by Chelsea Terris (I’m pretty sure this is the first guest blog post on EatBlogEat… Bold was added by me on the parts I really liked / found interesting)

Losing weight and getting fit is all about the body, right?  Wrong. Undertaking any weight loss program, be it diet, exercise, or weight loss surgery, requires a complete shift in mental perception to establish true change.

Ever lost weight but still functioned like an overweight person, feeling critical of your image in the mirror or engaging in habitual lack of confidence? The great Greek essayist Plutarch stated that “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” If this is true, then making changes to our bodies begins and ends in the mind, where seeds of success must be planted to bear hardbody fruit.

Sound like a pile of motivational munbo jumbo? Let’s look at the cold, hard facts. For our bariatric surgery candidates at WeightWise Bariatric Program, the stakes are high. If they continue to behave and eat in the same self-destructive ways that once packed on the pounds, they will not only remain obese but may become seriously ill due to comorbid conditions, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, high cholesterol levels, cancer, infertility, back pain, skin infections, ulcers, and gallstones, to name a few.

Think that’s rough? Once a patient has undergone weight loss surgery, returning to their old habits can cause discomfort in the form of dumping syndrome, which occurs when undigested contents of the stomach move too rapidly into the small intestine, causing dizziness, nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps and a whole host of other unpleasantries.

In addition, remaining engaged in former eating habits can cause a surgically-altered stomach to stretch, requiring correctional surgeries. Making good habits stick is not a choice for weight loss surgery patients; it’s essential.

Take it or Leave it . . . but mostly leave it

The same principles operate whether or not you have had bariatric surgery. If you want to make changes in your body, get that mind of yours under control and running on the right track.

A great way to do this is by employing Brad’s method of selective fasting, in which the following applies: “If you can go without then go without, if you can’t then don’t.” Built into this philosophy is the idea 90%/10% rule: eat clean (according to your doctor-prescribed diet or otherwise) 90% of the time and indulge 10% of the time (again, if you are a weight loss surgery patient, follow your doctor’s plan for you, which will eventually include certain indulgences. Don’t cheat, any percent of the time). Life is for enjoying, and maintaining a healthy weight and fitness level enables us to enjoy life more actively and with increased confidence. That said, food is one of life’s greatest pleasures and should be enjoyed. You, a full grown adult human being, know when you can have that chunk of dark chocolate you are craving and when one more cookie brings with it more cons than pros. Eat accordingly.

Old thoughts = old body

Old thoughts create the same old body you’ve had for years. It isn’t a bad body. If you are fully mobile and healthy, you have two legs that get you where you need to go and two arms that help you bring along what you need and give hugs along the way. You’re doing fine. But if you want more energy and a bod that, let’s face it, looks great in a bikini or speedo (no judgement!), you’re going to need to adopt a mostly disciplined attitude toward eating.

New Thoughts = More than just a new body

The great news is that this newly disciplined attitude will not only help you get where you are going, fitness-wise. It will also start to shape other areas of your life.

Just watch. Your work ethic and accountability will improve, producing great advances, should you desire them, at your job. You’ll feel more positive and will attract positive people who can enrich your life as you can enrich theirs. If you don’t like your current living situation/ career/ or relationship, you’ll suddenly have the energy to do something about it. Mental changes never just affect the physical, and that’s the best part.

Wondering why diet and exercise have not produced the changes you hoped for? Look at your thinking. By adopting a need-based indulgence system and remaining disciplined 90% of the time, you will shed pounds and could wind up reshaping your life perspective in the process.

Chelsea

***Chelsea Terris writes online content for WeightWise Bariatric Program, a comprehensive weight loss surgery program located in Edmond, Oklahoma. She is passionate about the mind/body connection and loves to encourage sustainable personal transformation.

In my freezer right now there is a big ball of frozen cookie dough. It’s about the size of a baseball and I really, really want to eat it. In fact, I want to eat it so badly, I’m starting to justify why I SHOULD eat it.  And of course, my mind turns right to thinking about muscle.

‘I probably do need to eat a bit more today to gain muscle, gotta fuel the process you know….’

Of course, there is some debate about this statement, and logically I know I really don’t need to eat the cookie dough, especially since it’s 10:05 in the morning right now. However, this whole exercise does make me want to look at the arguments for ‘bulking’.

From my understanding the primary argument is that you need a ‘surplus’ of calories to build muscle. And while definitions vary, my understanding is that a ‘surplus’ means consuming an amount of calories above and beyond the amount used in your day-to-day activities and above and even beyond the amount actually being used to fuel the muscle building process. Basically an amount of Calories that will cause some amount of fat gain.

This logic suggests that you are not building muscle unless you are gaining some fat.

The problem with this logic is that it would mean you would have to be constantly gaining fat in order to be building muscle – so having a little extra padding wouldn’t cut it.  You’d need to be gaining fat every single day, otherwise you wouldn’t be in a surplus – you’d simply be ‘maintaining’ at a higher amount of body fat – and simply maintaining doesn’t require much in the way of calories – so in essence you wouldn’t be bulking, you’d just be ‘fatter’.

This next fact is often one that’s forgotten or excluded when talking about the calorie needs of obesity -  Every pound of Adipose Tissue (Body Fat) only burns about 2 Calories per day while at rest (not exercising). It would take roughly 100 EXTRA calories per day to support the maintenance of about 50 pounds of body fat.

(Incidentally this is the reason why overweight people say they don’t eat more than their lean friends – they are typically telling the truth – unless they are actively GAINING fat, it just doesn’t take that many calories to stay overweight).

