You cannot serve two masters.
If you exercise, you can’t try to gain muscle mass, gain strength, and lose fat all at the same time. You can’t serve all of those masters. Pick one.
However, I do think while you serve one master you can at least acknowledge the others. For instance, if you are focused on building muscle mass, that’s generally going to work against fat loss. To gain muscle mass at any sort of decent rate, you’re going to have to eat more and that will mean some of your weight gain will be fat gain; however, you can be smart about it and not gain weight like a blob. So, serve a master but give a nod to the others.
My focus right now is building strength, with mass being secondary, and fat loss bringing up the rear. I want to get strong(er) and focus primarily on that goal. But, in doing so building muscle mass comes with it: muscles will get larger as they get stronger, tho not as much as a pure mass-building program. Plus, my flavor of the Wender 5/3/1 cycle is “boring but big”, directing my assistance work specifically towards mass building because to lift big you do need to be big.
But the big thing I struggle with is the fat situation.
I don’t want to become a fat slob. In fact, I’d love to shed the muffin around my middle. But it won’t necessarily happen with the path I’m on, and I’m OK with that situation. I have had some thoughts that in 2012 I may take a couple of months break from Wender 5/3/1 and focus on the fat loss goal, or perhaps stay with Wender 5/3/1 as a general template but modify the particular program. We’ll see.
The one thing that I am attempting to do tho in giving a nod to fat “maintenance” is my food intake. Of course, I must have a lot of protein in a day and strive to eat 30-50g about 6x a day (exactly how much depends on what I’m eating and when, but the goal is at least 200g a day). I don’t mind the fat that much other than ensuring I’m getting some but not overdoing it (e.g. eat 6 hard boiled eggs but give 1-2 yolks to the dog). Carbs tho are another matter… and have generally been my problem spot.
One thing that I’ve been toying with, tho have yet to fully master, is WHEN I have my carbs, in addition to what my carb sources are. I will say, getting our veggies from Johnson’s Backyard Garden Organic Farm is a boon because so much of it is green leafies and other “good stuff” that I don’t have much problem just shoveling it down and not worrying much about caloric impact. But still, I need some sources of carbs that have caloric value to help with glycogen stores so…. what and how to deal with this?
I read something that started me down a slightly different path. See, I was trying to avoid carbs as much as possible (quasi-atkins) but my body balked at that, and understandably so. So I needed to find what and how and when to take them in so they were beneficial but not harmful to my goals. What came up was consuming my carbs around my workout. Carb up beforehand to have energy for the workout, then carb up afterwards to replenish and the body should take them up well. But otherwise, don’t take in much for carbs throughout the rest of the day.
I saw a tweet last night from Dave Tate that sums it up well:
What has always worked best for me (getting lean) is 6-7 meals per day with 70% of the carbs before and right after training. #eliteftschat
And that’s about the size of it. If you know who Dave is and the transformation he went through, there’s something to what he’s saying.
I’ve been trying that, tho haven’t mastered it yet (slave to old habits, working to change them), and so far I seem to be working well with it. I can see in the mirror that muscles are getting larger, and I do think fat may be going away because I swear I might be seeing my abs a little better and it doesn’t feel like there’s as much muffin over my belt. But my bodyweight remains the same, around 235-240 (fluxes depending on the time of day or what day it is, and I’m 6’3″ tall) and has remained pretty steady there since I got off the PPNP program. Strength continues to go up, mass seems to be going up (tho perhaps not as fast as if I was shoveling food), and fat seems like it might be dropping off… slowly, but that’s ok.
I am not trying to serve all 3 masters, strength is still the prime goal. But if I can keep a nod to the others in the mix and still make overall progress? Great. We’ll see where this leads me.
Stuff From Hsoi 
I think you’re ready for this, now 🙂 Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320840255&sr=8-1 – Taubes has an extremely good handle on how things actually work in the body, and he lays it out nicely in this book. It’s a very good starting point.
The short of it is – don’t worry about the fat intake. In fact, if you’re cutting carbs back, and you find yourself feeling low energy, you need to raise your fat intake to increase your fuel.
Don’t worry so much about glycogen stores, but yeah, post workout is the best time to eat carbs. When you do, it’s best to eat something starchy (say, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, etc). At other meals, feel free to eat all the green leafy stuff that you want – the carbs they provide are relatively negligible. For now, just doing that should be enough (it’s probably enough for most of the time, actually). I’ll be doing something similar right after Thanksgiving – but I don’t intend to give up on strength gains while doing it (you actually can have your proverbial cake and eat it, too, with this stuff).
