ETP Flexible Eating Guide

Flexible Eating The Eat To Perform Guide to Achieving Sustainable Fat Loss by Paul Nobles, Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, April Blackford, and James Barnum Edited by Rebecca MacLary

Copyright © 2014, Eat To Perform. All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced or distributed in any way, nor electronically stored, accessed or shared, without the prior approval of the copyright holder, except as may otherwise be allowed by applicable law. This book is neither medical nor any other form of professional advice that requires licensing in any jurisdiction. It is for scientific and educational purposes only. Please consult a qualified health care professional for medical advice. The authors, any contributors, and copyright holder(s) (and their successors) are not responsible for any adverse effects associated with the use of this book. Where third party trademarks are used in this eBook, reasonable efforts were made to identify the trademark owner where first used. Such use is in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement. Let it be made clear that all third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

1

FOREWORD By James Barnum I’d like to thank you for your purchase of this eBook and congratulate you on taking what may be the first of many steps towards a healthier, stronger, happier version of yourself. The concept of this text began development over two years ago when Paul and I started writing articles together. Not a lot of people know this, but before Eat To Perform came to fruition, we were “YourDietSucks.org”. We wrote about many of the concepts that ended up in this book – especially the need for a less restrictive approach to carbohydrates and food in general. This was right around the time the Paleo diet had peaked in popularity and we wanted to help people understand that you can eat real food, lose body fat, build muscle, and feel awesome without cutting out all the carbs from your nutrition. Our response was to work with Dr. Mike T Nelson to develop an eBook based around the concept of “Metabolic Flexibility,” a theory that he’d been researching for quite some time. Our goal was to bring a more balanced nutritional approach to the burgeoning army of high-intensity athletes that were training in gyms around the world without adequate fuel in their bellies. As time passed and our community grew, we recruited April to administrate the Science Lab forum – a place where people can go to followup and get advice from coaches, doctors, and people just like them, without the negativity and drama that can crop up in similar outlets. Eventually, we had time to collaborate with Spencer on some videos as he prepared for his first bodybuilding show and we started brainstorming a new eBook that would distill our collective approach to nutrition down into an easily-digestible format. As you’ll read, we’ve each had our share of struggles as it relates to food and we’d like nothing more than to spare everyone from having to deal with those same pitfalls. The result of our collaboration is an expression of that desire; an honest examination of why it seems losing and maintaining fat loss is so hard, and an explanation of basic concepts that anyone interested in health and fitness should be familiar with, whether it’s for personal use or to help guide others in the right direction. Once again, THANK YOU for reading and good luck on your path.

2

Contents FOREWORD ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Contents .................................................................................................................................................... 3 Who is This eBook For? ................................................................................................................................. 5 Part I: The Basics .......................................................................................................................................... 6 Why Your Diet SUCKS.................................................................................................................................... 7 What Happens AFTER the Diet ................................................................................................................. 9 Why Do We Diet?.................................................................................................................................... 11 Dieting Doesn’t Have to be so Hard ............................................................................................................ 15 Flexible Eating Case Study: Spencer........................................................................................................... 18 Part II: The Nitty Gritty ............................................................................................................................... 19 Energy Balance: An Introduction ............................................................................................................... 20 Keeping the carbohydrates: why a balanced approach is better ...................................................... 22 Flexible Eating Case Study: April ................................................................................................................ 24 What is Flexible Eating? .............................................................................................................................. 26 What Makes a Food “Naughty” or “Nice”? ............................................................................................ 26 Why Eating Real Food Is Important ........................................................................................................ 28 Flexible Eating Case Study: James .............................................................................................................. 31 Designing an Approach to Nutrition ........................................................................................................... 34 START HERE: Establishing TDEE and Transitioning into Maintenance ................................................... 35 Step 1: Log Food ..................................................................................................................................... 35 Step 2: Establish your TDEE.................................................................................................................... 36 Step 3: Un-dieting .................................................................................................................................. 38 Part III: Flexible Eating for Different Goals................................................................................................. 42 Guidelines and Strategies for Maintenance ........................................................................................... 42 Guidelines and Strategies for Weight Loss ............................................................................................. 45 Guidelines and Strategies for Lean Mass Gain ....................................................................................... 49 Flexible Eating Case Study: Paul ................................................................................................................. 53 Conclusion: The Five Tenets of Flexible Eating .......................................................................................... 56 References .................................................................................................................................................. 57

3

4

Who is This eBook For? This book is for you if: 

You’ve tried every diet, weight loss plan, and supplement on the market without results and you’re tired of it.



You’ve gotten results with the aforementioned diets and supplements, but lost them all when you stopped dieting/following the plan/taking the supplement.



You’ve ever attended a birthday party and declined a slice of cake because you were “on a diet.”



You’ve seen a picture/video of a famous athlete or model and honestly thought less of yourself because you don’t have abs/shoulders/legs/glutes like they do.



You’ve gone months (or years) without eating potatoes, rice, or bread simply because it wasn’t on the list of foods you were allowed to eat.



You’ve ever looked at yourself in the mirror and thought, “If I just lost 5 more lbs. I’d be so much happier.”



You’ve lost countless hours of sleep to cravings for food.



You’ve given into cravings for food in the middle of the night and ended up eating a half-sleeve of cookies at 2:30 a.m.



You’ve gotten up at 5 a.m. to work out for an hour at 5:30, worked all day, and then headed back to the gym to work out AGAIN without having so much as a cup of coffee and an avocado to fuel your activity.



You’ve ever had your body fat tested and gotten upset because it was higher than you expected it to be despite the fact that you’ve added 100 lbs. to your deadlift over the past 6 months.



You’ve ever thought to yourself, “Man…My diet SUCKS!”

5

Part I: The Basics Part I of this eBook is a collaborative effort among the four of us (Spencer, Paul, April, and James) to address the inherent issues that manifest themselves during the course of your average diet. First, we explore some common problems that pop up as a diet progresses: both physiological and psychological. Next, we look at the mindset surrounding dieting, what happens when it gets out of hand, and some factors that influence us to diet in the first place. Finally, we go over a few simple behavioral modifications that can improve your relationship with food and even help you lose body fat. Without covering these topics, it would be impossible for us to convey the more “functional” elements of nutrition and fat loss, like determining what/how much to eat. Make no mistake: dieting is a complicated subject and understanding that it affects more than just your adipose tissue will help you make the most of your efforts. For that reason, we implore you to read through the following pages carefully before you move on to Part II and learn a bit more about the nutritional concepts that you should utilize to start on your path to a new way of eating.

6

Why Your Diet SUCKS Remember the first few weeks of your diet? It felt good, didn’t it? You were performing well in your workouts, you weren’t hungry, and you lost weight. Things were looking good in the mirror and you couldn’t wait to see your results in a few weeks. Over time, things became a little more difficult and your excitement diminished, but not so much that you couldn’t manage. You lost a little strength, you got hungry at the end of the day, and the weight wasn’t coming off as quickly as before, but you still felt good. Now, weeks later, your diet really sucks. It’s no longer giving you results; you’ve completely stopped losing weight. You feel weak, hungry, and lethargic. You want to eat more, but you’re worried you’ll gain fat. Now, after you eat a larger-than-normal meal, you never seem to feel satisfied. No matter how many vegetables or chicken breasts you eat, you never seem to feel full. There are physiological and psychological reasons for this. Your diet isn’t working, and eventually, you’re going to quit. Not only are you unhappy and on the verge of giving up, but your diet may be causing several other problems.

Your diet may be compromising your health Your immune and endocrine systems function best when you have adequate Calories. When you don’t eat enough, it’s easier to get an infection and suffer hormonal problems. Prolonged dieting can lower your testosterone and estrogen levels. (Cangemi, Friedmann, Holloszy, & Fontana) (NI, JL, HJ, RS, & MJ)This lowers your sex drive, makes it harder to gain muscle, and can compromise your long-term health. Dieting also reduces your thyroid levels, which can make you feel cold or sluggish. (Fontana, Klein, Holloszy, & Premachandra) This won’t help you stay active. If you’re a woman, dieting can also cause amenorrhea and low bone mineral density. (Fazeli & Klibanski) It’s not a great thing to have bones weaker than your grandma’s!

Your diet is keeping you from building muscle Unless you’re a complete beginner, you can’t build muscle if you don’t eat enough Calories. (Buchholz & Schoeller) (Schoeller) Later in this eBook, we’ll cover energy balance and Calories in greater detail so hold tight. For now, understand that just because you start lifting doesn’t mean you’ll get buff, but you will get stronger and look a little more “solid.” (Westcott) With Eat to Perform, we often see folks gain pure muscle when coming off their chronic diet, but in order for that to happen, there needs to be enough Calories to fuel this.

7

Your diet isn’t working The bottom line is that your diet isn’t working. Sure, you might have lost some weight, but you still don’t have the body you want. More importantly, you’re not happy. Again, your diet may also be compromising your health, which is more important than whether or not you have abs. It’s time for a change, and that’s what this book will give you. You’ll learn the essential habits you need to stay lean, happy, and healthy, without chronic dieting.

Ditch The “Diet” Mindset When you read the word “diet,” what comes to mind? Do you picture a cornucopia of loosely associated foods strewn across a table? Maybe the image in your head resembles something like Paleo: sweet potatoes, steaks, and fish oil, or perhaps it’s a collection of “healthy foods” like whole grains, lean meats, and fresh veggies. In that sense, a diet is a predetermined hierarchy of foods that makes it easy to know “what and what not to eat.” If something’s “on your diet,” you’re free to eat it and conversely, an option that isn’t on the list will be avoided under the pretense that including it would somehow disrupt your progress towards whatever goal you’ve set your mind to. In essence, it’s a list of “naughty” and “nice” foods. Naughty foods are oftentimes energy-dense, making them easy to overeat. Sometimes, they may contain too much of a specific macronutrient, usually fat or carbohydrate. There may be cultural or ethical roots that shaped the foods that are excluded from the “nice” list, such as the “Nordic” or “Mediterranean” diets. Under certain circumstances, there may even be a legitimate moral conflict present, as is often the case with those of us that choose to follow a “plant-based” diet and exclude animal products from their list of food options. Beyond food choices, a “diet” can also refer to a period of time, whether determined or left indefinite, where food intake will be deliberately restricted to accomplish weight loss for health reasons, aesthetic goals, or perhaps both (as is often the case). Oftentimes food will be meticulously tracked and recorded. This behavior may go hand in hand with altering food choices as described above, or the dieter might eat anything and everything as long as they don’t eat too many Calories. When someone goes on a “30-Day Fat Burn” diet, or accepts a “24-Day Challenge” in an effort to melt all of the flubber from their body, this is what they really mean. They’re “dieting”… it’s a verb now.

Dieting Is a Form of Restrictive Eating Behavior When I think about the word “diet” and indeed the act of dieting, the prevailing theme that comes to mind is restriction and creating negative space. Dieting is rarely about what you should do to get the best results; it’s all about what you shouldn’t do if you don’t want something bad to happen. Whether 8

you won’t eat white potatoes because they aren’t on “the list,” you’ve run out of Calories for the day and can’t eat because “you’ll get fat,” or you’re avoiding rice because you’re on a “low carb diet,” you’re engaging in a restrictive behavior that may not actually help you achieve the result you’re after. When a diet is designed around arbitrary external factors, it cannot produce a specific result. An approach to nutrition should be a direct response to the individual nutritional requirements of the dieter or there is no guarantee of success. Let me rephrase that: when you judge your level of success upon how well you adhere to an ideology, rather than on the achievement of specific short- and longterm goals, your diet is broken. Positive results are all that matter! The perfect list of foods for you may not resemble another person’s list. The number of Calories you need to consume to effectively lose body fat won’t be the same as mine. Cutting carbs (or fat) from your diet for prolonged periods of time probably won’t result in great long-term results. What’s good for others may not necessarily be good for you. Now, there’s nothing wrong with deliberating over what you do and don’t eat. In fact, that’s a healthy behavior that you’ll likely benefit from greatly. You shouldn’t eat food with reckless abandon and as an autonomous individual granted with free will, you have the right to make the decision to never eat another piece of bread in your entire life if you don’t want to. Likewise, if you want to lose some weight because you’re not satisfied with the number on the scale and you decided that this is the year you’ll finally get your summer six-pack, that’s entirely up to you. Although the choice is yours, eliminating foods from your diet or restricting food intake can result in a variety of negative outcomes that most people simply aren’t aware of. The least insidious thing that can happen is that perhaps you don’t reach your body composition goals; you don’t lose as much weight or body fat within the timeframe you’d given yourself. When you take into consideration how physically and mentally exhausting a diet can be, that’s a disheartening way to end things. You might fall off the wagon at this point and give up, or you could move onto another diet and give that a try. Maybe you were just following the wrong list of what not to eat. Maybe you were eating too much. Maybe your carbs were too high. As you’ll learn later in this eBook, it’s probably not the carbs, nor is necessarily your choice of foods, nor how much you were eating. In isolation, these factors cannot make or break a nutrition plan. They must be considered in context to your overall lifestyle, and that’s why the aforementioned diet methodologies always fall short: they don’t take YOU into account.