So even being 50 pounds overweight doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing much more than eating an extra couple hundred calories a day – so to be truly eating at surplus and not simply maintaining you must continue to gain fat every single day. This means that a person who is using ‘muscle growth’ as a reason to carry a few extra pounds fat is really missing the mark unless they are actually GAINING fat.. not just maintaining a little extra insulation, but GAINING.

Of course, the other argument is that it is not the surplus calories, but the actual increase in body fat that is somehow needed for muscle building.

I really don’t understand the logic in this argument. High amounts of body fat lead to a decrease in testosterone in males as well as an increase in systemic low grade inflammation – two known muscle building killers.

I have seen people suggest that actual cells from fat are able to migrate to muscle and create more muscle, but I think this is misguided information based on the idea of pluripotent stem cells. While it is true that Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the fat cells removed during liposuction can be easily and quickly turned into something called induced pluripotent stem cells, and eventually even into muscle stem cells, this is not a process that naturally occurs in our bodies. To date, it only happens in a lab with human intervention.

The kind of stem cells that you have in your body right now (no lab required) are generally multipotent, meaning they are  able to give rise to several kinds of cells, but only in their home tissues. So while satellite cells (muscle stem cells) are absolutely crucial to the muscle building process, adipose tissue stem cells are not, and gaining fat does not seem to do anything to increase the amount of muscle satellite cells you have available for muscle growth.

So currently I can’t see any reason why you need large amounts of extra body fat in order to build muscle.

Now, please don’t misunderstand this blog post – you do need energy to build muscle – the process of linking together amino acids to make proteins does take energy in the form of ATP. And, once your supply of ATP becomes low, it takes energy to replenish it…so calories are needed – but I will argue that they are permissive to the process. They need to be there to eventually replenish your ATP supply – but they don’t necessarily DRIVE the process of muscle growth.

You often here the saying “It takes bricks to build a house” to describe muscle building, but I’m sure you’ll agree that while it absolutely DOES take bricks to build a house, if you go dump a pile of bricks in a field, you can’t simply come back a week later to find a nicely built house. Similarly, if a home requires one metric ton of bricks, then supplying 4 metric tons won’t get the house built any faster/better.

Granted, picking on analogies is low hanging fruit, but the point remains – if it is true that a surplus of calories is needed in order for muscle growth to occur then you must actively be gaining fat, and I see no reason why there would be a difference between someone going from 17 pounds of body fat to 20 pounds of body fat versus someone going from 50 pounds of body fat to 53 pounds – It would take roughly the same surplus, give or take a couple hundred calories.

Especially since the ‘bricks’ in our analogy represent amino acids not energy – and as we’ve seen multiple times in multiple studies with many different study designs and subject groups – the ingestion of amino acids causes an increase in protein synthesis.  And here’s the kicker with this research – considering they measure protein synthesis over a 3-4 hour period, these subjects are usually in a caloric deficit* while the increase on protein synthesis is occurring – showing that ‘deficit or surplus’ may not be an hour-by-hour or even day-by-day phenomenon. However, I don’t want this to turn into a ‘building muscle while in a deficit’ blog post as much as it is a ‘how fat do you have to get?’ blog post. The point is it does take protein and energy to build muscle (I discuss this more in my book How Much Protein?)

(*50 grams of protein supplies about 200 Calories while a BMR of ~1700 would require ~300 calories during a 4 hour period)

So from this logic, I still don’t see why you need to be overweight to build muscle, especially since we know that you don’t lose muscle very quickly, so it also seems conceivable that our person gaining 3 pounds of fat going from 17 pounds of fat to 20 pounds could diet off the 3 pounds of fat without losing muscle (since losing 3 pounds of fat shouldn’t take more than 2-3 weeks at most), and then start over. Which brings us to our next point: Timelines.

It’s funny that most people accept the idea of a traditional bulking and cutting cycle as being 6-8 months of a slow bulk to build muscle followed by a 13-16 week weight loss period to get ready for a bodybuilding contest/event/beach season.

But when we start to shrink this time line, it seems that everyone has some sort of self-created breaking point where it no longer ‘feels right’.

Perhaps 3-4 months of bulking and 6-8 weeks of dieting still sounds “OK”, but then 1.5-2 months of bulking and 3-4 weeks of dieting sounds a bit iffy…

And then 3 to 4 weeks of bulking followed by 1-2 weeks of dieting? or how about 1 or 2 days of dieting and 3-4 days of slightly overeating?

Some where along those lines you probably thought to yourself “OK, that’s not enough”… But why?

I’ve seen some people argue that it’s because some hormones/processes need time to ‘ramp up’, but I’m not exactly sure which processes they are eluding to. We’ve seen amino acids moving into a trained muscle in the hours after exercise and we’ve seen the anabolic affects of a workout last for at least 48 hours after a workout..not START 48 hours after a workout.

In the end I think the main benefit of traditional ‘bulking’ is the biofeedback – you see something happening – you get heavier and you get bigger. As a trainer you are instantly getting your clients noticeable results on the scale. No one wants to admit that muscles grow incredibly slowly, and that noticeable changes in how you look can happen with as little as 4-5 pounds of muscle gain, and that most full grown men won’t gain more than 10-15 pounds of muscle in their lifetime (Note: Full grown men, I’m not talking about 18-20 year olds).

I’m also not saying that you can’t build muscle while bulking – as there is an abundance of internet anecdotal evdence to support this idea – my only suggestion is that the same amount of muscle may have been built without the need to gain massive amounts of fat, and to suggest people who have had problems gaining muscle despite the fact they *think they are bulking should look at whether they are truly eating at surplus, or simply maintain extra (an in my opinion unneeded) body fat.

The bottom line is even if a surplus is needed to build muscle (and this largely comes down to the semantics surrounding the word ‘surplus’) I’m still at a loss to explain why this surplus must involve gaining large amounts of fat. Ideally, I could see a lean man or women build muscle while still sitting at ‘lean levels’ of body fat and moving between Really lean and almost really lean during the process.

