0 Glucose Clearance

 

“My high sugar diet has really improved my glucose clearance. My 1-hour post-prandial readings decreased from 120′s to the upper 90′s. My waking temps are 97.8, up to 98.4 after eating (that’s during the first half of my cycle, I get even hotter the second half).

Plus I’m happy, energetic, sleeping well and waking up spontaneously and well rested at about 6am.

I’m enjoying eating lots and lots of fruit, some milk, a little gelatin here and there, lots of carbs, a smattering of meat and veggies. I avoid [polyunsaturated fats], but not obsessively. And I eat Lemon Sorbet whenever I feel like it. :-)”

~Jessica Johnson

I’m in Reno for a couple of months, and, naturally, I went to a casino restaurant where some Asian dude (not Debbie’s husband) was putting on a cooking show – chock full of cheesy jokes, spatula acrobatics, and unnecessary explosions. And afterward, my buddy Aaron, weird diet warrior and follower of the 180 blog since way back, struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting on the other side of the Teppanyaki griddle.

“Well, you gotta watch out for sugar and carbohydrates in your diet now, my Doctor says,” I hear the gray-haired gentleman say.

I tried to hide my smile and prayed Aaron would shut the hell up and just talk about basketball, like a normal guy.  Oh but no.  He had to make a spectacle out of it and mention that I had written a book about type 2 diabetes.  Then he put me on the spot to somehow convince this guy, in a sentence or two, shouting across this giant, steaming, soy sauce target, that carbohydrates didn’t cause blood sugar to become too high.  I didn’t give it much effort.  It’s not that easy of a thing to explain.  Well, not on the spot at least.

Here is a quick and easy-to-grasp primer on why the belief that carbohydrates cause diabetes or some other nonsense is simple-minded fad thinking, more akin to rumor than fact.  Not to use a worn-out metaphor, but blaming carbohydrates for diabetes is like blaming firemen for fires, just because there are usually a lot of firemen around when a building is aflame.

In a healthy person, when you eat a meal rich in carbohydrates (as well as fat and protein), the body secretes insulin.  This insulin takes the sugar and amino acids that hit the bloodstream from the food you just ate and stores it away into skeletal muscle and the liver primarily.  Accompanying this process is a rise in glycogen synthase, an enzyme that helps to convert sugar into its storage form as glycogen.  Also, right after a high-carb meal, you see a big increase in glucose oxidation – the body is busy burning sugar for energy.

All these things combine to maintain homeostasis – keeping sugar levels in the blood stable by quickly “clearing” glucose out of the bloodstream by a combination of storing it away into muscles as glycogen and burning sugar at an accelerated rate.

But with the rapid surge of insulin resistance, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes that we’re seeing in the world today – this process is getting progressively worse.  Insulin resistance means that the body’s liver and muscle cells are less responsive to the hormone insulin, which stores this stuff away and seems to be the CEO of this whole glucose clearance process.  The more insulin resistant a person becomes, the less glycogen synthase they produce after a meal, the less sugar he or she burns after a meal, and the more slowly sugar is cleared out of the bloodstream.

In other words, slow glucose clearance is one of the early signs of there being a defect in glucose metabolism.  When glucose metabolism shows significant impairment, it’s referred to as “impaired glucose tolerance.”

“Impaired glucose tolerance is an intermediate category between normal glucose tolerance and overt diabetes, and it can be identified by an oral glucose tolerance test. Subjects with impaired glucose tolerance have an increased risk of type 2 diabetes and therefore form an important target group for interventions aimed at preventing diabetes.”

-New England Journal of Medicine

The horrifying trend taking place currently is looking at this issue as precisely that – an ‘intolerance’ to glucose.  When you do not tolerate something, you stay away from it.  But that is extremely flawed thinking.  Try to fix problems by tackling them head-on before looking to permanent restrictions of one of the three sources of calories – carbohydrates.

We should be looking for ways, not just to identify impaired glucose tolerance, but to repair this intolerance.  That’s how I look at things, and is precisely why such a high percentage of people, like Jessica Johnson up above (but even some full-blown type 2 diabetics), have had such great success with improving glucose metabolism on the 180D approach.  Fixing this problem is one of the single most important things to know how to reverse in the 21^st century.  And the best answers for how to achieve it in a sustainable and lasting way appear to reside here.

What should the focus be on?

I think the rate of glucose clearance should be the focus, Clarence.  The more insulin sensitive a person is, usually the faster their rate of glucose clearance.  Someone with ideal glucose metabolism should be able to eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrates in a matter of minutes without seeing much of a rise in blood glucose at all.  And this is an achievable thing.

So you grasp the concept, let’s say someone eats 4 slices of cheese pizza.  At 1 hour their blood glucose is at 170 mg/dl.  At 2 hours their blood glucose is at 110 mg/dl, and at 3 hours their blood glucose is back to what is a normal fasting rate at about 85 mg/dl.  That is some pretty crappy glucose clearance.

