Brad Pilon.com

Muscle is a large part of your body mass, but it’s contribution to your metabolic rate is greatly over exaggerated in the health and fitness industry.

It is a very important contribution, because outside of exercise it’s one of the only things you can control, but it is exaggerated.

Just like you can’t out exercise a bad diet, you can’t out muscle it either.

(The black is bone, the yellow is body fat, the red is muscle, the blue is the rest of your lean mass…organs etc)

In the graph on the left we see that your muscle mass is shown to make up about 40%ish of your  total body weight. ON the right we see that while it makes up 40% (ish) of your entire body weight, in only makes up about 20% percent of your resting metabolic rate.

(FYI – 20% is roughly same amount that your liver or brain contributes to your metabolism)

BP

*Heymsfield SB, et al. Body-size dependence of resting energy expenditure canbe attributed to non-energetic homogeneity of fat-free mass. American Journal of Physiology, Endocrinology and Metabolism. 282:E132-E138; 2002

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“Eat Stop Eat and Resistance Training”

“Eat Stop Eat combined with Working Out”

“Eat Stop Eat and hitting the weights”

Admittedly, I am starting to sound like a broken record.

And while the benefits that weight training has on the effects of fasting are nothing short of remarkable, it is time for me to change it up.

In fact, I’m going to go in a whole new direction.

let’s talk about…

“Resistance training and Eat Stop Eat.”

(feel free to roll your eyes)

There are chapters in Eat Stop Eat on my theories on how resistance training benefits intermittent fasting, but we’ve never really talked about how Eat Stop Eat can benefit resistance training.

First and foremost..the obvious: All that work in the gym is almost pointless if the muscle you are building is covered by a inch-thick layer of fat.

Nobody buys a new Ferrari to keep hidden in a garage. You take that baby out and show it off.

(Just wrap it up and put it in my garage, I wouldn’t want anyone to see it)

Be proud of the muscle you built, don’t keep it locked away in a fat dungeon.

Secondly, (and this just a personal observation) I have great workouts while fasted.

Seriously.

I’m not a giant fan of volume..I love progression, I love heavy, but volume…bores me.

However, I can handle high volume workouts much better when fasted then when just fed.

I used to eat two snickers bars before every workout (don’t ask..I was a wannabe power-lifter for a while)

I can tell you now that a full stomach really interferes with high volume..especially squats and deads.

So, in my humble opinion…fasting helps.

Lastly, it will help get rid of the ‘calorie crutch’…

By admitting that almost all of your muscle building results come from the gym (and not gorging yourself in the kitchen) you’ll put your effort in the right place.

But mostly, it’s because building muscle only to have it hidden it under fat just doesn’t make sense.

BP

PS – thanks to  @jon404 here is an example of the fat dungeon… it’s literally a person trapped inside a layer of fat.

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You know what is really, really disturbing?

The fact that for many men it is a mental block that is probably preventing them from getting really, really lean.

In fact, sometimes a mental block can be a bigger culprit then either their diet or exercise program for preventing guys from getting lean.

Here’s a perfect example.

I use to see this in bodybuilders all the time:  They would spend an entire year (maybe more) ‘bulking’ enjoying the feeling of hitting milestone weights like, 200, 225, 250, even 275 pounds…every time a bodybuilder hit one of these weights it was a giant feeling of achievement.

But, when it came competition time these same bodybuilders could never get truly shredded because they had a mental block that would keep them from getting below 200 pounds..Even if they weren’t competition ready, they simply could not get passed the mental block of dropping into the 190’s especially after being so large beforehand.

In other words, they would rather LOSE THEIR COMPETITION then drop below 200 pounds!

I was thinking about this other day when it suddenly hit me…this doesn’t just effect bodybuilders…it effects a lot of men.

It even effects me too.

If I want to get leaner than I am now, I’d have to drop below 170.

Honestly, this is a fact that I’ve never really considered.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am extremely happy with my weight (175ish) and my  body composition. But the fact remains, If I did want to get leaner, I would also have to get lighter.

I know my lean body mass is between 150-155. I also know that I’m an experienced lifter in my thirties who has been seriously lifting weights for more than 15 years. My bench, squat and dead lift are not going to increase by more then ten to fifteen pounds in the next year.

I’ve also tracked my weight for years…so I know (obviously) I’m way leaner in the 170’s then I was in the 180’s and 190’s (again obvious, but needed to be stated).

This means that my Lean Body Mass is A) not going to change quickly and  B) Will most likely never to go outside of this 5 pound range.

So based on these facts if for some reason I wanted to drop into TRUE single digits for my percent body fat (7 or 8%), I’d have to weight between 165 and 170 pounds.

(The whole ‘gain 20 pounds of muscle and lost 20 pounds of fat at the same time’ thing only really happens when you are young (17 to 25), just started training, or are on steroids)

The bottom line is that weight can be a GIANT mental hurdle for guys who want to get lean. We’re often misled by the padded stats of professional athletes and celebrities, and have a very strong aversion to being “too light”.

If you want to get truly lean, then you may benefit from ignoring the scale and just go by your body measurements and how you look in the mirror.

BP

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27 obese patients were subjected to a ten day fast consisting of 250 Calories per day. The Subjects were divided into two groups, a group that exercised and a group that did not.

After ten days:

• Both groups had similar weight loss.

• The exercise was well tolerated without problems.

• The loss of muscle was significantly less in the exercise group.