BP

I don’t count calories anymore…but I used to.

I consider calorie counting to be a type of mental food training – it’s a step in the process, but it’s definitely not the end goal.

Put another way, calorie counting is how you gain control, but is not control in-and-of itself. Put another way, it’s one of the biggest steps in gaining control of your eating, but it is not the final step.

By focusing solely on the act of calorie counting, and not the lessons learned from it, you never really learn what “too much” feels like, or perhaps more importantly you never learn what “Just right” or “not enough” feels like.

You simply spend your life eating to an amount of calories that a calculator estimated you should be eating, and you do so by adding up all the estimated calorie contents of the foods you ate, based on estimated portion sizes… Not my ideal way to let go and be less obsessive about food.

Instead of tracking my daily calories I now rely on the feelings of  “not enough, just right and too much”. Combined with fasting once or twice a week this has served me incredibly well over the last half-decade.

It’s tricky, but learning what ‘just right’ actually feels like is far more valuable than trying to excel spreadsheet your way to weight loss by working off of estimated calorie counts on estimated weights of foods that you track…

And I know that the idea of eating by ‘feel’ is probably a little to wishy-washy for some people’s obsessive compulsive need to track EVERYTHING in their lives, but basically what I’m saying (or trying to say) is that once you get the hang of it going by ‘feel’ is probably no less accurate than calorie counting –since as I said before with calorie counting you are still counting other people’s guesses aiming for a calorie total that may or may not be right for you.

I will say there are some caveats to this approach.

Firstly, there are some foods that are ‘hyper-palatable’ that you need to be aware of – These are foods and drinks that are really high in calories, but they don’t make you feel as ‘full’ as you should – Regular soft drinks (non-diet) would be an example, as would some pastries/sweet baked goods and many fast foods (For a good book on hyper-palatable foods check out The End of Overeating).

You can still eat these foods (I had an ice-cream filled donut sandwich over the weekend) you just have to be aware that the days you do eat these food are more than likely days you went ‘over’ even if you don’t have the normal feeling you’d associated with eating ‘too much’.

The other caveat is that in order to get to the point where you can eat by feel you will probably have to spend a good amount of time calorie counting – in order to train yourself to know what each feeling represents.

The bottom line is that calorie counting is an important part of the process but in my eyes becoming an expert in tracking your calories on a spreadsheet shouldn’t be the end goal of stress free weight maintenance – instead it should be a training tool to get you to the point where you can eat and manage your weight, based on feel.

BP

PS – This is also how I choose which days I’m going to fast, and why my book Eat Stop Eat is based on one OR two fasts per week… the “OR” really depends on ‘feel’…basically your feel of how much you’ve eaten during the week.

A missing aspect in most people’s approach to health and fitness is the idea of a target, an end, or at least a goal that you could call completion.

For many, the idea of ‘completion’ of their weight loss and muscle building goals is almost blasphemy.  Most people approach fitness under the concept of CONTINUALLY losing fat and gaining muscle, because they don’t want to think about the idea of an end.

Without diving deep into a discussion on genetics and phenotypes, let’s just agree that their is such a thing as an Ideal body for you.

Lets also agree that we can all move close to our ideal body, and this ideal is defined by the limits of our own individual bodies.

For some reason it’s not ‘right’ or ‘correct’ to talk about an ideal shape or an ideal body, even though we have a large body of evidence that this very thing exists. Instead, we’re supposed to all be happy at any shape or size, of body fat, or muscle mass…and somehow the message of ‘be happy’ has been mutated into “don’t strive to improve, and think poorly of those who suggest that improvement is possible” leading to the inability to fathom the idea there even being a true ideal.

But an ideal does exist.  Anthropometric data (body measurements) on professional athletes and body transformation winners, combined with military data all all point to a very specific shape that signifies and ideal, healthy body.  We may not all be able to hit the goal, but we can all get very close to it by using exercise and diet as treatment – In this way, exercise and diet are corrective.

Accepting that there is an ideal or a goal body that represents a true ‘finish line’ leads to the philosophy that the farther you are from this ideal, the more severe the treatment needs to be, but the closer you get the less severe the treatment becomes. Very similar to treating being ‘out of shape’ as a form of sickness – you treat the sickness, but once it’s gone you switch to attempting to prevent it from coming back.

The point is to move from harder to easier, to the point where you are simply fine tuning the result… putting in the amount of effort needed to maintain, maybe tinkering with the process a bit, but not purposelessly putting in more and more effort in the hopes of achieving a goal that is not measurable or describable.

Once you realize there is a point where you are no longer ‘sick or broken’ that you are OK, Fine, even… done, then you can you train less and eat more of what you want. This entire approach can be ruined by the concept of ‘Sick mentality’ which I learned about from some friends who have gone through cancer treatment.

With cancer patients one of the most important things is to stay positive through your chemotherapy. Realize that there is an end, and you will be better again. The opposite of this is what some doctors call ‘sick mentality’ a feeling that it’s NEVER going to end and you are always going to be sick are always going to need treatment.

In this way many of us have been duped into a health and fitness version of sick mentality – thinking that we’ll never be fixed, that we’re always sick or broken and will always need intensive therapy involving various restrictive diets, exercise programs and supplement regimens.

To me this is the absolute worst way to think about health and fitness.

On the muscle building spectrum, the farther away you from what your body is capable of, the more effort will needed to build muscle – more workouts, more volume (collectively creating more stress), more protein, various supplements etc. But as you move closer to your ideal the less many of these things will be needed. You will move towards a healthy body where you need less workouts, less volume, less protein, and less supplements, because you are essentially done building surplus muscle.