What Happens AFTER the Diet Whether or not you experienced success on your diet, the likelihood that you’ve arrived at your ideal physique is minuscule. Verily, 24 to 30 days of eating only meat and veggies, avoiding artificial foods, taking the latest fat burning supplements, and restricting your Calories may have been challenging…but it probably won’t yield a drastic visual difference unless you had a lot of fat to lose, and that’s still not guaranteed. The most common result is that you’re a slightly smaller version of the person you were before. Of course we have to consider how much better off you are now that you’ve removed all of those processed foods from your life (not counting the few times during the past month where you caved 9

under the pressure of restricting your food choices and wound up binging on your favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s). Since starting your diet, you notice that you have more energy; perhaps you think more clearly and you’re motivated to exercise more often and with greater vigor. Certainly if you’re not dropping jaws at the beach, you’ve made a commitment to improve your most valuable asset: your health. Don’t get me wrong. There is overwhelming value in limiting your consumption of highly processed foods and learning how to appreciate cooking and eating whole, minimally processed, nutrient-dense foods, especially when you’re on a weight loss/fat loss diet. I have to hand it to you. You’ve made a positive change and if you could continue on that path for the rest of your life, I honestly think you’d be better off. The issue of course is that most people can’t do it: they can’t cut out processed foods forever. That doesn’t make them weak, and it doesn’t mean they’ve failed. As I pointed out earlier, these negative connotations go hand-in-hand with the dieting mindset. Restriction, negation, shame, loss: there’s really no positive movement. That brings us to a crossroads. The diet is over. There’s no more challenge, and we’re all out of supplements. Where do we go next? Do we do it all over again and continue to adhere to the modifications we made? That’s certainly an option, but the very nature of a short-term diet or challenge makes this almost impossible. At some point, you’ll get sick of it. As human beings, we crave novel experiences. While we can settle into consistent behavioral patterns that go against our natural inclinations, unless the reward is great enough, we tend to revert or loosen up. The second option, for the Calorie counters who never stopped eating the “naughty” foods in the first place, is to further reduce Calories and start looking for ways to increase the satiety effect of what little food is allowed.

Rebounding, Chronic Dieting, and Disordered Eating If you regress to your old ways, the way you ate before your diet, you’ll almost certainly regain weight. There are many people who’ve been able to get extremely lean and who end up miserable because they didn’t enjoy their diet. In fact, I’ve been there. You don’t want to be that person. If you get to that point, it’s likely you’ll rebound up to a higher weight later. I won’t get into the science related to why this happens, but it’s essentially inevitable. Under the circumstances where energy-dense foods were restricted, what caused your fat loss/weight loss was the removal of certain foods to create an intuitive Calorie deficit. Logically, once those food are reintroduced, the results of your hard work will diminish. If you were simply cutting Calories regardless of food choices, the unintentional increase in Calories after the diet will cause you to rebound as well. These changes in behavior and the resultant weight gain can be unsettling. Over time, dieting for too long or bouncing from diet to diet, losing weight, rebounding, and doing it all over again can take its toll on your body and mind. I mentioned the best-case scenario already: you just end up falling short of your body composition goals and figure out something different. The worst-case scenario is that you end up engaging in a pattern of disordered eating behavior (pathological dieting) and eventually develop a full-blown eating disorder. (Polivy & Herman)

10

This can have a devastating effect on your health and push you further and further from your intended destination. What may have started as a journey towards a better, leaner “you” can get completely out of hand and result in years of setbacks and potential health complications. For more information on eating disorders, how they affect your health, and how they can be linked to chronic dieting, check out the National Eating Disorders Association’s website.

Why Do We Diet? There are a perhaps dozens of reasons as to why we feel like we have to continuously subject ourselves to diet after diet. A lot of it stems from the fact that we associate success and achievement with idealized physical appearances. Sometimes, we diet because we get a number on the scale or a certain body fat percentage stuck in our heads. We expect achieving these goals to change our lives and revolutionize how we feel about ourselves; if our expectations are not met, we go to extremes or give up altogether. Does this sound familiar? You're standing in front of a full length mirror scrutinizing your stomach, hips or thighs and whispering to yourself about how much fat you need to lose ASAP. You are certainly not alone. We have all been there at some point or another in our lives. We see people with perfect jobs, perfect families, perfect lives, and yes, perfect bodies, all over television, on the internet, and on the covers of magazines. Our sense of realistic, healthy body image has been altered tremendously over the course of the past few decades.

What is body image? •

How we perceive our bodies visually;

•

How we feel about our physical appearance (how we think and talk to ourselves about our bodies); and

•

The sense of how others view our bodies.

Even our athletic idols contribute to the feeling that we just don’t look good enough to achieve our goals or be the people we want to be. Indeed, the top competitors in many weight-classed sports maintain very lean physiques year-round to maximize their strength-to-weight ratio and this leads us to believe that we too must have six pack abs if we want to perform as well as they do. It’s a bitter pill to swallow but you have to take a few things into consideration when you look at the physiques of celebrated people and athletes: 

Genetics play a huge role in how you look. Everything from your bone structure to muscle length and insertion, even fat distribution patterns and the density of fat tissue, is determined by your genetics. That doesn’t mean that you can’t look and perform your best, but you need to accept what your parents gave you; you’ll always have unique traits and that’s wonderful. Dwelling on things you can’t change, like the shape of a specific muscle in your legs, or how 11

much fat you hold around your belly button vs. another person, will set you up for disappointment because you cannot realistically change those physical characteristics through diet and exercise alone. 

Athletes do not starve themselves to look that way. I think this is one of the most pervasive misunderstandings surrounding the physiques of professional athletes. These people spend more time training in an average week than most of us do at our jobs. They burn through so many Calories that their food choices are often surprisingly unhealthy by your average person’s standards. The physique is a natural consequence of incredibly high demands for energy met with massive caloric intakes. They’re NOT on restrictive diets! The good thing about understanding this fact is that if you eat and train like an athlete for long enough, you’ll eventually wind up looking like one.



Maintaining an idealized physique is a full-time job. This goes hand-in-hand with the last point. Movie stars, physique competitors, and fitness models make a living at photo shoots. Their marketability depends upon their appearance. Most of us don’t have the time to train 20 hours a week on top of our jobs, nor do we have the disposable income available to hire chefs, personal trainers, and nutritionists. It’s unrealistic, unfair, and unhealthy to compare ourselves to people who do.



A lot of the images we see are misrepresentations or altogether fake. Yep. This is perhaps the most damaging element of the way we perceive our physique idols. Very few people maintain extreme levels of leanness year-round. Typically, a person will achieve a certain condition and maintain it only for a day or two to take pictures, attend an event, or film a scene. In addition, thanks to digital photo manipulation, we’ve lost touch with how a real human being looks: highlights and shadows are tweaked, pores and imperfections are scrubbed away, limbs are resized or replaced, and proportions are altered. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t be fooled.

The fact is, constantly obsessing over our flaws, imperfections, and constant dieting are hindering you from making body composition progress. Being in an energy deficit constantly does not give your body a break to reset hormones and regulate itself. Everyone needs a vacation every now and then, and so does your body. Focusing on your flaws is going to keep you in that "I need to diet to lose fat" mindset indefinitely. Improving your body image will go a long way here. Poor body image increases the risk for extreme diet/body control behaviors. Here are just a few things you can do to improve how you see yourself: •

Focus on your inner qualities. Rather than telling yourself you need to lose your abdominal fat or tone up your legs, reflect upon how awesome of a friend, mother, or father you are. You can love unconditionally. You may be a good listener, or perhaps you’re very inspirational to others and you’re not even aware of it. These things (and many more) are all positive qualities that we should acknowledge on a daily basis.

•

Focus on your positive physical qualities and accomplishments. I don’t know about you, but whenever I pull a heavy deadlift off the floor, I’m not thinking about what I need to do to get 12

better abs or a better butt. Instead, I’m thinking about how strong and accomplished I feel for achieving that. For most people, negative self-talk is silenced by the overwhelming joy of physical accomplishment. It feels incredible to move! Instead of worrying about abs, focus on your performance. For example, do you think someone who’s just completed their first 5k or marathon is worried about their body fat percentage? No. They are thinking about their achievement and all of the time and hard work they put into it. •

Utilize positive affirmations. For every negative thing I see or say about myself, I immediately follow it up with two positive things. For example, if I am standing in front of that full-length mirror criticizing my hips, I immediately tell myself two positive things in return like “My hair looks really awesome today!” or “My biceps have finally started growing!” Simple efforts like this can make a huge difference in how you feel about yourself.

“Naughty” and “Nice” Food Lists How many times have you been on a diet and restricted yourself from chocolate or ice-cream when these are the foods that you enjoy the most in life? Likely too many. The reality of it, is that when we eliminate foods thinking they are "off limits" to achieve success in our diet is when we are singlehandedly setting ourselves up for failure. Granted, food allergies or intolerances are the exception here as allowing these foods can cause a negative impact on your health or make you sick. Many years ago, I was on a diet and decided that I loved chocolate too much to allow it into my daily diet. I once went a few months without a single piece of chocolate. One of my colleagues came to me one day with a gift that included one of my favorite things in life: a bag of chocolate truffles. I hurried up and put them away in my desk drawer out of sight. Because I knew they were there, that was all that I thought about. All I could think of was the creamy, luscious taste of chocolate that I had not had in so long. So, what ended up happening? I ate the entire bag in one sitting. Why did I do that? Because I had deprived myself of my utmost favorite food because I thought it was going to ruin my diet. I had convinced myself that by giving up something I enjoyed so much, I could achieve the body that I had dreamed of. I realize now, that this single act was setting myself up for failure. Rather than depriving myself of foods that I enjoy or want, I know that fitting them into my diet on a regular basis in moderation will allow me to not go crazy and overeat them later. This also helps me maintain a level of sanity that I need. Food restriction without a necessary dietary intolerance or allergy almost always leads to a binge. This unhealthy behavior is an evil cycle that repeats itself until you find a solution. A simple solution would be to eat the foods you enjoy in moderation and not stress or worry yourself over them.

Over-Emphasis on Scale Weight Most of us have a love/hate relationship with the scale. We dread getting on it and it loves to fluctuate without our control. It’s imperative to understand that scale weight is JUST A NUMBER that reflects our body’s relationship with gravity. It cannot measure beauty, talent, purpose, possibility, strength, or love. Developing a healthy relationship with the scale and using it as a tool, not a measure of success, is very beneficial. Looking at the scale as a guide and not allowing it to influence our self-image is the best 13

outlook to have. Our body weight will fluctuate day-to-day based on so many factors…sodium intake, fiber levels, hormone cycles, exercise, and more. It is very healthy for the scale to move up and down. This is a positive sign that our bodies are functioning well and that our cells are efficiently processing the nutrients we feed them. We can learn to use the scale as just a number to measure progress or go down the dark road and allow it to control us. For years, I lived my life according to that number on the scale: I let it define me. That said, when I started weight training, I knew the likelihood of me putting on a few pounds was…well…likely. To say that I was okay with the idea then of a few added pounds would be a flat out lie; it scared me but I knew I had to trust the process and stop placing so much emphasis on weighing a certain amount. Rather than focusing on scale weight alone, focus on making progress with your training and gradually losing body fat. You may likely achieve your ideal body composition at 15 pounds heavier on the scale than what your original "goal number" was. Even for myself, I am currently sitting less than 10 pounds at my heaviest weight yet wear three sizes smaller than the last time I weighed this “number." Don't be a slave to the scale. Use it as a tool to monitor normal fluctuations and gauge progress. Measure your waist, legs, arms, and chest with a tape measure to monitor changes in the circumference of these areas. Take progress pictures every few weeks. You can also take a look in the mirror. If you like what you see, the scale doesn’t matter. Don’t let numbers control or define you!

14

Dieting Doesn’t Have to be so Hard While you have to be in a Calorie deficit to lose weight, you don’t need to do it all at once. In fact, it might be healthier and more relaxing to only diet for intermittent periods. Dieting is hard on your body, and it needs time to recover. Perhaps even more importantly, you also need a mental break. Prolonged dieting is stressful and demoralizing, so it’s good to give yourself time off. Instead of focusing on your scale weight 24/7, it’s better to focus on developing the right habits. These habits will help you get lean no matter what kind of diet you’re on, no matter what you weigh, or how motivated you are. You can also work on these habits all of the time, unlike weight loss, which you shouldn’t pursue year round. Keep reading to learn how to develop more of the right habits and break free from restrictive eating behavior.

Think about adding, rather than restricting or eliminating Whenever people start dieting, they think about what they can’t eat, what foods they should avoid, and what they have to give up. When you’re coming off a long period of dieting, it can be hard to shake this mindset. I want you to look at your new approach from the opposite perspective. Think of adding healthy foods to your diet instead of avoiding treats and other processed foods. Think about how you enjoy exercise, rather than the time you have to give up to get it done.

Focus on Your Habits Instead of Your Weight Habits are the foundation of every successful dieter’s repertoire. If you have to rely on willpower 24/7 to stay on your diet, it’s not going to work in the long-term. Instead, you should rely on habits. Habits are automatic behaviors that you’ve practiced enough times that they require less self-control to execute. The people who stay lean year round, or lose weight without thinking about it, are the ones who rely on habits instead of raw willpower. As an example, people think someone like Dr. Spencer must be so disciplined and have such great willpower, but really it’s because he’s been living this way for 20 + years and the habits have been ingrained. The other benefit of relying on habits is that you can work on them all of the time. When you start trying to lose weight, it’s easy to feel demoralized because you don’t “look the part.” You’re working hard,

15

eating right, and exercising, yet your body is changing very slowly. But if you focus on habits, you don’t need to rely on the scale for gratification. Just completing the right habits becomes an accomplishment in itself. Let’s say you go on a cruise. Like most people, you’re worried that you’ll gain weight. Instead of focusing on the scale, focus on your habits. Sure, you may eat more than you would have liked, but if you stick to the right habits, you’ll still come back to shore feeling good about yourself. Finally, habits are with you all of the time. You don’t need a scale, a diet book, a points system, or anything else to stick to your habits; that is, assuming you chose the right habits to stay lean.

Results-Oriented Behavioral Modifications If you can’t focus on the scale, what should you focus on? Mindful eating habits. Think of your new approach to nutrition as a self-taught course on developing better eating behaviors. Some habits help you stay lean, and others make it almost impossible. Instead of focusing on how to get rid of bad habits, we’re going to focus on some of the most important habits for staying lean.

1.

Eat when you’re hungry and stop eating when you’re full.

Assuming you’re eating a fairly healthy diet, this one simple trick is often the only habit people need to stay lean. Most people eat a large number of Calories when they aren’t hungry. (Wansink) That’s not all bad: food is for more than just keeping yourself full. We often eat to celebrate, feel certain emotions, and try new foods, but that shouldn’t be the case all of the time. Instead, become slightly more mindful of when you’re eating without feeling hungry.

