big and he wakes up motivated to cut. Eats no carbs till about 2pm, then he decides he wants to bulk and eats EVERYTHING.
Oooooh, pup, I love you.
When we get home I’m enforcing this diet for cutting:
• No simple carbs (breads, corn, fruit, rice, etc)
• No fruit (it’s important to emphasize this, but we can have not-sweet fruits like tomatoes and avocado)
• No milk, soda, or juice. Ever. No exceptions. (Fructose and HFCS cause the body to produce albumin, which binds to testosterone and makes it inert)
• No artificial sweeteners. They’re worse for you than the real thing. (Put down that diet snapple tea, pup)
• Once a week (Sundays) we will binge and gorge on all the simple carbs and junk we couldn’t eat during the week. Normally, calorie restriction makes the body cling to fat, but binging once a week helps you lose fat by tricking your thyroid to keep your metabolism high.
They diet is pretty easy to follow as you can eat everything else…and easy compliance is the key to making a diet stick.
notactuallyabear
My target is 400g protein per day, and the shakes really help that.
Unless I get too busy, I have four shakes a day:
- Morning super shake
- One-hour before gym 50g protein shake
- Immediately after gym 2,200cal gainer shake
- One-hour before bed 780cal gainer shake
Anonymous
There are two families of protein powder:
- Animal based (eg, whey, egg whites, beef)
- Plant based (eg, soy, quinoa, hemp)
This is a big over-simplification, but proteins are made up of amino acids, and depending on the source of your protein, the amino acids will vary. The more amino acids available, the more your body can build with them…either fixing wounds, growing new hair, skin, or big new muscles.
Animal proteins have the most amino acid complete profile.
Plant proteins generally don’t have all the amino acids needed to complete a profile. (This is why vegetarians and vegans have to use food combinations to get a complete amino acid profile and stay healthy). There are two plant proteins I’m familiar with that have mostly complete amino acid profiles: soy and quinoa.
However, men should not supplement too much soy protein because it will aromatase into estrogen and the resulting hormone imbalance will actually make you lose muscle.
There are blends of different types of plant proteins. But the only reason you should consider supplementing with plant protein is if it’s better for your health. Whey is considerably cheaper compared to plant protein blends.
You can also make your own plant-based alternative protein blend for amino acid completeness. Take equal parts brown rice protein, hemp protein, and pea protein. It’s much lighter than whey protein and just as amino acid complete. But it can be more expensive. And usually tastes bad.
danielsaysno
I do three minutes of cardio a day while bulking. I have an extremely fast metabolism and only do cardio to warm-up my body before a workout. Anymore than this and I lose weight…rapidly.
Back when I was riding my bike to the gym (20mins cardio) I could lose ten pounds in a week if I didn’t eat enough.
It’s also important to remember that the more muscle you have, the higher your base metabolism will be. The FDA “average” caloric intake is 2,000 calories per day…and that was fine for me at 120lbs, but at 260lbs I need more than 8,000 calories a day just to maintain my bodyweight!
Anonymous
How far should you go?
You should go all the way.
10lbs/year is a really slow rate of growth. You should audit your diet, workout routine, and sleep schedule. These are the most common reason folks don’t grow.
Diet:
Are you eating enough calories/carbs/protein to sustain muscle growth?
- You should aim for twice your body weight in grams of protein each day. (Eg, If you weigh 200lbs, eat 400grams protein per day). Your body can only absorb ~70grams protein per meal, so split protein intake over meals throughout the day.
- If you aren’t gaining weight each week, you should increase your caloric intake 10% each week till you start seeing gains. This is your caloric gaining baseline. (Eg, starting at 2,000/cal/day, add 200/cal/day each week till you start gaining weight. I didn’t gain weight till I was eating ~8,000/cal/day).
- You should evaluate your caloric intake every 20lbs since your metabolism will increase to accommodate your new weight. The bigger you are, the more you will need to eat. So increase your calories as you get bigger.
- Carbs are important for muscle recovery. You need to eat them when bulking. You can minimize fat gains by eating “good carbs” (like whole grains).
- Read about my diet here
Workout Routine:
Are you working out correctly for hypertrophy?
- Cardio is catabolic to muscle growth. You shouldn’t do more than 30minutes of cardio a day or your muscle growth will slow down.
- Don’t train for more than an hour a day. Doing more than this is overtraining and will make you smaller!
- Make sure your workout is balanced. Don’t do every body part each day. Split your routine into body groups.
- If you don’t see results in a couple months (and your diet/sleep are perfect), try a new routine.
- See my workout routine here
Sleep Routine:
Are you getting enough rest to grow?
- Your body releases growth hormone during REM sleep.
- Unless you’re a sleep hacker and can trigger REM at will (eg, Uberman Sleep), you should aim for 8-10 hours of sleep each night.
- Do not sleep more than 10 hours. This slows your metabolism.
- Make sure you take breaks during your workout week. (Eg, workout Monday-Friday, don’t workout Saturday-Sunday).
These are all little tips I’ve picked up from personal trainers and reading Mens Health. I can be wrong. But these things work for me. Every body is different, so I encourage you to research and see what works for you.
Good luck!
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