The same thing holds true in people who are obese.  The more overweight you are the more effort it takes to lose that weight. In the obese, anabolic resistance can occur, where you need more protein to illicit an anabolic response then an otherwise lean person would need.  But the closer you are, the more ‘in-tune’ your body is, since as we’ve stated before an ideal body seems to also be an ideal functioning body, it is more or less a shape of health. At a certain level of leanness and muscularity things tend to work as they should. Insulin sensitivity, Leptin sensitivity, Leucine sensitivity are all roughly where they should be.

Consider the lean person you know who is lucky because they can ‘eat whatever they want and not gain weight’.  They are not ‘lean BECAUSE they can eat whatever they want’, they are ‘lean THEREFORE they can eat whatever they want’. The same goes for the people who gloat about the junk and decadent desserts they can eat. They can eat this way BECAUSE they are lean and well muscled. By and large you’d consider them ‘there’. They are  lean, muscular and in ‘shape’.

To put in simply – your needs change as you move closer to your target. This doesn’t mean you can eat whatever you want and never ever workout, it just means that you move from corrective measures to preventative and health maintenance measures. As an analogy – once you’re finished Chemo and have been declared Cancer free, you do your best to go back to a normal enjoyable life, but you don’t start drinking and smoking everyday. This being said, you also don’t keep doing Chemo to try and get ‘more cancer free’ since the risk benefit falls heavily to the risk side. The same thing is true for diet and exercise…

I don’t think anyone will argue that exercise isn’t healthy. Its beneficial effect on the health of the body and the mind has been documented in numerous scientific studies over the years. However, exercise in excess can be deleterious to certain organs and systems of the body. In fact, the very way in which exercise promotes health is by acting as a stress situation for which the body must find a new dynamic equilibrium. This dynamic process requires, among other things, adaptive responses of the hormonal systems, the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. It’s not just muscle gain and fat loss that occurs as a result of a workout or the act of eating less.

In this case  exercise is like a medicine – there is an obvious value to using it as a corrective measure, but if you are going to use it as a preventative then the dosages must be adjusted. The exact same can be said for calorie restriction – there is a known benefit to calorie reduction, but the degree of reduction must change as you move from being corrective to preventative. You simply cannot spend your entire life dieting.

The goal isn’t zero percent body fat. And, you will reach a point where you simply cannot add more muscle.

At the beginning the going is difficult – losing fat and building muscle can be an extremely uncomfortable process, ESPECIALLY when you first start out. You are typically eating much less food that you would otherwise like to, and you are pushing your body to a degree you are simply not accustomed to. It hurts. And your body seems to fight you every inch of the way. Some approaches may be needed at this stage that won’t be needed in others. This includes supplementation, different macronutrient intakes and different exercise protocols. But as you move closer to an ideal body for you, the less corrective your approach should be. It should move closer and closer to maintaining and fine tuning.

In other words, you will reach a point where you are no longer ‘sick’, and this is a good thing.

BP

Yesterday the nightly news in Canada aired with a segment on Intermittent Fasting, and your truly was in it.

You can watch the clip below.

This was a great eye opener for me as it reminded me that even after all these years, it’s the most basic anti-fasting scaremongering that is still the most prevalent.

Back in 2007 when Eat Stop Eat was first published dispelling the myth of muscle loss while fasting was the major topic of the book. Since then the book has expanded, and in the fitness world ‘muscle loss’ is rarely brought up as a side effect of fasting anymore. But this television segment was a great reminder that to people first coming across Intermittent Fasting, this is still the major concern.

And it’s not just Intermittent Fasting.

It’s the most basic concerns that still hold back most of Health and Fitness.

High Protein –> But what about your Kidneys?

Squats –> But what about your knees?

Weight training –> Is it safe for women and children?

Building Muscle –> Won’t the muscle just turn to fat when you stop exercising?

As laughable as many of these concerns may seem, they are still MAJOR concerns to many people.

Which brings me to the dietitian in the television segment. It would be very easy to hate on her for the ignorant statements she made, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. Chances are she hasn’t read Eat Stop Eat, so she probably doesn’t know that it involves fasting AND weight training. She also was probably approached to give the “argument from authority” and had to give the quick, authoritative answer. Plus, as a Dietitian appearing on TV her job isn’t to be non-biased – It’s to give advice from authority to an entire nation. So I ‘get’ it. Better safe than sorry. Ten years ago I probably would have given the exact same answer.

However, I do also feel as though our current Nutrition Education system needs a reboot. The only reason Eat Stop Eat even exists is because during my graduate work I decided to question the facts I learned from my undergraduate degree in Applied Human Nutrition – The exact program you take to become a dietitian in Canada.

The simple fact remains that our current attempts at changing eating patterns and obesity rates are largely ineffective – either in theory or implementation, yet we are too afraid to recommend anything different since that would mean going against what we have been taught.  So in essence the logical fallacy of an appeal to authority – (Because someone with authority said it was true it must be true) is protected by a second appeal to authority (The authority to the authority said it was true so it really must be true). In this case the ‘authority’ is the dietitian and the ‘authority to the authority’ is her education.

So it really is time to change the way we think about eating for weight loss. We need to question the things we learn in school. Actually – we need to question everything. No matter how good we think the current advice is, if it’s not working, it’s not working. The reason is really irrelevant.

Finally, regarding muscle loss – There are chapters in Eat Stop Eat if you want the science behind why you don’t lose muscle during short periods of fasting. If you’re happy with a quick anecdotal answer you can go to www.EatStopEat.com and scroll halfway down to see over 6 years of pictures of me. To the casual observer you’ll notice no muscle loss, the expert eye will notice that I’ve actually gained close to 4 pounds of Lean Body mass over the years of fasting.