Man… my reading list things added faster than I can take things off. 🙂
I am not worrying about fat intake. I mean, I don’t want to sit down and drink a tub of lard, but if I suck down 6 hard boiled eggs, a few slices of bacon, and some buttered toast? That ribeye steak? bring it on. I really don’t sweat the fat intake and in some ways actually seek it out (if I have any milk I’d rather it not be skim because some fat is vital). Need an afternoon snack? a big handful of almonds. All good stuff. I just had a lot of bloodwork done and I can say for a fact that all my numbers are stellar… so I don’t worry about it, especially since I am working hard to utilize what I’m taking in. Not just shovelling fatty food while I sit on the couch.
As example for post workout, when I got home today I had 1.5 cups of milk, scoop of whey, 1/2 cup raw oats, then enough frozen raspberries and blueberries to make the shake yummy and almost too thick to drink. I’ll have another good meal with good carbs and such in a couple hours but then after that just try to stick to all the leafies… I know the add almost nothing for cals, but are good for fiber and lots of other goodness (vitamins, minerals, etc.). And so far, this seems to be working for me. Progress is slow, but I’d rather have slow and solid progress than yo-yo progress. So far, so good!
That one book is a wealth of knowledge about diet and nutrition, though 🙂 Very well worth the read…
Taubes’ book will also explain for you why you can eat a lot of fat and have stellar blood numbers 😉 The other thing that you never hear about is that high cholesterol numbers don’t mean anything on their own – it’s the size distribution of the LDL particles, too (and to a much lesser extent, the HDL particles). Eating like you do, the vast majority of the particles should be large, low density, “fluffy” particles – also called “B pattern”. The problem ones are the small, high density LDLs – “pattern A” – these are highly correlative to coronary artery disease (and heart disease, etc). Eating fat will not cause high blood cholesterol, and there was never any scientific evidence for the medical community and dietitians to suggest it.
Here’s the quick lesson. There’s one single hormone in the body that controls the storage of energy – insulin. Most of the tissues in your body respond to insulin in the blood by pulling fatty acids and glucose out of the blood stream and storing them in the tissue (in the form of triglycerides and glycogen, depending on the tissue in question). Most tissues in the body are normally relatively insulin resistant, meaning that they don’t respond greatly to insulin in the body – only adipose tissue (fat) is always insulin sensitive.
All food causes an insulin release – foods that are easily converted to glucose, however, cause a much quicker and larger release of insulin than foods that are predominantly fat or protein in composition. What this means is, eating lots of starchy or sugary foods will cause your adipose tissue to store more energy – that is, you get fatter.
Other tissues in the body become insulin sensitive when they deplete their internal energy stores, though. For instance, when you work out, you burn the muscles’ internal glycogen stores fairly quickly. The muscle becomes insulin sensitive, and starts pulling free fatty acids and glucose out of the blood stream. If you eat a big chunk of glucose releasing carbs (ie, high glycemic index foods) right after you work out, a predominance of the glucose released get sucked up by the muscle, rather than being stored by the adipose tissue.
There’s a caveat, though – fat tends to slow the absorption of carbohydrates in the food. So, the whole milk in your shake is actually working against you, here, to some extent.
Ok, the whole system is obviously more complex than that – but this is why post workout is the best time to grab your carbs.
Milk can be dicey for a few reasons, unfortunately. Milk proteins cause a huge insulin spike – there’s a good evolutionary reason for this, since milk’s purpose is to encourage growth in a young animal’s tissues. So, it might work against you in non-post-workout times, too. You’ll just have to try things and see – if you don’t make the progress you want, cut the dairy, and see what happens.
One sub for milk in your shake that works nicely is coconut water – some brands aren’t good at all, but C2O and Amy & Brian’s are both very tasty. In fact, straight coconut water is not a bad post-workout carb source, either (it’s what I use, at the moment).
Cutting back the carbs at all other times will make a huge difference for you, no doubt. Like I said, if you start feeling run down, up the protein and fat – and realize that you might go through a period where you feel weird just because you’re not getting the sugar you’re used to…
Not using whole milk. It’s actually that HEB Mootopia stuff. I think Wife gets the 2% variety of it. I’m still very curious about that milk tho, how they manage to get 12g of protein per serving AND also less sugars per serving compared to regular milk.
On the whole, I don’t drink milk. It’s the base for the shake, and I do have ice cream now and again because I like it too much. 🙂 I will have cottage cheese now and again.
Coconut water. Hrm. I’ll try to remember to pick some up at the store and try it.
But in the end yeah… the quasi-paleo diet is useful. I’ve had to make adjustments and tweak things over the weeks and months, but I’m starting to find a groove. The biggest help does seem to be centering carb intake around the workout and minimizing it at other times.