2.

Spend the first minute of your meal only thinking about your food

People eat more when they’re distracted. In some cases, they can forget how much and what they’ve eaten just 10 minutes after their meal. (Wansink, 2010) The more people you eat with, the more distracted you become, and the more Calories you consume. To fight distracted, or “mindless” eating, as Dr. Brian Wansink calls it, focus on your food for the first minute of your meal. This is harder than you think. Then, as you learn the habit, increase the amount of time you spend thinking about your meal. Once you’re able to focus on nothing but your food for an entire meal, you can become a little more relaxed. This exercise helps you become more aware of how distractions affect your eating behavior.

16

3.

Eat with people you want to look like

Whether we like to admit it or not, we tend to become increasingly more like the people we spend time around. The people we spend the most time around rub off on us in many ways, some of which are good, and others bad. If you eat every meal with other chronic dieters, it’s going to feel uncomfortable eating larger meals. If you eat around people who don’t care at all about their health, you’re more likely to eat like they do. If you want to develop healthy eating habits, try to find someone who’s already practicing these behaviors. Try to find a role model. These habits will help you stay lean for the rest of your life. They’ll put you in the proper position to consistently lose fat when you start dieting again, without developing disordered eating behaviors or sabotaging your progress.

17

Flexible Eating Case Study: Spencer

After I finished wrestling in college as a heavyweight wrestler, I decided to lean down a bit. I was always into nutrition science and fitness (exercise science was my college degree) and at the time it seemed the best way to get leaner was to cut out starchy/sugary carbs and stick with meat, vegetables, and fruit. This strategy was pretty effective but it cut out a lot of my favorite foods and took a toll on my workouts. Luckily, I wasn’t going through the strenuous wrestling practices, otherwise I would have never made it. I was also now sitting for a lot of the day because that’s how medical school is in the beginning, which didn’t take a toll on my energy. After about six years of doing this with “okay” results, I decided to employ a more “flexible” way of eating. Instead of just eating what are considered “healthy” foods only, I started to actually track my intake of food while measuring everything. When I had my baseline Calories I was eating daily, I decided to shift a lot of the Calories I was getting from fat towards carbohydrate-rich foods that I was previously restricting. Because of this shift, I was then able to enjoy many of the foods I once previously shunned. Just as significant as now enjoying new meals, my body fat started to decrease and my performance in the gym started to INCREASE. The carbohydrates allowed me to go harder and longer (if need be) in the gym. Now, I enjoy an easy, flexible approach to food.

18

Part II: The Nitty Gritty Part II of this eBook gets a little bit more technical. First, we go over energy balance and why you need to base your new “nutrition pyramid” around manipulation of energy homeostasis aka “calories in/calories out.” From there, we’ll get down to brass tacks and detail how to go from dieting and making no progress to healing your metabolism, clearing your head, and preparing to embark on a new fat loss journey armed with a basic understand of what you really need to do to lose body fat and build muscle. Without further delay, let’s get moving!

19

Energy Balance: An Introduction Despite what you may have heard from so-called nutrition gurus looking to make a buck by distributing misinformation and perpetuating the diet mindset, energy balance or “Calories in/Calories out” is one of the most important factors to consider when you’re trying to lose or gain weight. Nutrition strategies that place more emphasis on food choices attempt to simplify the energy balance equation by restricting energy-dense foods so that weight loss is inevitable. Diets that focus on nutrient timing or meal frequency (more on that later) effectively make it impossible to overeat by restricting specific foods or macronutrients to certain parts of the day. You can only eat so much in an hour window. Combine the two approaches, as many people often do, and you’ve opened up a can of worms that for many people leads to disordered eating patterns. Barring that, the two major issues with these methods is that they aren’t specific enough to work for every person and every goal, and they don’t leave much room for working outside the constraints of either food choices or meal frequency/nutrient timing. You have to be specific. That is to say, you should eat towards a daily Calorie/macronutrient goal rather than winging it in the hopes that you accomplish the desired outcome.

Energy Homeostasis Body weight is regulated by energy homeostasis. Every second you’re alive, your body is struggling to maintain homeostasis by altering the way it functions and when that balance is disrupted for several weeks, months, or years, your weight will go up or down as the system adapts to account for the change in energy availability. When you’re in a neutral energy balance or you’re eating at maintenance you’re providing your body with roughly what it needs to maintain body mass: both fat-free mass (mostly muscle, bone, vital organs, anything that isn’t body fat) and fat mass (body fat). When you put on weight, you’re essentially just telling your body to store energy and grow. As an example, if your diet has consisted almost entirely of energy-dense, processed foods for years and you’ve gained a considerable amount of weight, you can be reasonably certain that you’re in a chronic state of energy surplus. Losing weight happens for exactly the opposite reason. If you begin eating just meats and veggies, there isn’t any magic going on but you’re pretty much guaranteed to see the scale drop. Why? The meats and veggies do the trick simply because they are less energy dense; you reduced your energy intake, entered into a state of chronic energy deficit, and that caused the weight loss. It’s true that you could achieve an energy deficit eating practically anything but a bagel and coffee for breakfast, followed by a sandwich, chips, and a soda for lunch will leave you starving whereas meat and veggies will fill you up (we’ll come back to this example in a bit.) That sounds like the ultimate “duh” statement but most people don’t put a whole lot of consideration into the way they eat. It’s not that any one of those things is inherently bad on occasion; it’s that they don’t really address why we need food.

20

Thermogenesis and macronutrients At a basic level, food is comprised of protein, carbohydrate, and fat. We refer to protein, carbs, and fat collectively as macronutrients, or macros for short. Each macro serves many functions within the human body; from energy production to maintaining cellular integrity, balancing these three constituents among one another is the deciding factor in losing, gaining, or maintaining weight. The way this works is very complicated and would require an entire textbook to explore in full, but a brief explanation will suffice for now. Essentially, protein, fat, and carbohydrate are transformed into cellular energy through metabolism. The way we ultimately measure the energy each macronutrient will provide our bodies with at the front end of our metabolism is called a Calorie. (We should be in familiar territory now.) The caloric value of a given macro or food is determined by literally burning it in a sealed chamber with water and measuring the difference in the temperature of the water afterwards. Protein provides four Calories, and so does carbohydrate. Fat, on the other hand, provides us with nine Calories. The number of Calories you provide your body with throughout a given period of time is thus referred to as your energy intake. Metabolizing food requires energy in and of itself and through a phenomenon called diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT), heat energy is expended. Along with DIT, there are three other major types of thermogenesis or heat generation that occur within the human body. Energy lost during everyday activities like walking to the bathroom, doing laundry, performing physical tasks at work, or picking your kids up from school is called non-exercise associated thermogenesis (NEAT). Exercise-associated thermogenesis (EAT) refers to (not surprisingly) energy lost during exercise or vigorous physical activity. Believe it or not however, most of our energy is lost simply keeping our vital organs (including our muscles) functioning at rest. This is called basal metabolic rate (BMR) and it has the greatest influence on the number of total Calories you burn. When you add up all of the thermogenic activity occurring in your body (BMR, DIT, EAT, and NEAT) over a 24-hour period, you get a number expressed in Calories called total daily energy expenditure or TDEE. As I mentioned earlier, weight loss occurs when you eat fewer Calories than your TDEE and weight gain occurs when you eat more Calories than your TDEE. For that reason, knowing your TDEE is literally one of the most useful bits of information you can have in relation to losing weight. While you can’t estimate energy expenditure with 100% accuracy at home, you can come pretty dang close using a simple online calculator. I know you’re curious, so check out the Eat To Perform BMR/TDEE calculator and see what you come up with. Later on in this eBook, you’ll get an explanation of exactly how to utilize the numbers you’re presented with.

Why we need food Now that we’ve gone over a basic primer on energy balance and the role food plays in regulating body weight, we need to go over the other functions that food serves in your body. To begin, we’ll take a brief look at protein. Every day, we build up and break down the structures of our bodies. It’s very important that we include enough protein in our diets to replace what has been broken down, especially when it comes to our health and body composition. While protein can also be 21

transformed into glucose and used for energy production, the process is fairly slow and costly, resulting in a significant loss of energy. The thermic effect of food (TEF) is essentially a tax the body pays to break down and store food. Of all three macronutrients, protein comes with the greatest tax. What that means is that some of the energy we derive from food is lost as heat when it’s metabolized (remember DIT) and that promotes weight loss through increased energy expenditure. A protein-rich diet can be very helpful during weight loss to maintain lean mass as well. (Paddon-Jones) Protein is also highly satiating; it fills you up and effectively turns down the signal to your brain that compels you to eat more. This can be very useful when you want to lose weight! We’ll go deeper into the role satiety plays in your diet later. When developing a “way of eating,” protein should always be the base of your nutritional pyramid. A good place to start is at about 0.8g of protein per pound of body weight and some people may benefit from as much as 1g per pound of body weight or more. (Helms, Zinn, Rowlands, & Brown) Later, we’ll go into greater detail regarding who exactly benefits from eating more protein but for now, keep those numbers in mind. The next two macros, fat and carbohydrates, represent the bulk of the energy in your diet. Many diets are based on either eating fats or eating carbs as the primary fuel source, usually in a mutually exclusive fashion. Recall the bagel and soda example from earlier and you have one of the primary reasons most people fail on low fat diets; Calorie-for-Calorie, carbohydrates just aren’t as satiating as fat and protein. Diets focused on limiting dietary fat in favor of carbs leave the person hungry, which leads to snacking, and perhaps binging. Once you open the floodgates, it’s “game over.” I know this because that was my life for years; I got to five o’clock and I was starving and I certainly didn’t make the best choices for myself. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could choose to eat fat as your primary source of energy. Most people argue that fats keep you full longer and are your body’s preferred fuel source at rest. Fats should be part of the equation but suggesting that you need to eliminate carbs misses the point and often leads to either over eating fats (which can store as fat without the presence of insulin) or drastically under-eating. Certainly a diet that consists of proteins, fats and fibrous veggies is a good thing but it’s unnecessary to leave out the starchy carbs and I will explain why.

Keeping the carbohydrates: why a balanced approach is better Low-carb advocates often point to inflammation as one of the biggest reasons people should avoid carbs. However, in healthy human beings, there isn’t much of a difference in the increase of inflammatory markers whether you eat a high carb or high fat meal, although there is an increase in oxidative stress. Increases in pro-inflammatory markers seem to be correlated with a higher body mass index or BMI and many people who fall into the obese category of BMI have issues with Type II diabetes or insulin resistance, but it would be wrong to conclude that it was simply an excess of carbohydrate that caused these states. Inflammation and the impact it has on health is a very misunderstood topic that seems to be influenced by lifestyle factors beyond just diet. (Gregersen, Samocha-Bonet, Heilbronn, & Campbell)

22

Why then do carbohydrates get a bad rap for being inflammatory? The primary reason is that since carbs require water to be stored, they do come with a certain “water tax,” somewhere around 2g of water for every 1g of glucose. That means that carbohydrates add water weight to your body, which can make you feel bloated, sluggish, and inflamed. Again, there’s a lot more going on here and lifestyle factors ultimately influence how carrying extra water weight makes you look and feel. From a perspective of losing body fat, cutting carbs to inhibit water retention is a bit of fool’s gold. Rapid weight loss associated with a low carb diet gives you the impression you are making more progress than you are but when you actually test body composition, what you see is that ultimately you aren’t addressing sustainable fat loss over time. Another argument against dietary carbs is that they aren’t technically necessary for your body to function, which is based in truth but misconstrued as it applies in the real world. Remember that protein can be used to create glucose through a process called gluconeogensis. The problem is that when you limit dietary carbohydrates and force your body to make glucose, you effectively increases your protein requirements since a large portion of your protein intake will be used for energy production rather than repair and growth. The bottom line: when you restrict carbohydrates, you’ll likely end up restricting total Calories as well. Under those circumstances, you aren’t allowing your body and muscles full recovery and for athletic people that is a really big deal. If you look at that last paragraph and think to yourself “Phew! He isn’t talking about me. I’m not an athlete!” Well, I have news for you. On the contrary, even sedentary people need carbohydrates (provided there isn’t medical issue like diabetes at play)! You learned earlier that your basal metabolic rate is essentially just a way to quantify the amount of energy it takes to keep your vital organs functioning at rest. An interesting fact is that around 25% of that energy goes towards fueling your brain, which runs almost entirely on glucose. That’s right: even at rest, your brain needs a continuous stream of carbohydrates to function, about 50g each day for a 150 lb. woman! Even if you do achieve a certain level of success with a low-carb diet, eventually you’ll add back in the carbs with disastrous results. A lot of the impact is mental. When you deny yourself something, it can often lead to binging when it’s reintroduced. The solution to this conundrum is a balanced approach to nutrition called flexible eating.

23

Flexible Eating Case Study: April

First, let me start out by saying that for as long as I have known what a true “carb” is, I have always (I guess not technically always) had a sort of “fear” of them. Within the past 2 years, the light bulb finally went off in my head and I had that much-needed “Ah-ha!” moment. This has truly got to be the best thing, both physically and mentally, to have ever happened to me. I want to rewind to when this amazing experience first occurred. In August 2012, a group I was part of decided to have a friendly sixteen week competition where guys and gals were separated into categories of cutting and bulking. At the time, I honestly did not have a lot of so-called “weight” or fat to drop, but I had bulked over the summer and put on some extra fat that I wasn’t feeling comfortable with. I decided to be a good sport and join in, to help keep the others in the group motivated. My initial plan (in my mind) was easy: I thought, “Well crap, I’ll just go low carb with a once-a-week refeed, drop a bunch of fat and breeze through this!!” Well, that was a nightmare; a freaking nightmare. If you look up “freaking nightmare” in the dictionary, it will reference a picture of me. I was still continuing to lift heavy at the gym three days a week. The first couple of days were fine, but then my workouts started to suffer. Actually, they sucked. I was so weak that my body would tremble with simple movements like dumbbell bench press. My main lifts, like deadlift, squat and bench press, were even worse. My pulse would race to the point that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack, but I kept up with it for six weeks. At the end of the six weeks, the scale had only moved a whopping 3lbs. “Only 3lbs???!! What??” I wanted to eat my sweet potatoes, kabocha squash, and Brussels sprouts more than once a week!! So, I sat and thought it out and said, “There has to be a better way.”