If you want a larger example you can go here –> Adonis Immersion.

If you scroll down on that page You will see dozens  and dozens of before and after pictures from our Adonis Transformation contests. Many (but no all) of these people used fasting to get in shape. Can you pick out the ones who were fasting versus traditional dieting? Me neither.

BP

In a day an age where science is EVERYTHING, we sometimes forget that philosophy is the ‘thinking of thinking’ and needs to play an important role when we discuss how we should eat. After all, we shouldn’t confuse data collection with wisdom. The more we simply absorb data without truly critically analyzing its meaning, the more we can potentially fall victim to many of the diet and nutrition scams that are so prevalent in today’s world.

We have an unbelievable amount of data, and thanks to our  love affair with the ‘sound bytes’ that come from science we have all but abolished philosophy as a discipline, save for the quotes that occasionally appear on a person’s Facebook update status.

But philosophy is of critical importance if we are to truly understand how and why we eat.

It’s been said that philosophy calls us when we’ve reached the end of our rope. The insistent feeling that something is not right with our lives and the longing to be restored to our better selves will not go away.

I’d be willing to guess that ‘end of our rope’ ‘somethings not right’ and ‘restored to our better selves’ would accurately describe how many feel about nutrition and deciding what to eat.

We become philosophers to discover what is really true and what is merely the accidental result of flawed reasoning, recklessly acquired erroneous judgments, and the well-intentioned but misguided teachings of experts and gurus.  In this sense, philosophy and the scientific collection of data aren’t really opposites but rather necessary components of the whole ‘picture’.

No mater what nutritional beliefs you hold true, you will probably agree when I say that we simply cannot eat everything that is available to us on any given day. food is simply too abundant, too available and too cheap for us to live in a constant state of eating at raw impulse. Unless you are impoverished, the fact is there is more than enough food available to you – emphasis on more than enough. If you were to eat on impulse you would quickly become obese. We don’t need any more data collection to support this concept, but we do need to investigate what stops us from eating in this manner. Why we don’t all become obese by our tenth birthday.

In order to not gain an unbelievable amount of weight during our lives we must practice some form of restraint. In other words we ask ourselves, either consciously or subconsciously, “What is the right thing to do now – Eat, or not eat?”

The balance and proper use of this question is largely what determines whether or not we eat enough to gain weight.

This is the basic most fundamental philosophy behind intermittent fasting. If you consider Intermittent Fasting to be the ability to practice patience when it comes to the act of eating -  a conscious polite restraint when it comes to food intake, then the philosophy is simply - we do not have to eat all the time, therefore we are free to choose when we eat.

Intermittent fasting also involves minimizing the importance you place on large grandiose nutritional choices, instead, allowing you to concentrate on the small but significant inner food choice we make multiple times though out the course of any single day – should you eat or not eat?

In much of the world, how, what, and when we eat is a matter of habits. Habits that are learned, then reinforced over and over on a day-to-day basis. And while it is difficult, the truth is it IS possible to break old habits and it IS possible to create new ones.

You can think yourself lean and muscular. However, this is no easy task.

The first step is to separate yourself from the mob and decide to be extraordinary. As ridiculous as it sounds, simply accepting the concept that we do not have to eat all the time and therefore we are free to choose when we eat, is enough to already separate you from the way the majority of the population thinks about food.

Start with this fundamental belief then add in some concept of physical work, remembering that tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Your physical work doesn’t have to be complicated but it does have to involve a high degree of effort.

Finally, be careful of slipping back into old habits. Once we fall, however slightly to immoderation, momentum gathers and we fall right back into our old habits. This is one of the areas where Intermittent fasting can be extremely helpful. A break from eating can serve as a ‘reset’ when bad habits begin to creep back into our lives.  It’s a way to practice patience and to reinforce the understanding that it’s OK to wait to eat. You can wait for something better, or a better time, or a better person to eat with. You simply do not have to eat all the time.

My belief is that you can be a lean, muscular, healthy person without being obsessive about your food choices. You can accomplish this by being the type of person who realizes that since we do not have to eat all the time and we are free to choose when we eat, and by understanding the importance of physical training in this process.

That is my philosophy of Intermitent Fasting, and it’s the basis of Eat Stop Eat

I think I’m about to agitate both the high protein and low protein advocates, because the way I see it, they are both right.

It seems reasonable to me that people should eat high protein while they are growing. There is an obvious advantage to a high protein diet during a period of muscle building. The only item left for debate is the definition of ‘high protein’ (IE what is ‘high’?).

It also seems reasonable that people eat a higher protein diet while they are attempting to lose fat by drastically under eating. There are documented advantages here too. My thought is your best bet is to keep protein the same, but drop calories from carbs, fat and alcohol.

However, I do NOT think we should be eating high protein all the time.

In fact, there may be a point where the lower the protein the better (within reason). Here I think your best option is to work backwards from a fitness industry mantra of ‘high protein all the time for all purposes’.

let me explain…

I’m not going to review protein basics or how protein is involved in muscle building. If you are interested in this stuff you can read my thoughts in How Much Protein.

Instead of a lengthy review I’ll simply state that dietary protein can stimulate anabolic processes in the human body, and this is both the reason it’s good for muscle building and the reason why it may be killing us slowly once we are done building muscle.

It is well known that the same anabolic pathways and hormones that initiate muscle growth are also involved in many disease states, including Cancer and Diabetes. Simply put – we never want uncontrolled growth in the human body, and with certain rare exceptions we don’t even really want lengthy periods of forced growth, especially once we are fully grown adults.

It has also been suggested that many of the anabolic hormones and pathways stimulated with high protein intake are counter-productive to longevity – how long you live.

As anti-bodybuilder as it may sound, if you average your health across the entire 80-100 years you are expected to live, you could say that growth is bad for your health.

