Nutrition for Newbies, Part 2
by Christian Thibaudeau
In part 1
of Nutrition for Newbies, Coach Thibs gave you the rundown on the big 3
macronutrients, along with some incredibly useful info on fatty acids,
cortisol, and the basal metabolic rate (BMR). He also told you which
foods to eat and which foods to avoid.
Now
he's going to fill your belly and mind with 14 nutritional nuggets and
give some concrete advice on how to accomplish almost any physique goal
you might have.
Why-o-why didn't we have something like this when we were first starting out?
— The Editors
Nutrition Nuggets Here
are some additional nutritional guidelines that will apply under most
circumstances. These simple things will allow you to get a better grasp
of this dieting thing, and attain optimal physique transformation
results. 1. Measure and write down everything, at least in the beginning. A proper nutrition program is about quality
andquantity.
You should eat a certain amount of good food to meet your needs and
build that great body. If you drastically undereat, you risk losing
muscle and strength; overeat and you'll pile on more fat than muscle. If
your goal is to build muscle, you must eat enough to stimulate maximum
growth, but not so much that you become fat. If you prefer to get
ripped you'll need to have a big enough caloric deficit that you'll tap
into your fat stores for energy, but not so great that you end up
eating away your muscle. In both cases there's a constant:
you have to ingest an amount of calories within a certain range to get
the results you want. How can you do this if you don't even know how
many calories and grams of protein, carbs, and fat you're getting each
day? You might think you're getting 3000 calories per day, when really
you're getting only 2000 or less (or you could do the opposite and
drastically underestimate your intake). If you don't have at
least a good idea of where you're at, how can you tell you're where you
need to be? That's why you need to record the food you eat on a daily
basis and calculate your nutritional intake. You can buy the FitDay software to help you record and calculate this.
FitDay daily food log In
an ideal world, you would always calculate your food intake to know
exactly what you're getting. By doing so, it's fairly easy to make
adjustments rapidly. I can understand if you don't want to do this year
round, it gets tedious after a while, and there are only so many hours
in the day. However, do it for at least the first month of your "body
composition eating" phase. At the very least, you'll get a pretty
accurate idea of how many calories and nutrients your favorite foods
contain. 2. Use the 10-20 rule.
If you're in a fat loss phase, you should consume between 10 and 20%
fewer calories than your DEE (a greater deficit than that will lead to
muscle loss). If you're in a mass gaining phase, consume between 10 and
20%
more calories than your DEE (you don't need more than that
to grow optimally, and more will lead to more fat than muscle gain). So
if your DEE is 3000 calories, you should consume between 2400 and 2700
calories per day if you're trying to lose fat, and 3300 to 3600 if
you're trying to add muscle mass. 3.
The less body fat you carry, the more carbs you can eat without gaining
fat. Leaner individuals have better insulin sensitivity, so they don't
tend to store carbs as fat as easily as fatter individuals. Carb intake
should thus remain on the low end unless you're at less than 10% body
fat. Now, this doesn't mean that you should consume no carbs at all
(although for fat loss purposes this is a very effective way to eat),
but at least minimize carb intake. If you decide to keep
carbs in your diet, be sure to consume only "good carbs" (veggies and
some fruits, especially berries. Post-workout carbs in the form of a
shake like Surge
are also acceptable). Be sure also that you eat them at the appropriate
times. As mentioned earlier, the "safest" times to eat carbs are at
breakfast and right after a workout: at these times your muscles are
naturally more insulin sensitive and are more likely to store those
carbs in the muscle as glycogen rather than as fat. 4. Think
whole food: the closer a food is to its natural state, the better it is
for you. This holds true for both health and body composition purposes.
Under most circumstances, if it comes in a box or a can, don't eat it.
Don't eat it. 5.
When you start to eat a muscle-friendly diet, wait 14 to 21 days before
having a "cheat meal." It takes at least this long to get used to any
new pattern of eating. If you cheat too often, you'll stick with your
old habits. Eating a good diet will always seem like a chore, requiring
forced discipline and the feeling of sacrifice, instead of becoming a
way of life that is enjoyable. 6.