24

Abandoning Low Carb was scary I immediately stopped the low carb method and started on more of a moderate carb cycling approach. The new plan consisted of low carbs on rest days, two medium carb training days, and one high carb on my heaviest training day. What happened? I started slowly dropping fat and at the end of the 16 weeks, I was down 14lbs. After the competition, I knew I had to reverse out of my diet and reset my body and hormones. At this point, my body was screaming at me. ”What the heck are you trying to do to me!!!?” I had consistently eaten at a deficit for sixteen weeks. It was time to start back increasing my Calories and carbs, and yes, I was nervous; I think it is natural to have that feeling. I knew to expect an increase in water weight, mainly for the simple fact that carbs hold more water. First week: I increased all my days by an extra 25g of carbs compared to what I was eating at before. I did that for two weeks, increased again and continued ‘til I reached my highest level yet. I am now at 225g on rest days and 350-375g on training days…YAY!! Time for happy dance! I get to eat carbs every day now, not just the days where I slam some heavy weight around at the gym!

Now Performance is the driver Fast-forward to where I am now: I have been eating higher carbs since November of 2012. My strength has blown up in this time. I hit a new deadlift best of 255 lbs. for 2 reps a few weeks ago. Something magical has happened; I stopped caring about the scale and losing weight, started focusing only on my lifts, and I’m getting leaner! I officially weigh 15 lbs. more now than in November, 2012. My abs look good, my arms are getting vascular, and my butt is growing (butts are the thing you know).

Strategic Carbs within reason Now, what and when I eat is probably the next question. I eat protein and carbs around my workouts in the form of starchy carbs. I eat a LOT (and I mean a LOT) of white rice, GF oats, grits and sweet potatoes. I love yams; Japanese and Okinawan varieties are the best. I have a natural sweet tooth. My absolute favorite food source is kabocha squash; I could seriously eat this every single day. It is not as starchy as rice or potatoes, therefore I limit these to my rest days only. When that “Ah-ha!” moment occurred to me, things changed. I finally stopped obsessing, and started seeing results. The moment when I realized that less it not always good, and more is better, is when the magic happened. As I tell my friends now, “Don’t be scared of the carbs.” They are truly magical.

25

What is Flexible Eating? In the most basic sense, flexible eating is a low-stress, open-minded approach to nutrition that includes foods based upon context, not upon labels like “clean,” “dirty,” “good,” or “bad.” Whether it be for fat loss, lean mass gain, or to fuel high-intensity exercise, this method looks at the intrinsic value of food choices and emphasizes the big picture rather than assigning foods to a “naughty” or “nice” list irrespective of their effect on your progress. The positive effects of eating a food are weighed with equal importance to the potential negative effects. What this means in the real world is that you don’t avoid white rice because it’s “not on the list;” you eat sweet potatoes because they fill you up more. You don’t shy away from going out for pizza with your family on Saturday night because it’s “not healthy.” Instead, you have a slice of pizza and enjoy yourself because you understand that going over your Calories for one day isn’t a big deal and you can get back on schedule the next day without hurting your progress. Indeed, with a flexible approach to eating, you won’t have to rationalize your behavior based upon anything except how food makes you feel, as well how it fits into your daily macronutrient goals. While you might develop a list of foods to eat and a list of foods to avoid, it will be based upon your needs and preferences vs. an “out of box” list. Nutrition requirements are largely individual. Let’s address that statement with a discussion about how to decide whether or not a food fits your unique requirements.

What Makes a Food “Naughty” or “Nice”? Flexible eating encourages us to look at the physiological value of food - the macro and micronutrient profile - as well as to determine whether or not it could potentially aggravate an existing health problem (whether diagnosed or undiagnosed). In other words: if a food doesn’t hurt, it’s not off-limits. Another way to look at this concept is to analyze how useful or helpful a food will be to us on the quest to accomplish a particular goal.

Food allergies and sensitivities The first thing you need to consider when making a food a part of your plan is whether or not eating it is going to result to a trip to the doctor somewhere along the line. Obviously, if you’ve been diagnosed with a peanut allergy, you’re going to stay away from foods that contain peanuts, even in trace amounts; you could very well die under the circumstances that you consume peanuts if you have an allergy. The same applies for a person diagnosed with celiac disease; gluten will literally kill you if you eat it, so you must avoid it. Lactose intolerance is fairly common, and so once more: if you get sick when you drink milk or consume foods containing lactose or milk protein, you have every reason to avoid said foods. 26

If you think you might have a food allergy or sensitivity, I urge you to consult a physician before you add a questionable food into your plan. Even if you don’t have a diagnosable allergy, you should work with your doctor to understand why you respond negatively to the food. You might be avoiding something unnecessarily, or you might be avoiding the wrong food without realizing it. This can save you months (if not years) of discomfort and frustration. If you haven’t been diagnosed with an allergy, but suspect you may be sensitive to or intolerant of a food, you should certainly remove it from your diet but you should consider the impact it will have on your overall nutrition. Removing a major food group can result in a nutrient deficiency, so you should replace the potentially aggravating foods with other sources that provide similar benefits without the negative side-effects you’re experiencing. For instance, if you remove whole wheat from your diet to avoid gluten, you’ll reduce carbohydrate and fiber intake. To account for this modification, you should replace wheat with brown rice. Another alternative would be white potatoes (for the carbs) and broccoli (for the fiber). Just as the removal of a food from your plan may necessitate replacing it with something else to prevent nutrient deficiencies, if you are considering reincorporating a previously off-limits food and you want to experiment, you’d do well to have a plan. Start off by slowly eating more of the reintroduced food to gauge your response. Let’s say you haven’t eaten bread in three years because the last time you ate it, it made you feel bloated and you were convinced you had a gluten sensitivity. Now, after over a year, you’re not so sure and you’re ready to give it another try. Please don’t immediately jump into eating bread twice a day for the next week! Instead, begin reintroducing gluten with half a slice of toast or something to that effect. Don’t go overboard.

Palatability and Food Reward As you explore the topic, you’ll see more and more that nutrition is very cerebral. The mental implications of changing your approach are far reaching and they affect your quality of life far beyond that of your body composition and athletic performance. If you develop a greater understanding of how certain foods impact your mentality, you can more effectively stick to modifications that you make.

Hunger/satiety One of the least considered factors in setting up an effective nutrition plan is how certain foods affect your hunger levels. The satiating effect of whole foods is a major contributory factor in why people tend to lose weight when they opt for a nutrition strategy based around altering food options. Indeed, many highly processed foods have a minimal effect on hunger levels while whole foods are often highly satiating. For instance, when selecting starchy carbohydrate sources, you want to consider things like fiber, the amount of water present in the food, as well as the total weight/volume of food consumed. Compare two slices of toasted white bread (processed food) to a small sweet potato (whole food). Both foods will provide roughly the same amount of energy, and most of it will come in the form of glucose. The major functional difference between these two selections is that the toast isn’t going to fill you up; 27

there isn’t much substance to it as it’s dry and barely weighs anything, while the sweet potato, which has more fiber, water, and weighs twice what the toast does, will effectively satisfy your hunger. In this way, you may actually be influenced to eat less if you eat the sweet potato, even though it provides the same ballpark number of Calories as the toast. If you’re attempting to lose weight, highly satiating foods can become your best friend, especially when you have a very specific fat loss goal in mind. When Calories are set low, hunger signals will be increased and choosing foods that make you feel full may prevent you from overshooting your daily Calorie/macro goals without the negative mental effects of eating a hypocaloric diet. On the flip side, Calorie-dense, low satiety foods may be conducive to gaining weight and they can be useful for fueling extremely high energy demands. If your daily Calorie goals are set high (as they are for many athletes) the opposite can occur and it’s very easy to undershoot if you eat highly satiating foods. In this instance, foods that provide more Calories without the impact on hunger can make the task of eating what may seem like an insurmountable number of Calories much more easily attainable. From the standpoint of hunger signaling VOLUME MATTERS. A Snickers® might satisfy your hunger temporarily but the Greek yogurt does the trick for much longer, which is why diets that emphasize real foods like this have good success rates. Fibrous veggies are pretty important whether you are trying to expand your caloric needs or trying to restrict them. You’ll find overall that when you’re trying to increase your energy intake you’ll need to be less reliant on fibrous veggies and when you are restricting your energy intake, you will be more reliant on them. Veggies take up a lot of room in your stomach and have very little useable energy. For that reason, you don’t really want to go overboard with them at any point. A few servings a day is perfect.

Why Eating Real Food Is Important Eating real, whole food is important for a number of reasons. Not only is it more satisfying overall, but it comes packed with the vitamins, minerals, and other constituents that you need to function properly. If It Fits Your Macros or IIFYM is a popular concept that I believe disregards the importance of being healthy and never really addresses the big picture. Does that mean you should never have processed foods like ice cream or utilize protein shakes in your diet to hit your macros? Absolutely not. Just understand this: there’s a big difference between eating a Snickers vs. a bowl of Greek yogurt with strawberries and honey. It goes way beyond what’s “natural” or “healthy.” Things like the volume of the food you eat do matter. If you haven’t seen a Snickers® lately, they are getting smaller and smaller so most people end up just buying the bigger version which is pretty much the caloric equivalent of a meal.

28

Doesn’t look that different right? Well the devil is in the details. The 3.3 oz. Snickers® bars aren’t a lot

(2) Snickers® 2 to Go:

Calories: Fat: 20g Carbs: 58g 440

Protein: 8g

of food when it comes down to it. You’re also missing a great Whole Fat Yogurt Calories: Fat: 15g Carbs: 50g Protein: 28g opportunity to meet your protein with Strawberries 424 and Honey requirements if you go for that option. Compare that to 10 oz. of Whole Greek yogurt, one cup of strawberries, and 1 ½ tablespoons of raw honey. In case you don’t know, that is a pretty big bowl of food. That kind of volume is like throwing a log onto the fire and whether or not you consider it a meal or a snack is up to you (for me it would be a snack) but the more you neglect your macro needs in terms of protein in this instance the more you need to rely on supplements to make up the difference. I don’t have any problem with that from the standpoint of convenience and overall well-being, as sometimes you have to do what you have to do to meet your needs but once again you are sacrificing volume.

Eat lots of protein and vegetables Protein is more satiating than fat or carbohydrate, (Halton) so it’s important to eat enough to keep your hunger under control. It’s also essential for maintaining and building muscle mass. Vegetables contain fiber, water, and many nutrients which help you stay healthy and satisfied on few Calories. (Clark & Slavin) As a general rule, try to include vegetables and protein at every meal.

Add fat and starch as needed Everyone needs a certain amount of fat to stay satisfied, healthy, and happy. Fat helps transport fat soluble vitamins into your cells, it helps form your cell membranes and hormones, and it helps transport flavors so your food tastes better. But many people consume more fat than they need, (Blundell & MacDiarmid) so be mindful of how much you’re consuming. In general, it’s smart to have a small portion of fat with every meal. When it comes to starch and more carbohydrate-dense foods, how much you need depends on your activity levels. If you’re exercising every day, it’s best to consume more carbohydrate. (Burke, Hawley, Wong, & Jeukendrup) If you’re sedentary, you don’t need as much.

How exercise affects hunger This book is technically about “diet,” but exercise has a large impact on your appetite. (King, et al.) When people exercise, they tend to do a better job of matching their food intake to their true Calorie needs. (King, et al.) Some evidence has also found that high intensity exercise can act as an appetite suppressant. (King, Burley, & Blundell) In general, this means that exercise helps prevent overeating.

29

I recommend you exercise every day during your diet break. It’s important to maintain the habit of regular exercise, so it won’t be hard to become more active when it’s time to lose weight. This also helps you understand that exercise is about more than burning Calories. If you’re trying to maintain your weight, you need to find other sources of motivation to exercise, such as enjoying being outside. When people exercise, they also generally feel more motivated to eat well and feel more in control. You don’t need to do hard workouts every day, but you should stay active.

STOP exercising to “earn your food”! I often hear things like “Honestly I just go to the gym so I can eat in a less restricted way. Becoming a better athlete/getting stronger/building muscle isn’t that important to me.” This makes about as much sense as someone eating without regard for maintaining or improving their health or body composition. Nutrition and exercise go hand-in-hand! Sure, you can go to the gym to “earn food” but you’re missing a great opportunity to make yourself better and expand your capabilities. The simple fact is if you aren’t getting better at what you do, you are getting worse. Just showing up doesn’t quite get you to where you want to be. You need to fuel your workouts and spend most of your time building an improved work capacity. Similarly, showing up all the time without recovering is also fool’s gold. Your body needs to adapt to the stress you are putting it through. With little-to-no downtime, you are basically just piling stress upon stress upon stress and that takes its toll over time. Eventually you’re going to hit a wall, get sick/injured, and have to stop. Again, exercising to burn Calories is a terrible idea! The best way to approach this is to have a progressive plan, but that doesn’t mean you don’t address a broad spectrum of deficiencies. In fact I think that is a positive thing overall. In addition to work capacity, you should be progressively working to get stronger rather than randomly lifting weights and building muscle. Yes, this allows you to eat more food - a plus if you like to eat - but it’s also favorable for maintaining a lean physique! It really doesn’t take much more energy than just showing up and going through the motions but it might require some extra help.

30

Flexible Eating Case Study: James

150 lbs. To 173 lbs.