The bad kind of growth

Sure, most of the growth we experience up to our mid-twenties is good growth (most – the fat gains still aren’t exactly good for you), but for the other 60-80 years of life, growth is something we want in small doses and in the right places.

What I’m getting at is this – high protein when you have the ability to increase your muscle size seems to be a good idea… but once your are done growing (and we ALL reach this point) then maybe it’s time to scale the intake down.

I’m not suggesting zero protein. I’m suggesting that you see how low you can go while still maintaining your muscle mass, then stay there.

One of the most pervasive ‘protein is good for you’ arguments comes from the concept that higher lean body masses are associated with longevity, which seems to be true, however I’m not sure constant super-high protein intake is needed to maintain a high level of lean body mass. You may need a time of high protein intake to build that extra muscle, but you may not need it to be quite so high to maintain that muscle.

Eat it when you need it

Based on the work I’ve done with both the Adonis Index and the Venus Index, I’m interested in nutritional principles that are specific to a persons body-metrics. I’m a firm believer that their is a shape to health, and the way you should eat is different depending on how close (or how far) you are from that shape.

As an example, if your lean body mass is lower than suggested for your height, and your body circumferences are under the suggested measurements for your height AND you are interested in adding more muscle mass, then eating a higher amount of protein while following a resistance training program designed to add muscle mass would be a good idea.

However, once you’ve hit your numbers (or at least moved much closer), Continue to weight-train, while slowly tapinger down your protein and see how much you need to eat to maintain your new lean body mass and your measurements.

Again, note I’m not saying remove all protein – that would be silly.

At 5’10″ I seem to do fine with around 70-80 grams of protein per day. This amount is easy for me and I can comfortably eat this amount eating in my typical fashion – I’m not out searching for protein containing foods, nor am I avoiding any high protein foods that I like.  At this amount my Lean Body Mass stays constant as do my waist and shoulder circumference measurements (with a small amount of day to day variance).

The benefit of eating at this amount of protein is if for some reason I felt that I could and wanted to add more muscle then I could easily increase the amount of protein I eat in a day. If I increased my protein intake to 120-140 grams per day this would represent a 50-70% increase in my daily protein intake – in other words a pretty big jump. At my stage of my development I’m not sure that this would make any difference, but at least it’s an option.

If I were to eat 300 grams of protein every day, and for some reason decide that I wanted to add more muscle…then what would I do? a 60% increase in daily intake would push me up to 450 grams per day! And then what? where do I go from there?

A big part of protein and muscle research that people seem to miss that it may simply be the percent change that is important. It may also be how quickly that percent change occurs.

In one of the most often quoted studies showing that eating high protein preserved muscle mass when dieting, the people eating the least protein did lose muscle lean body mass, but the part that is often left out is that when the study started they were asked to immediately slash their protein intake by more than 40%. They already started with a high intake (around 130 grams), then cut both their calories and protein drastically.

I’d be curious to know what would have happened if they kept their protein intake the same, or slowly decreased it.

In fact, this is another benefit of keeping your protein somewhat low, if you want to increase your protein while dieting, you can do so without having to eat super massive amounts of protein.

The bottom line is that there may be a time and place for high protein intakes, and there may also be time to keep protein on the low side, especially if you are interested in health and longevity. If (and it’s a theoretical ‘if’) change in total protein intake is more important than absolute intake, then this also provides an interesting way to create occasional large increases in totally daily protein intake without having to consume 500 grams of protein every day.

I guess the question becomes, if you are already at a near maximal amount of lean body mass, and are happy with the way you look, and CAN decrease your protein intake slightly without risking muscle loss… then why not do it?

You have the possible benefit of improved longevity, and if you are able to maintain your lean body mass then you are avoiding the negative of a loss of lean body mass (obviously).

The protein life cycle

As a compromise between muscle and longevity, it may be beneficial to eat high protein during the important part of muscle building (the first couple years) then once you’ve reached the upper limit for your frame and genetics, keep protein ‘lowish’ for most of the year and then increase it occasionally for small 8-12 week periods of muscle gains or fat loss. I still don’t think the increased protein will make a large difference, but I do think it beats eating high protein all the time.

The trick to this whole technique is knowing how much muscle mass you are able to carry and admitting there is an upper limit to the amount of muscle a steroid free man of woman can carry <– that’s the hard part.

The even harder part is the willingness to accept or even entertain the idea that a lean body mass that is far beyond 2-3 standard deviations past the mean for your height may actually be detrimental to your health. While not causative in any way, we can look to the fact that the average lifespan of an NFL player is far below the norm, and while multiple blows to the head and a whole host of other factors may come into play, we cannot rule out the idea that large amounts of lean body mass – whether naturally occurring through outlier genetics or through the use of drugs, may in itself shorten lifespan, regardless of protein intake.

The bottom line is for this article to have any value you need accept entertain the concept that their is an upper limit to the amount of muscle you can build and an upper limit to the amount that is ‘good for you’.

Lean Body Mass and Height

I’ve listed the equations on here before (men HERE, women HERE). In general my suggestion is to find your age, and add two standard deviations (Add 1 to the number ‘c’). This would be roughly the amount of mass you would find on a a top level steroid-free bodybuilder at your height and age. There are some exceptions, people far above this level, but they are genetic outliers and if you were one of them, well… you’d know.

Next, get a DEXA performed so you know your lean body mass. If you can’t get a DEXA then do your best to guess at your lean body mass.

