Nutrition for Newbies, Part 1
by Christian Thibaudeau
"Bodybuilding is at least 80% nutrition" - Vince Gironda
"Nutrition is 100%, training is 100%, recovery is 100%" - Dorian Yates
"If you're not growing, it's likely your diet, not your training, that's holding you back" - Dr. John Berardi I
remember when I was getting into serious Olympic lifting training:
after every good workout I would reward myself with five burgers from a
local fast food joint. And this wasn't only an occasional thing,
either. I ate like this pretty much all the time. Not surprisingly,
despite being pretty strong, I basically looked like a pile of fecal
matter, or the Michelin man's (fatter) brother!
Happily dreaming of post-workout burgers, Thibs adds another plate. I trained hard, sometimes twice a day. I took every supplement known to man, yet I stilljust looked like a fat guy who lifted weights. Which is, of course, exactly what I was. Why, oh why was I not a lean, muscular Adonis? Was it a genetic curse? Nope, just old-fashioned lousy dietary habits. One
of my former clients, a 6'1" 165-pound hockey player, had the opposite
problem: he would train like a madman (I made sure of that), and
actually made some decent strength gains (he once surprised the NY
Rangers strength coach at rookie camp by easily power cleaning 275
pounds), but he could not make an ounce of muscle stick to his bones. I
suspected insufficient eating. He told me that he was eating a lot, so
I had him keep a food diary of everything he ate for a week. His
eating patterns were exactly as I suspected: he was eating like a bird
all day, followed by one big meal in the evening. The big meal made him
feel so full that he really believed he was eating a lot, but his
average daily caloric intake was only around 1700 calories per day.
This was a young guy with a lightning-fast metabolism, who was training
twice a day (one weight session, one track session) four times a week.
1700 calories was barely enough to keep him alive, let alone allow him to gain size! I changed his diet, and he went from 165 to 190 pounds in less than a year.
If you're going to eat like a bird, eat like this bird. The
moral of these stories is that if you're training hard and not gaining
muscle, then your nutrition plan (assuming you even have a plan) is not adequate. If
you have the opposite problem of training hard and not being able to
lose fat, then the reason is probably the same: your diet sucks! No matter what, if your nutritional approach isn't optimal for your objective, you won't get the results you want. With
that in mind, this article will show you the basics of proper nutrition
for body composition (gaining muscle and/or losing fat). Of course,
knowing the basics isn't nearly enough. Sticking to a muscle-friendly
diet is hard, hard work. In some ways it's even harder than training:
you can usually motivate yourself to train hard for an hour or so, a
few times a week. Diet is different. You have to stay committed and
disciplined 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Controlling your
cravings and urges can be painful. Believe me, I know. It sucks. After
a hard day, when you're tired and stressed out, that half-gallon tub of
chocolate ice cream starts to look mighty friendly. Proper nutrition has its rewards, but the psychological price is high.
It's times like these when your true character is revealed. That
said, if you're really willing to take the extra step toward achieving
your physique goals, then by all means, read on.

What Are We Talking About? Understanding
how to plan an adequate body composition or muscle-building diet
requires a basic understanding of a few basic concepts. My objective
here is not to give you a thorough course on each individual component
of a proper nutrition program. Rather, I hope to give you enough
information so that you will be able to read a nutrition article or
plan a nutrition program without feeling like you're lost in a foreign
country. Protein: Each gram of protein provides four calories.
The word "protein" comes from a Greek word meaning "first" or "of
primary importance." For bodybuilders and strength athletes, this
nutrient is of primary importance, because proteins are the
building blocks of, among other things, muscle tissue. Protein is
broken down into amino acids in the body, and these amino acids are
turned into muscle via a process called protein synthesis, or muscular anabolism (from another Greek word meaning "to build up" or "ascend."
Hercules, a Greek guy, displaying his anabolism. Proteins
(amino acids) make up the major portion of the solid part of a muscle.
Around 20-25% of the muscle content is protein, 70% is water and other
fluids, and the remaining 5-10% comprise muscle glycogen, minerals,
intramuscular fatty acids and other elements. You don't need to
memorize the proportions, just master the point that protein is the most important nutrient for muscular growth. No protein, no muscle. Exactly
how much protein is needed for maximum growth? Good question. Studies
have shown over and over that a higher protein intake is associated
with a more positive nitrogen balance and a higher rate of protein
synthesis. In other words, the more protein you eat, the more muscle
you build. However, it's not that simple. At some point we
run smack into the law of diminishing returns. Once you've reached the
maximal amount of protein that your body can use to build muscle, any
additional protein you swallow will notincrease your rate of muscular growth. That
sucks, doesn't it? I mean, wouldn't it be great if all we had to do to
build muscle was consume tons of protein? In no time at all, we'd all
be 250-pound shredded behemoths! Even the girls! Sadly, we are limited
by our own natural biochemistry when it comes to being able to use
protein (amino acids) to build muscle.