The authors concluded “This may indicate that muscular activity is useful in aiding adaptation to fasting and may orient weight loss preferentially towards fat mass.“

While certainly not earth shattering…the part that is very interesting to me is that this study was published in 1975!

So, we had a vague idea over 3o years ago that exercise was needed to maintain muscle mass while dieting. Yet, nowadays we still argue about protein ratios, carb cycling and meal frequency and supplementation. Seems like something was lost in the last 30 years!

Simple truth – Just like Schrub et al. hypothesised over 30 years ago, if you are dieting and you want to preserve muscle mass, lift weights.

BP

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This time last year I was almost half way through dieting for a bodybuilding contest.

That’s right. As embarrassing as it is, I have been on stage, in a pair of glorified speedos, posing for a table full of judges.

You can call it a freak show, you can call it a bikini contest or you can call it pure vanity. I admit, I make fun of these competitions too.

I decided to compete last year to make sure that I could transform my body. After all, I’d be a hypocrite if I wrote in this blog about nutrition and weight loss if I’ve never actually taken my own body to the extremes of dieting.

And to be honest, it was one of the single best things I have ever done, because I recorded a journal of every single day of my diet.

And now whenever I feel like I need a little motivation and direction, I can simply look back at what worked for me.

I know I say this all the time, but it is worth repeating – A journal is your single best tool for getting in shape. It doesn’t have to be super detailed, just a quick outline of how each day is going.

Here is an example of one of my pages…it’s mostly chicken scratch that only I can understand..but it tells me exactly what I need to know.

Basically, the yellow highlighted stuff is my workout…and the rest is notes. From this one page I know that I didn’t want to go any heavier on dead lifts, that my diet was going well, and that I tried step-ups, but preferred split squats for this particular workout.

It took me about two minutes every day to fill this out. I never did it in the gym..often I filled it in during a break at work, or when I got home that night. But it’s proved to be extremely valuable for me.

A couple of months after the contest, I summarized some key notes about the whole experience.

• I had great results using intervals.
• I had great results using a whole body split.
• I had poor results using a bodybuilder type routine.
• I was able to maintain my strength during the whole diet.
• I was able to maintain my activity level during the whole diet.
• Cheat days are a waste. I found no benefit from them at all.
• 1,200 Calories was a little too low for me, but 1,500 to 1,800 worked perfectly.
• I lost almost no muscle during the entire diet.
• Avoiding simple sugars seemed to make a very big difference towards the end of my diet.

Great reminders for whenever I felt I needed to look back at what worked for me. This is why I view keeping a journal as your number one tool for weight loss.

Another great bonus was that during this time I had regular access to a BodPod..a great device for tracking body fat and lean mass changes that is very easy to use and very accurate.

Every Thursday I would take my measurements with the BodPod, and then chart my changes in a spread sheet.

This is the second most important tool for weight loss – measurements.

Now, you don’t need a BodPod to track changes – a scale, measuring tape and a digital camera will do just fine. In fact, I used the pictures I took with my digital camera more than I used my Bodpod readings to track my changes.

If you photograph, weigh and measure yourself at the same time every week, this will give you a great way to look back and track any changes that were made.

Once you get in the habit of monitoring your progress by recording a journal and measuring your body, losing weight becomes much easier, because you are no longer guessing at what works and what doesn’t work. You can simply look at your records.

BP

PS- for those of you who have been asking about the next installement of the Deconstructing Nutrition Series (Dr. F), it’s still coming – I just have a few more articles to read through before it’s completed.

Eat Stop Eat

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Back in July and August, I spent a fair amount of my time up in Northern Ontario Cottage country.

The cottage is a great place to hide out and get some reading and writing done, but sometimes it can be a horrible place to try and ‘eat clean’. It’s very easy to rationalize a couple bad days at the cottage as “cheat days”.

For some reason, body building magazines and fitness “gurus” love to promote the idea of cheat days.

It is more than common for a dieting bodybuilder to spend 6 days out of a week eating as little as 1200 Calories per day, and then on the seventh day eat close to 10,000 Calories!

People rationalize being a complete glutton for one day with excuses like “reloading” and “refueling”.

These types of excuses are based on what I like to call fitness magazine science.

Fitness magazine science is all of the theories that appear in fitness magazines that have no scientific backing. Take for instance the idea that you can’t store the excess calories from cheat days. This is rationalized by stating that your metabolism increases because of the massive amount of foods that you just consumed, and therefore you burn off all the extra energy.

A perfect example of a theory with no scientific backing.

But here is the real deal, and its plain and simple math. If your target calorie intake is a 500 Calorie deficit, and you lower your intake from 2,500 calories to 2,000 calories, then you have created a 3,000 Calorie deficit over six days.

Now on the seventh day, if you gorge yourself and eat yourself into the 6,000 Calorie range (which is hard, but definitely not impossible to do), you have just undone almost all the dieting you did during the week. There is no magic that makes those calories disappear.

Your body is amazing at storing energy. Sure, you lose a little to heat production and some ramped up metabolic processes, but at the end of the day the practice of cheat days is destructive. Like I said in my previous post on metabolism, the effect that food has on your metabolism is actually very small.

The idea that your body can’t store all of these calories, or that somehow these extra calories don’t turn into fat is a myth and a lie that will never die. It’s OK to reward yourself with ice cream every now and then, but full out cheat days with the soul purpose of gorging yourself should be avoided, plain and simple.

BP

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