As a example, at my age and my height (35 & 5’10″), You’d expect a lean mass with two standard deviations to be around 162 pounds. I’ve been hovering around 154-156 for years, so I’ve done most of my growing already (I had about 145 pounds of lean body mass when I was 19). Since most of my growing has already happened I know that jacking up my protein intake isn’t going to force me to build more muscle (I know, I’ve tried). The best option for me would be to occasionally cycle my protein intake to a higher level when concentrating on attempting to add muscle, but to keep it lower for most of the year. Realistically the higher protein intake is probably not going to make much of a difference as to how much muscle I gain or lose at this stage… but at least I have the option of trying, especially if I want to try to slowly get closer to the illusive 160 pound of lean body mass mark.

However, if I was 19, with 145 pounds of Lean Body Mass, and no real training history, then I would be smart to increase my protein intake for the next year or two while attempting to gain muscle. It would help with growth, and during this period of time the fact that protein is being used for muscle growth may negate it’s use for other more deleterious types of growth.

Final Thoughts

Basically, if you have room to grow, then do your best to grow, but realize that you will reach a point where you are fully grown, fully developed for you… More protein simply will not be able to force more muscle growth. Also, keep this in mind when you are reading about protein advice on-line.. age, and training age may be an underlying factor in people’s personal experiences with protein and muscle growth.

BP

Pictures make things true.

Look at the picture above – the super-healthy and completely awesome for you watermelon goes bad after 180 days, while the highly-processed chemical-laden burger and fries-of-death do not look like they’ve gone bad, even after 180 days.

Therefore we have conclusive evidence that fast food is bad for you right?

Or this an ‘image illusion? – a bit of a slight-of-hand trick (or is it slight-of-eyes?) where we use a bit of distraction (the gross watermelon) to keep you from seeing what’s really going on.

If we were to compare an organic, hormone free, locally grown well-done steak and an organically grown, hormone free, locally grown baked potato to the hamburger and fries, how different would they look?

Of how about comparing a highly processed highly preserved Wal-Mart purchased apple pie to the super-good for you watermelon? What if you were to leave a slice of said pie on your counter for 180 days? I’ve left one out for 4 days and it looked a lot like the watermelon in the top right picture.

This isn’t meant to defend fast-food. Just to point out that the trend of using pictures and info-graphics to prove a point in health and fitness is usually full of misconceptions and blatant logical fallacies.

Questions the things you read AND the things you see.

BP

As you’ve probably guessed this is another post in my “fat as debt” series.

A topic I’ve probably written about ad nauseum 

However, just because I’m beating a dead horse doesn’t mean the message is any less important.

The EXACT same things that are making us fat are also making us deeply in debt and Vice Versa.

In fact, we (at least North America) largely live in a debt-based society, and it shows in the way we approach both food and money.

Long gone are the days of saving for something you want – These days you simply check to see if you have enough room on your credit card, then you buy it.

Typically this is done after some self talk about ‘deserving it’ or how ‘good of a deal it is’, then promising to yourself that you’ll pay it back as soon as possible.

This exact same mentality is apparent in how we eat.

It’s perfectly acceptable to diet AFTER a big celebration of eating, but it is not acceptable to diet before, in anticipation of a big eating celebration.

Even though Advent, the 3-4 week period for before Christmas, was originally a fast to PREPARE for the feast, essentially doing the food equivalent of saving up FIRST before buying something we really want.

Instead we approach food like we do our expenses… We convince ourselves that we deserve it or need it, and that we will simply pay it off (*burn it off) later.

But in reality there is nothing wrong with saving up first, just as there is nothing wrong with preparing when you know there will be a feast.

Somehow we’ve been taught that this is the wrong approach.

Prepare for big purchases… Whether it’s a new couch, or a Super Bowl Feast.

BP

I promised myself that I wouldn’t take it upon myself to DEFEND intermittent fasting…mostly because I do not see that as my role.

I enjoy intermittent fasting, and it is what I do to stay lean. I am educated in intermittent fasting, and I enjoy writing about it, but I don’t see it as my child that I need to defend when someone kicks sand in its face on the playground that is the internet.

Yet, here I am.

Hopefully, you’ll see that I’m not about to defend Intermittent Fasting, but rather defend logical thought.

Most of (but not all) the slander about intermittent fasting that is popping up on the net is a mix of purposeful attacks (typically to gain traffic and Google rankings) and logical fallacies – ideas that seem logical, but on further investigation are lacking in soundness and validity.

I really don’t mind when people discuss possible negatives of IF, since it forces me to expand my understanding of the research. However, I do mind when people cloud the science of IF with logical fallacies.

I want to start with an obvious logical fallacy – that a high protein diet is exactly the same as intermittent fasting because it has almost identical effects on hypocretin neurons. Fine, then by that rationale, intermittent fasting is exactly the same as a high protein diet.

Obviously this is incorrect, since high protein diets have  myriad of health effects the intermittent fasting simply does not have. Which is exactly my point – intermittent fasting also has a myriad of health effects that a high protein diet does not have. The fact that they share many similar health effects does not make them the same.

(as an analogy: I am not a twin of every other person on earth who is 5’10″ with brown curly hair.)

Secondly, as to the negative health affects of intermittent fasting I can say two things

1) There is no diet style is so perfect that it works for everyone who tries it – hopefully this is obvious and doesn’t need any further discussion

2) I find it sad that this myth is often perpetuated by people who are supporters of the Paleo way of life. While I have no qualms with paleo, I do know that they have had to fend off their share of scientific attacks – including that a high protein diet increases the rate of Cancer, Diabetes and Osteoporosis. So it’s sad to see a group of people (or rather one or two members) jump on the ‘IF is bad for you’ band-wagon based on a couple of comments made in the scientific community, when they themselves know how frustrating it can be to be attacked by incomplete-science.