In May of 2011, I had the privilege of witnessing my younger sister Elizabeth graduate from the University of South Florida with her Bachelor’s degree. All along she’s told me that she pursued her degree not for herself, but for her family; for me. Her accomplishment inspired me to take a look deep inside myself and reflect upon my own life. I asked myself what I was doing with the time I’d been given, what my ancestors would think of me, as well as where I was going to end up if I continued on the path I’d set out upon. I had given up on my life-long goal of becoming a successful musician and started work as a line cook at a local barbecue restaurant; I had never made so little money for so much work but it was all I could find. My social life had dwindled to nothing, my girlfriend was constantly at my throat…my self-esteem had hit rock bottom. Not only was I poor, uneducated, and demotivated, but I was also fat, weak, and chronically ill. I contemplated ending everything practically every day, but I thought to myself, “I cannot let my sister down. I have to get better. If not for myself, I have to do it for her.” I made a promise to her that I wouldn’t carry on that way any longer. Fast-forward to now: I’m writing and editing this eBook, I’m an NASM certified personal trainer and nutrition coach, I’m a state record-holding powerlifter, I run at least 5 kilometers every week, and I can pull a 2.5x bodyweight deadlift any day of the week. I make enough money to provide for myself and my family and I have a new car after eight years of riding a bike to work! It’s absolutely astonishing how things can change if you keep an open mind and take advantage of the incredible fountain of information we commonly refer to as “the Internet.” I lost over 50lbs, added 45lbs of muscle to my frame, and (most importantly) found new respect for myself and my body. It wasn’t easy; I wasted a lot of time (and muscle), drove myself crazy on a few occasions and endured countless paradigm shifts, but I made it.

My low carb “Perma-cut” and how I snapped out of It Without a doubt, one of the greatest changes in my life has been how I approach eating. I spent the first year of my “transformation” (if you can call it that) following a strict low carb/ketogenic (under 30g

31

a day) paleo diet. Mark’s Daily Apple became my Bible and I almost bought a pair of Vibram® FiveFingers. I sprinted, played, did a ton of pushups, synthesized a ton of vitamin D, and within six months I’d dropped from 5’6” 180lbs to 130lbs. I got a gym membership and started doing some HIIT training on machines (think Arthur Jones), but as 2012 rolled around, low carb “perma cutting” had rendered me a spry 120lbs. After posting a progress picture on my favorite Facebook group (which Paul happens to have created) it hit me: I was emaciated, and I wasn’t all that lean. I thought to myself, “Oh my God. How did this happen!?” I had struggled with bulimia and self-abuse in high school, so I was surprised that it took me so long to see what I was doing to myself. I knew that there had to be a better way, so I fired up the Google, did some research and took the plunge; I started training and eating like a powerlifter. The cornerstone of my new lifestyle was eating a ton of food and heavy barbell lifts to the tune of the Westside conjugate method. When I began training in February (30 months ago as of this writing), I was benching 95lbs for two reps, I couldn’t squat the bar, and deadlifting actually gave me an upper respiratory tract infection the first time I tried it. I’m not kidding. It was THAT bad. Now, I’ve never been a very athletic person; I was born with clubbed feet, my shoulders and hips dislocate at will, and the only sport I ever liked was hockey (GO RED WINGS!) so although my numbers aren’t fantastic, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’m a competitive powerlifter and I hold a Florida state record in the United States Powerlifting Association. My best lifts in competition are a 369 lb. squat, 203 lb. bench press, and 435 lb. deadlift. I went from a bodyweight of 122 lbs. to 173 lbs. and maintained a relatively lean physique. I attribute the bulk (pun intended) of my strength and muscle gains to how I ate over the course of this period.

How I Fixed Myself Following the approach we teach here at Eat To Perform allowed me to literally pig out every single night and gain 20 lbs. without getting fat. You may not be surprised, considering how tiny I was, but the key to getting where I knew I wanted to be really WAS (as we’ve written about countless times now) to ditch the “clean eating” mindset, feed my body based upon my activity levels and Eat To Perform. Rather than trying to appease the imaginary, unseen panel of judges that care about how my abs looked, I paid attention to my deadlift and how my body felt. I let the ice cream/doughnuts/beer back into my life. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I gorged on a ton of junk food, but let’s just say there’s a video on my YouTube channel of me eating a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts in 4 minutes. Gaining weight was actually really hard at first. It’s almost unbelievable, but that’s why I had to write this essay. A lot of us don’t want to hear it, but it may be time to face the facts; if you live an active lifestyle, low carbing and (especially) clean eating might be screwing you over big time. Big goals require big eating. This goes double (maybe triple) for young people with raging metabolic fires. I hope I can serve as a real-world example of how detrimental it can be to put all your faith into a single method or program, especially when it teaches you to avoid foods you love for the sake of keeping off a few pounds of water weight.

32

Eat To Perform and Met Flex are part of a toolkit into which I’ve reached and pulled out a viable method of continuously getting stronger and gaining weight, of healing the metabolic and psychological damage that dieting can cause in those who’re susceptible. My mind has been liberated, my world reconstructed, and I have a much healthier relationship with eating; for the first time in my adult life, food and physical activity are my best friends. I’m proud of myself and I feel like I’m finally living up to the promise I made to my sister.

33

Designing an Approach to Nutrition At this point, you’ve read a lot about why a flexible approach to nutrition is effective, sustainable, and healthy; this information will be vital in your application of the concept. It should be clear to you now that while it’s important to base your diet on minimally processed foods, there’s no need to apply concepts such as good or bad to what you eat; instead, effectiveness should be your barometer! You should judge foods based on how they impact your progress and you should consider not only food quality but also energy balance, macronutrient ratio, and satiety. We need to be mindful of how food affects our thought processes and how those thoughts influence our success, as well as our long-term relationship with food. Although we’ve extensively covered why you should be eating flexibly, we haven’t said much in the way of how to begin utilizing these concepts to establish a plan of action. You need to have a clear goal in mind, a timeline of how long it’ll take you to achieve it, and a strategy to account for any hurdles you may encounter along the way. Before we go deeper, here’s a glance at what separates an effective nutrition plan from an ineffective one. An ineffective nutrition plan: 1. May fail to provide you with an appropriate amount of Calories: either too few or too many. This can make losing fat or building muscle IMPOSSIBLE. 2. Can conflict with your personal preferences and natural approach to eating, making it incredibly difficult to adhere to long-term. 3. Might place restrictions on energy-dense food sources and UNINTENTIONALLY cause undereating. 4. May INTENTIONALLY limit carbohydrate intake, resulting in premature fatigue during exercise and other activities. In contrast, an effective nutrition plan: 1. Will provide an appropriate amount of Calories based upon the goals of the individual. 2. Will fit into the lifestyle and personal preferences of the individual. 3. Will emphasize energy-dense whole foods in order to maintain proper energy balance. 4. Will provide a balanced approach to carbohydrates that optimizes performance during exercise.

34

START HERE: Establishing TDEE and Transitioning into Maintenance To begin, we’ll take a look at an approach for transitioning from a long period of dieting into maintenance. Get ready and listen up because if you walk away from this eBook having learned one thing, it’s the concept I’m about to introduce. The main reason diets work is not because of the diet, it’s because of the time spent outside of the diet. That’s right: the secret to getting and staying lean is to stop dieting all the time!

Eating at maintenance should be the norm and dieting the exception About 20% of the U.S. population is on a diet of some kind. (NPD Group, 2013) If you ask 10 of your friends if they’re on a diet, it’s likely at least two of them will say yes. Many people have tried to lose weight, and many people have failed. As a result, people assume that it must be extremely hard to get lean, and they resort to extreme behaviors that ultimately result in all kinds of dysfunction. That’s not the best plan. For your health, sanity, and body composition, it’s better to spend more of your time at maintenance. Whether you’re coming from a background of chronic under-eating, or you’re over-eating and want to start improving your body composition, you need to know what it takes to keep things how they are before you can begin to understand what it takes to enact a plan to change things and achieve a specific goal. There are two steps to this process. First, you need to do a bit of food logging to see what you’re currently eating. Next, you’ll use a simple calculator to determine your ideal maintenance Calories or TDEE.

Step 1: Log Food I know what you’re thinking: logging food stinks. Indeed, one of the reasons why people are so attracted to “boxed” diets that give you a food list (and not much else) is because you don’t have to track. Let’s face it though: if that worked, you wouldn’t be reading this eBook. You have a specific result in mind: to lose fat or build muscle. To get there, you’re going to need to do some tracking! The good news? You don’t need to track every day for the rest of your life! Initially, a short, one-week period will give you most of the information you need to see where your Calories and macros are. Even better, logging food has become very convenient thanks to advances in technology. There are a number of smart phone applications and websites available to make the process easier but our recommendation is to use MyFitnessPal. If you’d prefer to go old-school and use a logbook, be my guest; some people have an easier time remaining accountable if they keep physical records.

35

What we’re ultimately looking for is a seven-day average of total Calories consumed, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. For example: Monday

Carbs: 230g

Fat: 110g

Protein: 145g

Calories: 2490

Tuesday

Carbs: 145g

Fat: 130g

Protein: 100g

Calories: 2150

Wednesday

Carbs: 220g

Fat: 100g

Protein: 150g

Calories: 2380

Thursday

Carbs: 160g

Fat: 110g

Protein: 150g

Calories: 2230

Friday

Carbs: 230g

Fat: 90g

Protein: 115g

Calories: 2190

Saturday

Carbs: 280g

Fat: 135g

Protein: 170g

Calories: 3015

Sunday

Carbs: 340g

Fat: 135g

Protein: 150g

Calories: 3170

Average

Carbs: 229g

Fat: 115g

Protein: 140g

Calories: 2517

Here are some general rules to follow for the initial one week tracking period: •

Report accurately. You’re logging your food to collect data so you know how to make modifications that will put you closer to your goals. That means weighing your food when possible and being honest about portion sizes.

•

Try to be consistent. Don’t log Monday but skip Tuesday unless you have to. Don’t fill out Wednesday halfway because you couldn’t find a couple minutes to log your dinner. The more consistent you are, the more accurate your data will be!

•

Don’t stress. If you do miss a day or you can’t weigh and measure your food, do your best but don’t beat yourself up over anything. Get a good picture of what a busy day where you don’t have much time to eat looks like as well as a day where you eat for joy and don’t pay much attention to your food choices and call it well enough.

Step 2: Establish your TDEE There are two ways you can establish your TDEE. 1. Use the Eat To Perform Calculator 2. Use the Harris-Benedict equation

Using the ETP Calculator Without a doubt, the easiest way to get a rough estimate of your ideal TDEE is to use our very own Eat To Perform Calculator. You plug in some numbers and it spits out a number that should come pretty close to what it will take for you to maintain your weight. Here’s a primer on using the calculator and a 36

description of its functions. The “height,” “weight,” and “age” fields are fairly self-explanatory but the rest of the options may require some explanation. Activity This is the money spot right here. If you work out, “Moderately Active” probably represents the activity level of a guy/gal who trains 2-3 times a week and works a relatively inactive job. “Very Active” people work out 4-5 times a week. “Extra Active” correlates with someone who exercises with intensity and works a pretty active job, or does two-a-days in the gym. The next two fields, “gender” and “units” are also self-explanatory; you’re either a male or female. If you live in the United States, select “Imperial.” If you live anywhere else and you measure in grams, liters and meters, you will want to switch to “Metric.” Results There are two options here but for our purposes, you want to select “TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)” and ignore the “-10%” option. Protein Calculation This provides you with two settings: “1 gram per lb.” and “LBM.” LBM or Lean Body Mass is based off of the body fat percentage that you input in the next field. If you don’t know your body fat percentage, either select the first option or make a guess; you don’t need to be 100% accurate. Fats The calculator can also solve for carbs based upon how much fat you’re going to eat. When solving for fat, you should go for roughly 30% of your daily Calories or 0.6 grams per pound of body weight. Carbs This gives you a drop-down menu where you choose your “theoretical” carb intake for a day. That number combined with your protein number allows the calculator to come up with a suggestion for how many grams of fat (not carbs) you need to eat to reach your TDEE goal. Carbs should be set at roughly 35-45% of your daily Calories or 1.3-1.8 grams per pound of body weight. With everything plugged in, you can hit the “calculate” button and get a fairly accurate estimate of your ideal TDEE! Hooray!

Using the Harris-Benedict Equation Although the ETP Calculator is easy to use, we’re aware that there are people who like to do the math themselves. The formula that our calculator uses to estimate TDEE is known as the Harris-Benedict method. This century-old equation allows you to estimate your BMR, then apply an activity modifier to estimate your TDEE. (Harris & Benedict)

37

Basal Metabolic Rate Women BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) - ( 4.7 x age in years ) Men

BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.8 x age in years )

It’s important to note that variations in body composition can affect your BMR significantly. People who’re either very lean or carrying around a lot of body fat may find that the resultant numbers don’t line up with data obtained from other methods of estimating BMR, like scales or body fat tests. This is OK. There will always be some level of trial and error involved in applying calorimetry to real-world scenarios. The potential for slight inaccuracy does not render the equation useless. After you’ve estimated your BMR, you simply multiply it by an activity factor to determine TDEE. Activity Multiplier Sedentary (little or no exercise)

BMR x 1.2

Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week)

BMR x 1.375

Moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week)

BMR x 1.55

Very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week)

BMR x 1.725

Extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training)

BMR x 1.9

Again, because of variations in body composition, training intensity, duration, and a host of other factors, this number is only an educated guess (albeit a very well-educated guess). Now that you’ve done a bit of math, you’re ready to begin putting it to use to develop a new approach to nutrition that will stick with you for the rest of your life.