Once you're well set in your good eating habits, you should have a
"reloading/cheating" period lasting anywhere from one meal to one full
day every 5-14 days depending on your degree of leanness. If you're fat
(by body comp standards) at 15% body fat or more, you should limit
yourself to 1-3 cheat meals (half a day) every 10-14 days. If you're
between 10 and 15% you can have that half day cheat every 7 days, and
if you're under 10% you can have a full cheat day every 7 days or half
a cheat day every 5 days. 7. Do
notmake up for an unplanned binge by skipping meals. A lot of people will
eat an unplanned crappy meal, feel guilty about it, and then either not
eat for the rest of the day, or become extra drastic the next day. Even
worse, they might feel like eating junk later in the day, so they don't
eat anything at all before that (basically fasting for almost the whole
day) thinking that this will prevent fat gain. This is just stupid. In fact, these two mistakes are worse than the binge itself. Not
eating for a while (starving yourself for 10 hours) before eating a
junk meal will put your body in fat storage mode, and you're actually
more likely to store the junk in your trunk than if you had not starved
yourself. Furthermore, starving yourself is likely to make you eat even
more crap because you'll be more hungry than if you had eaten your
normal meals. Skipping meals after an unplanned binge is no
better, especially if you decide to starve yourself the day after a
binge to "make up for it." This will create a vicious cycle: by
starving yourself you'll actually increase the feeling of hunger and
you'll have huge junk food cravings. You then might give in to those
cravings by bingeing; this will make you feel guilty so you'll once
again starve yourself, etc. After an unplanned cheat, go back to your regular diet
immediately.
Accept your mistake, live with it, and do your best not to let it
happen again. Don't compound a mistake by trying to counter it with
another mistake. 8. A while ago
I had the opportunity to listen to Coach Poliquin give a presentation
in which he talked about diet. He once again explained his basic diet
principle: "If it doesn't fly, swim or run, or if it's not a green
vegetable, you don't eat it." One poor dummy asked, "What about bagels,
Coach? Are bagels okay?" I thought that coach P would rupture a blood
vessel, but he merely asked, "Do bagels fly? Do they run or swim? Are
they green? No? Well, then
don't eat them!" 
The converse of Poliquin's Axiom: if it swims, runs, and flies, you should eat it. 9.
It's important to eat a wide variety of foods. If you over-consume one
specific food, for example if you eat chicken 4 times a day, every day,
you'll eventually develop an allergy or intolerance to it. A
few years ago, I was coaching a weightlifting team at the Quebec Games.
It was held in a remote part of the province and we were confined to
the competition site and our dormitory for a week. They gave us 5 food
item tickets for every cafeteria meal (3 per day). Each ticket gave us
one of every food item available. For most people that would be one
drink, a main course (normally pasta), side dishes (veggies, gravy), a
desert and a piece of fruit. Hardly any of the food items had
any protein, so for a week I would ask for five milk cartons, three
times a day, to get my protein. By the end of the week I had become
severely lactose intolerant!
Milk was a bad choice. You
might not develop a full blown food allergy, but even a mild one (that
you might not even feel) can have negative impacts on your body. When
you're intolerant to a food, even mildly, eating it represents a stress
on the body. So when you eat that food it will raise cortisol levels.
As you may recall, cortisol can lead to catabolism (muscle breakdown
and loss), and it can also facilitate the storage of fat on your
abdomen. Double ungood. So rotate your food choices. This is
especially important for protein sources, since various foods have
different amino acid profiles. Don't limit yourself to dry broiled
chicken breasts: eat beef, pork, salmon, venison, buffalo, ostrich,
kangaroo... you get the idea.
Grilled elk steak with green salad and sauteed eggplant. Chicken just can't compete. 10. Small
and frequent feedings are better than large, infrequent ones. I really
thought that most people these days knew this already, but when I speak
to new clients I'm always baffled that many of them don't. It's
quite simple, really. Your body can better absorb nutrients when you
ingest them in small but frequent doses, and it facilitates a positive
nutrient-partitioning effect (more nutrients stored in the muscle and
less in the fat cells).
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