Becoming a shredded behemoth isn't just a matter of eating more protein. Protein
synthesis (using protein to build muscle tissue) is highly dependent on
our hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers that run through our
body, responsible for making the body "do things." One of these
"things" is synthesizing protein. The hormones mainly responsible for
stimulating this progress are testosterone (the male hormone), growth
hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), insulin, and
cortisol. Testosterone directly increases protein synthesis,
and thus allows you to make good use of the protein you just ate. The
more testosterone you have in your body, the more protein you can turn
into muscle. This is why some bodybuilders and other athletes use
injectable testosterone or synthetic hormones (steroids): by
artificially jacking up their hormonal level, they increase their
body's capacity to use protein for building muscle. Some
people have naturally higher T levels than others, which will allow
them to build muscle faster than others, especially if they consume
more protein. But the fact remains: if you're not using anabolic or
androgenic steroids (and as a newbie, you'd better not be) then
your body has a limited capacity to use protein for muscle-building,
and testosterone is the major limiting factor. What about GH, you ask? One would certainly imagine that a substance called "human growth hormone" would make humans grow.
Well, it does, if you're a child, but GH is only mildly anabolic in
adults, meaning that it only increases your capacity to build muscle by
a small amount. However, its sub-hormone IGF-1 is highly
anabolic. IGF and GH are produced in bursts (IGF production following a
burst of GH production). As with other hormones, the amount produced
varies from person to person, and this can also become a limiting
factor when it comes to building muscle. Insulin is often said
to be the most anabolic (muscle-building) hormone. This is because its
main function is to tell the body's "storage units" to open up, pull in
"stuff" and store it. The main storage units are the muscles, liver,
and fat cells, and the "stuff" to be stored are the nutrients we eat
(protein, carbs, fat, etc.). Insulin opens up those storage units, but
each of them have their own degree of responsiveness to this hormone.
The more sensitive a unit is, the easier it will open up and store
nutrients. In an ideal world our muscle cells would be super
sensitive, and our fat cells only slightly sensitive. This would surely
facilitate muscle gain and minimize fat gain. Basically, the more
sensitive your muscle cells are, the greater your muscle-building
potential will be. The more sensitive your fats cells are, the greater
your blubber-building potential will be!
In an ideal world, muscle cells would be hypersensitive, and fat cells less sensitive, to insulin.
Alas, it is not an ideal world. We'll
come back to this concept later on, but for now just master the point
that the more sensitive to insulin your muscle cells are, the more
amino acids you can store in them, and therefore the more you can use
to build new muscle tissue. Finally, cortisol is a hormone that inhibits
muscle-building. Not only that, it can actually decrease muscle mass.
It's what's called a catabolic hormone. Its role is to mobilize
nutrients (get them out of their storage units) so that the body can
make fuel from them. This also includes muscle: cortisol can break down
muscle tissue into amino acids, which in turn can be transformed into
sugar (glucose) by the liver to be readily used for energy. This is
what we call catabolism (sounds like "cannibalism"). It's the
opposite of anabolism, and for a bodybuilder, it's generally a Bad
Thing. So it would seem that cortisol is a bad hormone. Well, yes and no. Actually, cortisol is necessary
during a workout, because it helps with energy production, as well as
with the capacity to cope with physical stress. However, if cortisol
levels are chronically elevated after a workout, the body stays in a
catabolic (breakdown) mode instead of being in an anabolic (building)
mode. This often happens in individuals who are stressed out: cortisol
is a stress hormone: it's released when stress levels go up.
Individuals who are under a lot of stress will thus have a harder time
using a lot of protein to build muscle, since their body is in a
constant state of breakdown, not building. As you can see,
simply feeding yourself tons and tons of protein will not necessarily
mean gaining more muscle. Overfeeding protein can also have another
downside: if protein is the dominant nutrient in your diet, you run the
risk of your body adapting to the use of protein as its main energy
source. If that happens, your body will burn more protein for energy,
and will thus have less of it available for muscle-building purposes.
The trick is to increase your protein intake until you reach the
maximum amount for optimum muscular growth.