Step 3: Un-dieting At this point, you’re left with two sets of numbers: one set represents what you’re currently eating, and the other set represents what you should be eating. The difference may be staggering, and you may feel confused. If you’re a highly active person you’re probably under-eating quite significantly and you know that needs to change. So what the heck do you do? The answer is to gradually add in more food over the course of a few weeks (or even months) until you’re hitting your TDEE on a consistent basis. Many people refer to this as reverse dieting or a diet break, but we’d like you to think of it as “un-dieting.” You’re simply moving towards giving your body what it needs to function properly so you can move on to effective and sustainable weight loss. 38

How un-dieting works When you diet, your metabolic rate slows. It’s not enough to completely stop weight loss, but it does make it much, much slower. (Camps, Verhoef , & Westerterp) In addition, your body becomes lighter as you lose weight, which means you burn fewer Calories for the same amount of movement. (Goele, Bosy-Westphal, Rumcker, Lagerpusch, & Mueller) As you know, dieting can also be stressful. Being constantly vigilant of your food intake 24/7 can wreak havoc on your sanity. As we’ve already mentioned, if you maintain it too long, it can even push you to the point of developing an eating disorder. (Polivy & Herman) During his cut for his bodybuilding show, Spencer found himself bingeing at night, which is something he’s NEVER had a problem with before. That is not a healthy habit. Un-dieting works by letting you recover from all of these negative adaptations. You allow your body time to get back to baseline so you can focus on fat loss later. (Trexler, Smith-Ryan, & Norton ) During the initial stages of this phase, you generally increase your Calories, and stop actively pursuing fat loss. The goal isn’t to “bulk up.” The goal is to let your body recover from dieting. It’s also best to place as few restrictions on your diet as possible, to give yourself a chance to recover psychologically. During this period, try to be as flexible as possible about your diet. Even if you don’t consider yourself a “rigid dieter,” most people become more strict about what they eat whenever they cut Calories. You’ll have more wiggle room for treats during your diet break, so don’t sweat small indulgences. This doesn’t mean you should pig out on junk food or eat well above maintenance. This is about establishing normal, healthy eating behaviors. Let’s talk about exactly how to do this.

Gradually increase your calorie intake There are generally two camps when it comes to un-dieting. One side says you should immediately raise your Calories back to maintenance. The other group says you should gradually increase your Calorie intake over a period of weeks or months. There’s not much scientific evidence that’s true, but there are other benefits to gradually increasing your Calorie intake. Many people take a “black or white” approach to dieting. When they aren’t trying to lose fat any more, they go overboard and eat too much. By gradually increasing your Calorie intake, you can maintain a sense of control over your diet and adapt to your new eating behaviors. This gives you a smoother transition to eating at maintenance. Or in other words, it reduces the chance you’ll binge or restrict during your diet break.

39

How Many Calories to Add To start, eat about 100-200 more Calories per week. Continue on that rate until you start to gain more than about 3-5 pounds. That initial weight gain is just going to be water and glycogen. When you start to gain more than that, cut back about 100-200 Calories. That’s your new maintenance intake. In theory, this should help minimize fat gain while allowing you to build muscle and burn more Calories. Women can gain even more than this due to changes in their hormone levels. (Watson & Robinson) Some females can gain over ten pounds in just a few days around their menstrual cycle. It’s almost all water. After this initial increase, your weight gain will slow. You’ll still probably gain some muscle as you eat at maintenance, but the rate will be drop, maybe a quarter to a half pound per month. Your goal during a diet break isn’t to lose weight, or to strictly control your weight, so don’t worry about the scale. If you want to, weigh yourself once per week, but no more than that. It messes with your head if you do it too often.

Eat more of the same foods at first When some people go on a diet break, their first inclination is to eat all of the foods they’ve denied themselves during their diet. That’s generally not a good idea. Instead, increase the size of the meals you’re already eating. This reduces your risk of binge eating. You absolutely should eat some of the foods you’ve avoided, but do so in a controlled way. There’s no rush. Increase your Calorie intake first so you aren’t as hungry, and then include some of the treats you’ve been craving. Eating more of the same foods also makes it easier to gauge portion sizes and find your true Calorie needs. If you introduce a lot of new foods at once, it can be easy to under- or overshoot your maintenance needs. For example, after dieting for his bodybuilding competition where his Calories ended up very low, Dr. Spencer added back a bit of rice that he was withholding along with more chicken (or beef) on a daily basis. He went up from there.

Won’t I gain weight? If you’re chronically underfed, you will gain a bit of weight while you un-diet. Commonly, you can expect to gain 3-5 lbs. and it may come on very quickly: almost overnight for some folks. You’re NOT putting on 3-5 lbs. of fat overnight; that’s a physical impossibility. Still, you may gain a little fat, and if you’re lifting weights, you’ll probably gain muscle. As mentioned before, many folks who start using the Eat to Perform guidelines gain some good muscle AND strength. The weight gain will be predominately water weight and stomach contents as you rehydrate your body and put more fuel in your proverbial gas tank. This is a good thing. If you don’t gain some weight during this phase, you likely aren’t eating more, and you aren’t reaping the benefits. You’ll gain the most weight immediately after you start your diet break. Your muscles will absorb carbohydrates and store them as glycogen. As we mentioned earlier, glycogen stores with water. Plus you’ll have more food in

40

your digestive system throughout the day. In general, this will make you gain about 3-5 pounds in the first week or so. You’ll find that you have more energy as your body recovers from the stress of undereating and you might notice a more “full” look in the mirror.

41

Part III: Flexible Eating for Different Goals Earlier in this eBook, we went over how energy balance is ultimately the deciding factor in whether or not you maintain, lose, or gain body mass. The food you eat impacts not only energy balance, whether you’re in a neutral, positive, or negative balance, but also how hungry you are, how much energy you have available for exercise, and more. In this section, you’ll learn strategies that apply simple math as well as behavioral modifications to achieve a desired result: weight maintenance, fat loss, or lean mass gain. While there is some overlap, a unique approach is required for each goal. We’ll look at nutrition as well as some guidelines for exercise.

A word regarding high intensity exercise Throughout this section, you’ll read suggestions that apply to a wide range of people. To be clear, we are huge proponents of high intensity exercise across broad time and modal domains no matter what your body composition goals. Your average WOD or workout of the day mixes a wide variety strength and conditioning elements into one workout and it’s a very efficient use of time. Furthermore, becoming a balanced athlete – strong, fast, durable and flexible – is one of the best ways to build muscle, lose fat, improve your health and have fun. That said, when your Calories are stable and you’re maintaining, or you’re increasing them in an attempt to build lean mass, you’re going to have plenty of energy to exercise for longer periods of time and with greater levels of intensity. During these periods, you can really push the envelope. However, when your goals shift towards fat loss, you will inevitably hit a wall if you don’t respect the fact that you’re simply not eating enough to support vigorous activity every day. During periods where your Calories are lower, it’s best to give yourself room to breathe. Take more rest days, and don’t run yourself into the ground when you WOD. Emphasize strength during your strength sessions – lift heavy! When it comes time to metcon (metabolic conditioning), focus on getting a good time over trying to Rx the workout.

Guidelines and Strategies for Maintenance Maintaining weight can be a challenge. As you learned earlier, most people who go on diets regain the weight they’ve lost plus interest because they don’t have an exit strategy like un-dieting. They don’t know their TDEE, they don’t know how much they’re eating, and they freak out as soon as the scale goes up a few pounds. At this point, you understand that when you enter into a period of maintenance, your weight may go up a few lbs. due to water retention. You also understand that gradually increasing your

42

Calories over the course of several weeks will allow you time to adapt and potentially minimize any fat gain. You realize the value of eating at maintenance and taking breaks for both your mind and body. Keeping all of that in mind, here are a few tips you can employ to keep your weight relatively stable once you’ve gone through the un-dieting process. 1. Eat the same foods most of the time. While you should eat a wide variety of foods, you don’t want to eat randomly. Develop several standard daily meal plans that fit your TDEE and adopt an “80/20” rule so you don’t go overboard or restrict your food intake. For example, if you eat a couple fried eggs and a small bowl of oatmeal each morning but you forget to buy oatmeal, it’s OK to substitute with fruit or maybe even a bagel as long as you aren’t allergic or sensitive to the substitute. 2. Continually self-monitor. As we’ve explained at several points throughout this eBook, developing habits that help you accomplish your goals is key to managing your nutrition. You don’t want to constantly track food and weigh yourself…you want to live your life, be healthy, and look good! That said, it can be very helpful to occasionally revisit the process of logging your food to make sure you aren’t dramatically under or overshooting your food intake. For more examples of habits that can help you stay on the right track, revisit the section “Dieting Doesn’t Have to be so Hard” from earlier in this eBook. 3. Remain active. I know this isn’t a problem for everyone who’ll read through these pages, but it has to be noted that most people who maintain weight easily are active at least a couple times a week. Diet and exercise in combination are the key to weight management! If you aren’t already exercising, you should start as soon as possible. Weight training and aerobic work like walking, running, and cycling are all valuable tools to bring along on the quest for health. If you do high intensity exercise, you’ve already got this part covered.

Calorie/Carb Cycling for Recomposition: Loading and Control Days While we commonly associate fat loss with weight loss and muscle gain with increased body weight, you can absolutely build muscle and lose fat while maintaining weight – it just happens slowly. This is called recomposition. In a nutshell, recomposition is what happens when you stay the same weight but increase your muscle mass, resulting in an overall decrease in body fat. One of the most common and effective strategies available to accomplish body recomposition during weight maintenance is Calorie cycling. What this entails is keeping Calories at maintenance most of the time, while taking brief periods to eat at a slight Calorie deficit. Calorie cycling can be done day-to-day, week-to-week, or even month-to-month depending upon your goals.

43

At Eat To Perform, we typically suggest that new people work up to their maintenance Calories from wherever is they’re at when they arrive at our digital doorstep. Once they’re eating at TDEE on a consistent basis, we like them to cycle Calories between higher carb days and lower carb days based upon their activity levels, referred to colloquially as loading and control days. Here’s an example of what that loading and control days might look like throughout a week. Daily TDEE: 2155 Calories

Average Calories: 2,100

Monday (workout)

Carbs: 225g

Fat: 75g

Protein: 145g

Calories: 2,155

Tuesday (workout)

Carbs: 230g

Fat: 75g

Protein: 145g

Calories: 2,175

Wednesday (rest)

Carbs: 100g

Fat: 85g

Protein: 150g

Calories: 1,765

Thursday (workout)

Carbs: 225g

Fat: 80g

Protein: 150g

Calories: 2,220

Friday (workout)

Carbs: 220g

Fat: 80g

Protein: 145g

Calories: 2,180

Saturday (rest)

Carbs: 115g

Fat: 75g

Protein: 140g

Calories: 1,695

Sunday (rest)

Carbs: 100g

Fat: 90g

Protein: 150g

Calories: 1,810

Weekly TDEE: 1,5085 Calories

Weekly Calorie Deficit: 1,195 Calories

What happens, naturally, is that the more rest days you have each week, the greater the Calorie deficit you create. This allows you to keep your average Calorie intake at just below TDEE so that you essentially maintain body weight, but give your body the chance to utilize the principles of Metabolic Flexibility – you run on mostly fat during your rest days, and rely more upon carbohydrates when you need them the most. We’ll go over a few more examples of how to use Calorie cycling for different goals in the next few sections so keep this fresh in your mind.

Nutrition/Exercise Guidelines for Maintenance •

Calories: Equal to established TDEE with control and loading days based upon activity levels

•

Protein: Roughly 25% of your daily Calories or 1 gram per pound of body weight

•

Fat: Roughly 30% of your daily Calories or 0.6 grams per pound of body weight

•

Carbs: Roughly 35 to 45% of your daily Calories or 1.3-1.8 grams per pound of body weight, adjusted between loading and control days

•

Weight Training: Moderate volume, moderate-heavy weight, moderate frequency

•

Conditioning: Moderate exertion, moderate volume, moderate frequency

44

Guidelines and Strategies for Weight Loss This is the section I know you’ve been waiting for. You’ve probably spent at least some part of your life at this point trying to lose fat and keep it off. There’s also the possibility that you’re already lean, but you can’t quite seem to get any leaner. Whatever the reason, you need to understand right from the get-go that for you to make the most of your attempts to lose fat, you need to move slowly. Furthermore, you may not be able to approach things in a linear fashion; you’re going to have to take diet breaks if you want to lose a significant amount of fat.

Calorie deficits and weight loss timelines For most people, we recommend one pound of weight loss a week or a 3,500 Calorie weekly deficit. That’s about a 500 Calorie deficit each day. If you have more fat to lose, you may lose weight slower with these numbers. Conversely, if you’re leaner, you may lose weight faster on the same Calorie deficit. (Hall D., 2008) The bulk of your energy deficit should be created by reducing dietary carbohydrates and fat. For most people, that means dropping about 75g of carbs and about 20g of fat. This of course assumes that you are coming from a period of energy maintenance or surplus. If you’re in a negative energy balance to begin with, that one pound a week plan needs to be delayed while you get your Calories up to an acceptable level. It varies from person to person but if you’ve been dieting hard for the last five years, you would probably be best served to take three to six months to just reset everything and focus on maintaining your weight. Once you work the math a bit better in your favor, it’s much easier to take eight to 12 weeks to address fat loss goals. (Dulloo & Jacquet J) The timeline over the course of a year might look something like this: •

Three months maintaining

•

2 months eating for a one-pound-a-week decrease

•

Three months maintaining

•

2 months eating for a one-pound-a-week decrease

Calorie Cycling for Fat Loss Building upon the timeline presented above, when you’re ready to focus on fat loss, you can utilize Calorie cycling just like you would to achieve a recomposition effect during maintenance; the only difference is that you’re working with monthly deficits, not weekly deficits.

45

Here’s an example of what your average monthly Calories might look like over the course of an 8 month period: Starting Weight: 151 lbs.

Starting TDEE: 2500 Calories

January

February

March

56,000 Calories

56,000 Calories

4 lbs. weight loss

8 lbs. weight loss

– 500 Calories April

Ending TDEE: 2380 Calories

Average TDEE: 2440 Calories

May

June

July

August

54,000 Calories

54,000 Calories

66,000 Calories

12 lbs. weight loss

16 lbs. weight loss

Maintenance at 135 lbs.

68,000 Calories

Maintenance at 143 lbs.