The truth about the intermittent fasting is bad for you  movement is this: There are a group of people who have made millions of dollars convincing you that weight loss has to be complicated, and that you absolutely need their expertise to cut through this confusion to create the ideal weight loss diet. For these people there is a large financial benefit to attacking IF. There are also people who are genuinely curious about IF and have found some sort of information in the scientific community that troubles them, so they decided to broadcast it and their ideas to the world.  I don’t mind this second gr0up, since they help expand our understanding of how IF works. However, they are the minority.

Moving to the intermittent fasting and insulin resistance story – I wish I could say that the people who perpetuate this story should know better, but sadly, I think they DO know better, and that this was a purposeful scientific oversight. There is a transient decrease in insulin sensitivity when fat burning is elevated. This is pretty standard physiology. As long as fat burning is increased there will be a slight compromise in the amount of glucose that can be transported into your muscles, because those same muscles are busy burning fat and have no reason to be taking up glucose while this is happening. So the results do illustrate that after longer fasts (36+ hours)  there has been (but not always) a finding of a reduced amount of glucose entering muscles, but we do need to look at other situations where fat burning is elevated for more than a couple hours and you will see similar transient levels of decreased glucose disposal because again the muscles are busy burning fat.

A prime example would be the decreased glucose disposal after a marathon event. Running marathons do not cause diabetes. As with most scientific findings, we have to ask does glucose disposal remain decreased for weeks and months or is this something that only occurs during periods of elevated fat oxidation? This does not mean we should ignore these scientific findings, but maybe we should stop using them as a scaremongering tactic. Especially without fully explaining the intricacies of the study in question.

Keep in mind, the other day I reviewed a scientific study that suggested that lazy-boy style recliners caused diabetes by crushing the pancreas under the weight of your stomach. You can find at least one study that says just about anything – that’s why we always analyze the information from the total body of research, and not just one or two studies.

Finally, I’d like to talk about my old favorite – Intermittent fasting and muscle building. I’ll just cut right to the chase with this one. From my understanding of the available science, weight training DOES NOT cause muscle growth. It SENSITIZES the muscle to the anabolic affects of eating protein.

No workouts, no muscle growth.

No protein, no muscle growth.

Workouts plus protein = muscle growth… at least for a short while.

THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT PROTEIN NEEDS TO BE EATEN EVERY TWO HOURS, AND IN MASSIVE QUANTITIES, OR EVEN RIGHT AFTER A WORKOUT

And here’s the key to this whole equation… MUSCLE GROWS SLOWLY, and if you are training consistently with a high amount of effort (Practicing the art of ‘consistency of effort’ as I like to call it) then EVERY protein meal you eat will be anabolic. And, since muscle grows slowly, any growth you see over a 2-3 month period is actually the result of 100′s of workouts and potentially 1000′s of protein containing meals.

The questions “how much protein” and “how often” are still being debated (and will probably continue to be a topic of debate for decades). This however doesn’t change the following point…there are no magic windows of time when you must eat protein, the ‘sensitization’ from your workouts can last for days if the volume and/or intensity was high enough, and quite frankly, there will come a time when all the protein in the world will not force you to gain any more muscle.

Don’t blame intermittent fasting for that last fact.

The bottom line is that no diet is perfect, and to be honest, I hate that fasting is becoming trendy just as much as you do… It’s not perfect by any means and it’s not for everyone.

When you’re reading the latest internet diet-gossip (which is what diet advice on-line really is becoming) keep in mind that sometimes (but not always) the person on the other side of the computer may not be using sound logic, and they may doing so on purpose.

I know it’s difficult, because to figure out if someone is telling the truth you would have to track down every single reference and read through the scientific findings to make sure it supports the claims made in the article (which is part of the reason I no longer read other peoples blog posts or articles unless they are people I find truly entertaining)

Again – no diet is perfect, IF probably isn’t going to cure cancer and turn you into the most muscular person in the world. It’s a tool… a very useful one in your arsenal against obesity. For many people it is the simplest and easiest approach to weight loss that fit into their lives without having to make drastic lifestyle changes.

The various forms of IF have helped thousands of men and women get in fantastic shape, yet there are some people who tried and simply thought “this isn’t’ for me” , and that’s fine too.

The end goal of IF, at least from my view, is simply to allow people to be comfortable with the idea that it’s OK to eat when they are hungry, and not eat when they are not hungry.

Like I stated in the beginning – I enjoy intermittent fasting, and I enjoy writing about it. I do not see the need to defend the concept of IF but I do see a need to point out when the fight isn’t fair.

It is very difficult to tell a person’s intentions on-line, and it is also difficult to tell whether or not their opinion should count. It is really is up to you and your ‘feel’ for the person. If you start to notice logical fallacies being a reoccurring theme in their writing, it’s time to let them go. (great resource for logical fallacies here)

My goal is to have this post serve as my ‘evergreen’ answer for when people what me to review a blog or article about fasting written by some on-line personality or coach. To be clear, if they raise a valid point worthy of true scientific thought, I will absolutely review it and include in the next edition of Eat Stop Eat, but I will not argue it on-line. If their point is not valid and is a logical fallacy or simply an attack to raise awareness of their site, or an attempt to keep their personally-designed scientifically-validated supplements selling , then I am not going to take it upon myself to be the whistle blower and attack them.

IF is a method of weight loss that really doesn’t take much expertise, you don’t need coaching or special supplements, and it’s becoming very popular – so it is NOT going to make a lot of friends in the next couple years.

In the end, I want to help people understand and explore IF, but it’s not my goal to try and change peoples minds or opinions.

My last couple blog posts were dedicated to helping people get the most out of intermittent fasting, however I did omit one last piece of advice that I will now add – If you don’t like IF, if it’s not fitting into your life, then you don’t have to do it. Simple, it’s not a failure, just not a good fit at the moment.

Eat when hungry, rest when tired.

BP