If this seems to you like this is a slow rate of weight loss, if it appears as though you’re taking a long time to lose only 16 lbs. of fat…Then you’re right. This IS a slow approach, but there are two very important benefits to taking it slow rather than trying to lose weight as fast as possible. First of all, this rate of weight loss will spare lean mass. Whether you’re losing weight to look better, or you’re doing it to improve your strength:weight ratio and enter a lower weight class for competitive reasons, maintaining as much lean mass as possible is vital. If you lose too much lean mass as you lose weight, you’ll just look like a smaller version of your former self, and you’ll see a significant decrease in athletic performance. That’s not good! Second, losing only 1 lb. of weight each week and taking long breaks to un-diet is sustainable. In Part I of this eBook, you learned all about (and have very likely personally experienced) the dreaded weight loss stall. With a “slow and steady” approach, stalls will occur less frequently because you’re allowing your body to recover during the periods of maintenance. Equally beneficial is the fact that you’ll be focused on achieving several small goals throughout the year. Biting off small chunks to achieve a greater goal will keep your head clear and you’ll be able to stick to your guns as you lose fat because you’re only eating slightly less than normal.

Exercise during weight loss The standard advice given to most people when they begin a weight loss plan is to exercise as much as possible, and to do excessive amounts of cardiovascular training. As far as weight training is concerned, you’ll see people switching from heavy weights for low repetitions and a moderate amount of sets to the complete opposite end of the spectrum; tons of reps, tons of sets, and very light weight. The fact of the matter is that whatever you were doing for exercise during your maintenance phase should stay relatively static during a weight loss phase, save a few differences.

46

1. Intensity and strength should remain the same or increase. If you were (for example) overhead pressing a 50 lb. barbell for 5 repetitions during maintenance, you should strive to increase or at the very least maintain the weight on the bar for the same number of repetitions. In the same vein, if you’re running an 8:00 mile, you should try to improve or at least maintain your speed. In other words, don’t lift lighter and don’t slow down just because you’re eating less. Keeping the intensity up will go a long way to preserve lean mass as you lose weight. 2. Volume should decrease slightly. When intensity is high, volume should be low. In response to decreased energy input, energy output should naturally decrease. Don’t “eat less/do more” or you’ll just create an unnecessarily large Calorie deficit, which is not favorable as far as sparing lean mass is concerned. You want to do the smallest amount of the most effective work to maintain lean mass in an energy deficit. That might mean dropping some assistance exercises or doing fewer sets on days you’re just not feeling it. Do not sacrifice intensity for volume – stick to the basics. Get in, get out! 3. Frequency should remain about the same. You don’t need to be in the gym lifting weights or plodding away on a treadmill every day while you lose weight. If you’ve found success doing resistance training and cardio 3x a week on maintenance Calories, just keep things how they are so that you don’t unwittingly increase volume, which will necessitate a concomitant decrease in intensity.

Tips for eating at a deficit One of the most difficult aspects of eating at a deficit is the fact that you…Well…Have to eat less! We’ve already touched on hunger and how certain characteristics of food impact cravings and satiety but there are a few behaviors you can put into action that apply specifically to weight loss. 1. Emphasize high-satiety, low-Calorie whole foods. The bottom line is that when you have a limited number of Calories to eat, you need to eat foods that fill you up to keep hunger at bay. Increase your intake of fibrous vegetables and keep hyper-palatable foods at arm’s length. Hyper-palatable foods are foods that tend to make people hungry when they eat them. They’re usually sweet, salty, or fatty, and they’re almost always energy-dense; you know what I’m talking about. Contrast that with a food that’s bland and dry. Palatable, energy-dense foods can be worked into your plan but without a certain level of awareness and tracking, they may contribute to overeating which will absolutely sabotage fat loss. “Bland” and “dry” aren’t exactly terms that bring to mind the pleasure of eating, so these foods become a valuable asset in the war on hunger.

47

2. Eat most of your carbs before your workouts. Carbohydrates are the preferred energy source of the human body. In “Keeping the carbohydrates: why a balanced approach is better,” you learned that your brain and nervous tissues use a considerable amount of glucose each day, even at rest. Another tissue that needs a lot of glucose to operate at peak capacity is skeletal muscle. Unfortunately, carbohydrate intake will, under most circumstances, have to drop during a fat loss plan to facilitate an energy deficit; Calories from fat can only drop so low because they’re necessary for basic functions like absorption of vitamins and production of cell membranes. Since glucose will be scarce and Calories from carbohydrates will be lower, it’s important to pay a bit of attention to nutrient timing and make sure that you get in a good amount of carbohydrates before you exercise so that you can keep your energy up. Remember that intensity of exercise needs to be either preserved or improved upon during a weight loss phase. To ensure that you maintain a high level of performance, eat up to 50% of your daily carbs in your pre-workout meal. The exact amount will vary based upon how you respond so you need to experiment with this to hit the nail on the head. 3. Allow room to eat for joy. While you do want to emphasize high-satiety foods on a fat loss diet, there’s no reason to completely exclude foods you love when the opportunity presents itself. Remember that fat loss takes place over the course of many weeks and months, not overnight. A night out at the movies with your family that involves ice cream or pizza won’t hurt if you plan for it and refrain from using it as an excuse to binge for the next week. When you do eat for joy, make it count – don’t feel guilty for “messing up your diet”. Instead, enjoy yourself and eat mindfully. Think about how good the particular food tastes, and how awesome it is that you can still have foods you enjoy while you lose weight.

What if my weight loss stalls? Almost inevitably, you’ll hit a point during your fat loss plan where you expect to lose weight, yet you do not. Provided everything is on point, there are a few ways to approach to situation. First, understand that weight loss is not always linear. You may be within a few days of experiencing a sudden decrease in scale weight – often referred to as a “woosh” – so don’t jump to conclusions. Wait things out for another week or so and see what happens to your weight. As long as the scale is trending down, you’re probably on the right track. If you give your body time to catch up but your weight doesn’t go down, it’s probably time to reconsider your approach. Consider taking a few days to drop your Calories a bit lower (2-300 Calories less) and observe your results.

48

If a larger Calorie deficit doesn’t get your weight moving downward, you’re probably at the point where you need to head back to maintenance for a few weeks before you recommence losing weight. It’s really that simple.

Nutrition/Exercise Guidelines for Fat Loss •

Calories: 10-15% (200-500 Calories) or more below established TDEE, mostly by reducing carbohydrates

•

Protein: 25-30% of your daily Calories or 1-1.2 grams per pound of body weight (depending upon how lean you are)

•

Fat: 40% of your daily Calories or 0.7 grams per pound of body weight

•

Carbs: 35% of your daily Calories or 1.3 grams per pound of body weight

•

Weight Training: Moderate volume, heavy weight, low-moderate frequency

•

Conditioning: Low exertion, moderate volume, moderate frequency

Guidelines and Strategies for Lean Mass Gain Now that we’ve covered maintaining and losing weight, understand how to gain weight will be easy. Gaining weight is essentially the same process as losing weight, except you’re increasing Calories rather than reducing them. That’s it! Of course, it’s not really that simple. There are some issues you can run into when gaining weight, and there are also ways to make the most of the process.

Calorie surplus to gain weight Just as we need to create a Calorie deficit to lose weight, we need to create a Calorie surplus to gain weight. The major difference with the math here is that as body weight increases, a greater energy suplus is required to cause weight gain. Thus, lighter people may gain as much as 1 lb. a week on as low as 500 Calories above maintenance TDEE/3,500 weekly Calories, but heavier folks may need to go up to and beyond a 1,000 Calorie daily surplus/as much as 7,000 Calories over TDEE. Remember how we suggested that you take a diet break every two months while losing weight? The same goes for gaining weight. Taking a diet break will help your body and mind reset and take a load off from all the eating you’re going to have to do to successfully gain a significant amount of weight. Again, you’re going for short-term bursts towards goals, then maintenance, before you attack weight gain head-on again for another couple months. Not only does this make the job easier, but it also helps keep some of the fat off.

49

As an example, someone who’s set aside a solid 8 months to gain weight might have to gradually build up to eating 28,000 Calories over maintenance to gain even 7 lbs. of solid body weight. Starting Weight: 151 lbs.

Starting TDEE: 2,500 Calories + 500-1,000 Calories

Ending TDEE: 2,875 Calories

Average TDEE: 2,670 Calories

January

February

March

May

June

July

August

84,000 Calories

89,600 Calories

93,800 Calories

98,000 Calories

80,500 Calories

April

78,000 Calories

5-10 lbs. weight gain

2-5 lbs. weight gain Maintenance at 160 lbs.

Maintenance at 165 lbs.

Do hard gainers really exist? Exercise and food logging Hard gainers are people who just can’t seem to gain weight no matter how much they eat...or so they think. Compare the figures in the above table to the table from the previous section on weight loss. It should be immediately apparent to you that fueling weight gain – even 5 lbs. over the course of two months – requires a dramatic departure from the normal eating habits of your average person. While there are considerations to be made for people who have legitimate issues with hormone function, particularly those with hyperthyroidism, hard gainers are more often than not simply overestimating how much they’re eating, or just not eating enough to gain weight. There are also certain behaviors that make eating enough to gain weight more difficult; remember that non-exercise associated thermogenesis contributes significantly to TDEE. A person who’s constantly busy may have a higher TDEE than they’ve estimated. Someone who likes to perform a lot of long, slow cardiovascular exercise each week may also run into the same problem. If the above description fits you like a glove, the only way to really get around this is to eat as much as you can while reducing your training volume to a bare minimum. That doesn’t mean you should stop doing cardio (in fact it’s very important for your health as you put on mass), and you certainly shouldn’t stop lifting weights, but you need to make everything you do count. Over time, try to gradually increase your Calorie intake as well as your training load. The ideal scenario is the one where you’re doing a tremendous amount of work and eating to fuel it.

Tips for eating at a surplus 1. Emphasize energy-dense, low-satiety foods. This is pretty much the oppposite strategy you would use to lose weight. When you’re looking at packing away an extra 1,000 Calories each day to gain weight, you’re ideally going to want to eat foods that don’t fill you up; foods that make you MORE hungry when you eat them! Those same hyper-palatable choices that are your 50

enemy when you’re trying to lose body fat become your most valuable tools when you’re trying to pack on lean mass. All things considered, that doesn’t mean you want to live on fast food and baked goods. You should instead think about building upon the foods – both in terms of volume and selection – that you would eat to maintain your weight. 2. Log your food dilligently to avoid under-eating. Again, self-monitoring of food intake is key to achieving your desired result. You may feel like you’re eating a lot...you may be eating some pretty huge meals...but the fact of the matter is that most people inaccurately report how much they’re eating! They undershoot when they’re trying to gain weight, and they overshoot when they’re trying to lose weight! Don’t let that happen to you – take the time to log your meals and remain accountable. 3. Get the bulk of your surplus Calories from carbohydrates. Carbs are highly thermogenic in an active body – especially when the majority of your activity involves heavy resistance training. (Denzer & Young) What that means is that a considerable amount of energy is lost just processing carbs after training. Because of this effect, you can potentially stay leaner on a high carbohydrate weight gain diet than you would on a high fat weight gain diet. In addition, increased carbohydrate consumption will ensure that you have plenty of fuel for your workouts, enabling you to push your workload higher and higher. 4. Eat for joy on a regular basis. Again, we’ve reached a stark contrast among the strategies to gain and lose weight. Whereas eating out with your friends and family can put you at a detriment when your goal is to lose weight, gaining weight is another story. You shouldn’t go nuts and order 3 sundaes for yourself on date night, but you should very seldom turn down the opportunity to get some extra Calories in...especially when it’s a food you love. Remember to exercise moderation and get the majority of your Calories from whole foods while taking advantage of the fact that any bit of extra energy you can put in your body will probably be useful.

51

Nutrition/Exercise Guidelines for Lean Mass Gain •

Calories: 15-30% (500-1000 Calories) or greater above established TDEE, mostly from carbohydrates

•

Protein: Roughly 20% of your daily Calories or 0.8 grams per pound of body weight

•

Fat: Roughly 30% of your daily Calories or 0.6 grams per pound of body weight

•

Carbs: Roughly 50% of your daily Calories or 2 grams per pound of body weight

•

Weight Training: IDEALLY high volume, heavy weight, high frequency but only if the Calories are there to support the workload

•

Conditioning: IDEALLY moderate exertion, low volume, moderate frequency but only if Calories are there to support the workload

52

Flexible Eating Case Study: Paul

My name is Paul Nobles. I am the founder of Eat To Perform. I am both a Level One and Kids certified coach and I have a BA in Liberal Arts from Metropolitan State University. Like a lot of people, my dieting history was complex. The standard advice to eat less and do more never made sense to me but I tried that route for what amounted to roughly 10 years. Basically every other Thanksgiving I would either show up as a smaller or bigger version of myself. The problem with the “eat less/do more” approach is that it’s an attempt to defy physics. Food is energy so denying yourself food and then asking your body to perform more work might work initially but you are essentially playing a rigged game. Dieting, for me, like with most people, just left me fat and out of shape. At my worst, I weighed 225 lbs. and I wasn’t motivated to do anything. Logic would have me burning the candle at both ends to lose weight but what works best is something less taxing to my system. For me, things started with exercise but I quickly realized that food needed to be part of the equation as well. The only thing that came from working out excessively did was pain and sickness. From 225 lbs. I was able to get down to 185 just by improving my nutrition. After that my approach had to be refined and a lot of things I thought I’d never give up had to go. I eliminated them one at a time. Here are a couple short examples of what was wrong and what I did to change things: 1. Coming from a mostly glucose-dependent way of eating, I often filled up with carbs which didn’t leave a lot of want for protein. I switched that around, focused on eating more protein, and things changed drastically. Not only is protein favorable for hunger signaling but it also aids in the maintenance and repair of muscle. The two single greatest things you can do for fat loss are to eat 53

adequate amounts of protein combined with a resistance training program (lifting weights or body weight movements). 2. I lived for coffee with cream and sugar. Honestly, just writing that is laughable now because it’s been so many years since I have drank it that way. What I found was that iced coffee was more palatable black, so I started drinking that. Eventually (like most people) I just let my coffee cool a bit and I learned I liked it better than iced coffee. Now I drink my coffee black. That was 200 Calories a day that could either be eliminated or replaced with better nutrients. That, however, is only half of my story. I eventually got down to 149 lbs. and 9% body fat. When you’re overweight, you sort of envision things a certain way but the dream is different than reality. Sure, it was nice to have veiny abs and a well-defined 4-pack but once all the fat was gone I look emaciated, not like the muscular person I’d envisioned. I also wasn’t phenomenal at exercise; body weight movements were great but not vastly better than they are now that I’m heavier. Certainly I couldn’t lift what I can now. I was just looking back at my journal; since that time I have put almost 200 pounds on my deadlift and just over 100 pounds on my squat. That’s the problem with fat loss: it sort of robs you of a lot of things that you might not realize are important. Once I lost my obsession with body fat percentage my performance took off. I also gained a lot more muscle. That probably sounds great to the guys reading this but it’s likely not what most women want to happen. Take my word though: after years of working with clients, most women pursuing fat loss would be much better off with a strategy that emphasizes building muscle. Setting arbitrary aesthetic goals based upon how much you weighed at some point in the past is pointless. Here are two examples to illustrate my point: It’s pretty well known that we work with Games athlete Dani Horan. At this point Dani is on cruise control and I’m grateful to have contributed to her success, however minuscule our role may have been. I was talking to a friend’s wife who told me she was 10 pounds over weight and I asked her “How do you know?” She said “Trust me I know.” So I pulled up a recent picture of Dani and asked the gal how much she thought Dani weighed. She guessed 105 lbs. I posed the same question to a number of women and not one guessed over 125 lbs. which is why they were all astounded to find out that Dani in fact weighed 150 lbs! The problem for these ladies is that they have bought the “starve and move” mantra. They’re constantly putting their bodies in a state that isn’t conducive to maintaining and building muscle. They were all runners and none them lifted weights regularly so they are literally on the treadmill for life, even though they have a shining example of the value of muscle right in front of them. I understand; we all want abs but abs are muscles! If you aren’t building and preserving lean mass with regular resistance training, it’s extremely hard to get defined abdominals. For my second example, I’d like to talk about another client who felt like she had some fat to lose. She was 160 pounds. and 20% body fat but had been 15% at one point. She was also a doctor. When she was leaner, she weighed 143 lbs. so she was under the impression that she had to get back there to get to 15%. The major difference was that she had gained 9 pounds of muscle between those two weights. So basically what that means is that her ideal number was adjusted to 152 pounds because of the muscle. Mentally, that was a gigantic relief and what seemed daunting now became much more realistic. The eight pounds came off easy.

54

The point of these examples is that our perceptions often cloud reality. I am not saying that there won’t be hard work along the way but it’s much easier when you have good information and understanding in front of you. To end my story, I just felt too small at 9% body fat so I have spent the last three to four years just enjoying my journey. I find that I like what I can do and feel better at about 15%. That’s one of the enduring messages I hope we can get out there to people. While you certainly don’t want to be obese, most of the people we talk to on a daily basis aren’t. Unless there is a health issue, body fat is not an accurate predictor of health so let’s quit pretending it is. It’s well-known that extreme dieting is more detrimental to your well-being than a moderate approach. The obsession with maintaining uber-low body fat isn’t something I am a proponent of. Most athletes who maintain very low body fat percentages do so because they’ve built a significant amount of muscle, not because they dieted all the time. You get that way from eating adequate amounts of food. I was personally stuck at 20% body fat for a long time until I started eating enough food and lifting heavy weights. Adding 15 pounds of muscle is what got me to 9%. This is why we don’t want people to ignore muscle. We want people to know that if your body needs 2300 Calories a day with adequate amount of proteins, fats, and (yes) carbs but you are giving it 1500 Calories, you aren’t building muscle. End of story. That is the biggest argument for not dieting most of the time, in my opinion.

55

Conclusion: The Five Tenets of Flexible Eating 1. Understand that nutrition requirements are largely individual. Your plan will look different than someone else’s plan. Everything from your food preferences, as well as how your body responds to changes in energy balance, macronutrient splits, how often you eat, even the kind of job you work must be considered when setting up a new approach to nutrition. Customization is very powerful. 2. You need to be specific. It’s very difficult to get your body to respond to more than one stimulus at a time. You need to be specific about what you want to accomplish over the course of several weeks and months; set realistic goals and don’t try to do everything at once. If you want to lose body fat, make it a concrete goal: lose 10 lbs. of fat in 10 weeks. Want to gain muscle? Dedicate the next six months to gaining 10 lbs. of lean mass. Once you accomplish a goal, move on to the next one. 3. The sum is more important than the whole. Don’t view foods in isolation. Everything you eat has a synergistic effect on your results so it’s important that you don’t miss the forest for the trees. A balanced approach is more often than not the best path forward. There only a handful of scenarios where you shouldn’t allow some flub factor so life can proceed as normal. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; take each day as it comes. 4. Self-monitoring is a must. This goes beyond “listening to your body,” which is OK once you settle into a routine but leaves something to be desired when that routine changes. Whether you’re adding/removing a food from your plan, increasing/decreasing your Calories, tweaking your macros, experimenting with peri-workout nutrition, or taking a new supplement, you need to monitor how it affects you. Utilize the tools at your disposal: food logging, performance assessments, and body composition tests, to track progress and modify behaviors systematically. 5. There are no shortcuts. Changes take weeks, months, even years to show up. Nothing happens overnight, so approach every new journey with the intent to finish; make this a lifelong commitment. Resist the urge to completely change your routine when things don’t seem to be working; instead, make small, gradual changes over time to allow your body to adapt.

56

References A Golay, A. F. (1996, February). Similar weight loss with low- or high-carbohydrate diets. Retrieved May 1, 2013, from http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/63/2/174.abstract Anne Raben, L. A.-L. (2003, January). Meals with similar energy densities but rich in protein, fat, carbohydrate, or alcohol have different effects on energy expenditure and substrate metabolism but not on appetite and energy intake1,2,3. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/77/1/91.full Blundell, J., & MacDiarmid, J. (1997). Fat as a risk factor for overconsumption: satiation satiety, and patterns of eating. J Am Diet Assoc, S63-9. Blundell, J., & MacDiarmid, J. (1997). Passive overconsumption. Fat intake and short-term energy balance. Ann N Y Acad Sci, 392-407. Buchholz, A., & Schoeller, D. (2004). Is a Calorie a Calorie? Am J Clin Nutr, 899-906. Burke, L., Hawley, J., Wong, S., & Jeukendrup, A. (2011). Carbohydrates for training in competition. J Sports Sci, S17-27. Camps, S., Verhoef , S., & Westerterp, K. (2013). Weight loss, weight maintenance, and adaptive thermogenesis. Am J Clin Nutr, 990-994. Cangemi, R., Friedmann, A., Holloszy, J., & Fontana, L. (2010). Long-term effects of Calorie restriction on serum sex-hormone concentrations in men. Aging Cell , 236-242. Charlene M. Denzer, J. C. (n.d.). The Effect of Resistance Exercise on the Thermic Effect of Food. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://journals.humankinetics.com/ijsnem-backissues/IJSNEMVolume13Issue3September/TheEffectofResistanceExerciseontheThermicEffectofF ood Clark, M., & Slavin, J. (2013). The effect of fiber on satiety and food intake: a systematic review. J Am Coll Nutr, 200-211. Denzer, M. C., & Young, C. J. (2003). The Effect of Resistance Exercise on the Thermic Effect of Food. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. Dulloo, A., & Jacquet J. (1998). Adaptive reduction in basal metabolic rate in response to food deprivation in humans: a role for feedback signals from fat stores. Am J Clin Nutr, 599-606. Fazeli, P., & Klibanski, A. (2014). Anorexia nervosa and bone metabolism. Bone, 66c, 39-45. Fontana, L., Klein, S., Holloszy, J., & Premachandra, B. (2006). Effect of long-term Calorie restriction with adequate protein and micronutrients on thyroid hormones. J Clin Endocrinol Metab; 91(8), 3232-3235.

57

Goele, K., Bosy-Westphal, A., Rumcker, B., Lagerpusch, M., & Mueller, M. (2009). Influence of changes in body composition and adaptive thermogenesis on the difference between measured and predicted weight loss in obese women. Obes Facts, 105-109. Gregersen, S., Samocha-Bonet, D., Heilbronn, L., & Campbell, L. (2012). Inflammatory and Oxidative Stress Responses to High-Carbohydrate and High-Fat Meals in Healthy Humans. J of Nutr and Met, 1-8. Hall D., K. (2008). What is the required energy deficit per unit of weight loss? International Journal of Obesity, 573-576. Halton, T. L. (2004, October). The Effects of High Protein Diets on Thermogenesis, Satiety and Weight Loss: A Critical Review. Retrieved March 31, 2013, from http://www.jacn.org/content/23/5/373.full Harris, J. A., & Benedict, F. G. (1918). A Biometric Study of Human Basal Metabolism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 370-373. Retrieved from http://www.pnas.org/content/4/12/370 Helms, E., Zinn, C., Rowlands, D., & Brown, S. (2013). A systematic review of dietary protein during caloric restriction in resistance trained lean athlete: a case for higher intakes. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. K J Acheson, B. Z.-M. (1980, May). Caffeine and coffee: their influence on metabolic rate and substrate utilization in normal weight and obese individuals. Retrieved March 31, 2013, from http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/33/5/989.full.pdf+html K R Segal, B. G.-S. (1985, September). Thermic effect of food at rest, during exercise, and after exercise in lean and obese men of similar body weight. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC424000/ K. J. Acheson, Y. S. (1984, January 1). Nutritional influences on lipogenesis and thermogenesis after a carbohydrate meal. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/246/1/E62.short Katsuya Dezaki, H. S. (2008, May). Ghrelin is a physiological regulator of insulin release in pancreatic islets and glucose homeostasis. Retrieved May 2013, 2013, from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163725808000417 King, N., Burley, V., & Blundell, J. (1994). Exercise-induced suppression of appetite: effects on food intake and implications for energy balance. Eur J Clin Nutr, 715-724. King, N., Caudwell, P., Hopkins, M., Stubbs, J., Naslund, E., & Blundell, J. (2009). Dual-process action of exercise on appetite control: increase in orexigenic drive but improvement in meal-induced satiety. Am J Clin Nutr, 921-927. Langfort J, Z. R.-U. (1997). The effect of a low-carbohydrate diet on performance, hormonal and metabolic responses to a 30-s bout of supramaximal exercise. Retrieved May 1, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9272770

58

M M Tai, P. C.-S. (1991, November). Meal size and frequency: effect on the thermic effect of food. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/54/5/783.full.pdf+html Manfred Hallschmid, S. H. (2012, February 16). Postprandial Administration of Intranasal Insulin Intensifies Satiety and Reduces Intake of Palatable Snacks in Women. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2012/02/16/db11-1390.abstract Mayer, J. (2009, January). The glucostatic theory of appetite control and the risk of obesity and diabetes. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19002144 NI, W., JL, R., HJ, L., RS, L., & MJ, D. S. (2010). Estrogen and progesterone exposure is reduced in response to energy deficiency in women aged 25-40 years. Human Reproduction: Oxford Journal, 2328-2339. Nicole R. Stob, C. B. (2006, December 18). Thermic effect of food and β-adrenergic thermogenic responsiveness in habitually exercising and sedentary healthy adult humans. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://jap.physiology.org/content/103/2/616.full NPD Group. (2013). The NPD Group Reports Dieting is at an All Time Low-Dieting Season Has Begun, but it’s Not What it Used to Be! Retrieved from https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/the-npd-group-reports-dietingis-at-an-all-time-low-dieting-season-has-begun-but-its-not-what-it-used-to-be/ Ostojica, S. M. (2006, December 21). Yohimbine: The Effects on Body Composition and Exercise Performance in Soccer Players. Retrieved March 29, 2013, from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15438620600987106 Paddon-Jones, D. (2008). Protein, weight management, and satiety. Am J Clin Nutr, 1558S-1561S. Peter Wellhoener, B. F.-S. (2000, March 1). Glucose Metabolism Rather Than Insulin Is a Main Determinant of Leptin Secretion in Humans. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/85/3/1267.short Pimstone, B. (1976). Endocrine Function in Protein-Calorie Malnutriton. Clinical Endocrinology, 83-84. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2265.1976.tb03806.x/pdf Polivy, J., & Herman, C. (2002). Causes of eating disorders. Annu Rev Psychol, 187-213. R Swaminathan, R. F. (1985, August). Thermic effect of feeding carbohydrate, fat, protein and mixed meal in lean and obese subjects. Retrieved March 31, 2013, from http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/42/2/177.full.pdf+html S. L. Carter, C. R. (2001, June 1). Substrate utilization during endurance exercise in men and women after endurance training. Retrieved April 25, 2013, from American Journal of Physiology, Endocrinology, and Metabolism: http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/280/6/E898.full.pdf+html Schoeller, D. (2009). The energy balance equation: looking back and looking forward are two very different views. Nutr Rev, 249-254.

59

Scott, N. (2007). Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: An Easy Household Guide. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. Tomomi Shiiya, M. N.-I. (2002, January 1). Plasma Ghrelin Levels in Lean and Obese Humans and the Effect of Glucose on Ghrelin Secretion. Retrieved May 10, 2013, from http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/87/1/240.short Trexler, E., Smith-Ryan, A., & Norton , L. (2014). Metabolic adpatation to weight loss: implications for the athlete. Int Soc Sports Nutr. Wansink, B. (2010). From mindless eating to mindlessly eating better. Physiol Behav, 454-463. Watson, P., & Robinson, M. (1965). Variations in body-weight of young women during the menstrual cycle. Br J Nutr, 237-248. Wayne Scott, J. S.–M. (2001, November). Human Skeletal Muscle Fiber Type Classifications. Retrieved from http://ptjournal.apta.org/content/81/11/1810.long Westcott, W. (2012). Resistance training is medicine: effects of strength training on health. Curr Sports Med, 209-216. Woodend, G. H. (2003, October). Consumption of sugars and the regulation of short-term satiety and food intake. Retrieved May 10, 2013

60