But after a month of raising metabolic rate, sleeping more, reducing stress, and eating a higher carbohydrate diet, that exact same portion of 4 slices of cheese pizza should now send blood glucose to only around 100 mg/dl at the 1-hour mark, and be back to normal in less than 2 hours.  Normal might also be a little lower.  Like 70-75 mg/dl.  That would represent a substantial increase in the rate of glucose clearance, and signifies a tremendous improvement in glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity.

This may sound like a radical improvement for such a short period of time, but that ain’t nothin.’  A non insulin-dependent type 2 diabetic I worked with recently had her glucose clearance go from 340 mg/dl an hour after a meal to 130 mg/dl an hour after a meal – despite the meal having tons of carbohydrates.  It didn’t happen overnight though.  It took over a week to see this improvement.

There is much to be explored with glucose clearance, including exploring various meal frequencies, circadian rhythms, types and volumes of exercise, and something we may discuss in the future called glycogen supercompensation (where, by depleting stored carbohydrates, you create a greater reserve for stored glycogen and are thus able to clear much greater levels of carbohydrates out of the bloodstream – and there is some indication that the size of the glycogen reserve has a direct link with health and vitality).

But whether you are neurotic enough to play around with a glucose meter and track this for yourself or not (I wouldn’t recommend it, health fanaticism is a disease potentially worse than diabetes), you can at least take a sigh of relief and realize that you are now free from dully thinking that avoidance of foods that “spike your blood sugar” is the solution to rising rates of glucose in your blood.  It is not.  It can actually make the root problem worse and impair glucose tolerance and glucose clearance even further.  Do not accept insulin resistance as your fate.  Like Michael Jackson, just beat it.  How?  By being like Weird Al… Just eat it.  Food that is.

0 Body By Science

 

Ah, the long-awaited post on Doug McGuff and John Little’s exercise opus – Body By Science.  Let me purge a few of the sour tastes out my mouth first, so we can get into the good stuff - because I do think that Body By Science offers your metabolic rehab “patient” the best of all exercise solutions.

My most major complaint is the tremendous overreliance on scientific theory in coming to conclusions, as if science trumps experience and observation, or is infallible and immune to error.  Not that the book really relies upon that as a crutch too much when it comes to exercise specifically, but it has that general air of scientific elitism that I find annoying.  In my experience, science is the most prone to error, because of how it examines things in isolation (instead of from a broad perspective), different contexts are not accounted for, and time – well, time ruins everything when it comes to science (as short-term changes are often the exact opposite of long-term effects… like calorie-restriction, carb restriction, fat restriction, etc… all of which lower body fat, LDL, blood pressure, triglycerides, blood glucose, and insulin in the short-term, and raise all of those things over the long-term because of the physical and psychological human REACTION to those interventions).

There’s some tater hating in there too, but I’m over that.  Most of the carb-hating stems from the misbelief that insulin resistance is a result of ingesting carbohydrate when glycogen reserves are already maxed out, a fallacy that I go into more detail on in 12 Paleo Myths.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here’s why I think Body By Science, and forms of exercise in that genre - including Slow Burn, Power of 10, and the like, offer what is probably the single best overall type of exercise from a health and body composition perspective.  That may seem like a bold claim, and others who fared poorly on this type of exercise only to succeed with programs that are totally out of sync may be facepalming right now, but hear me out…

I have a great deal of experience with all kinds of exercise.  Collegiate-level athletics, skiing, skateboarding, wrestling, Standard Weightlifting, Olympic lifting, several forms of yoga, pilates, running, cycling, hiking, high-intensity interval training, and Metabolic Enhancement Training are just a short list of things I’ve toyed around with over the years.  Almost all of those activities had an adverse effect on metabolism, particularly the long-duration endurance activities like cycling, running, and hiking.  As my research led me increasingly in the direction of metabolism and body temperature increase, and sustainability in approaching the loss of body fat, I gave exercise a little bit of a lashing.  Between injury, burnout, time availability, overtraining, metabolic downregulation, muscle loss, enjoyment, cost, required skill level, seasonality, and other factors – about the only activity remaining that is practical for a mass audience is Pilates, maybe.  But you don’t see me doing that every day.  I find it too boring.  And while it may keep me feeling good and lowers pain (from all the damage all the other forms of exercise did to me, haha), it doesn’t have any significant effect on body composition.

What I’m getting at is that Body By Science can significantly increase strength, increase muscle mass, improve fitness, increase bone density, substantially affect appearance, slow down or even reverse some of the natural physical declines with aging… and it can do all of those things without causing injury, without leading to overtraining, without taking up much time, without leading to burnout, there is no special skill or knowledge required to begin doing it, it is safe and effective for everyone… Sounds pretty good right?  I truly think it is.

While I have touted similar qualities when it comes to maximum-intensity interval training – what I refer to as “MAXercise,” I personally find it to be much harder, more dangerous in terms of injury (and suppressive to body temperature), and limited in its ability to increase muscle size and strength, or increase bone density like strength training performed in McGuff/Little fashion.

The problem with other forms of weight training is that special form and skill is required for doing it without causing injury.  And even doing it correctly canlead to overuse injuries, something that I frequently encounter.  I have had a lifelong history with such proneness, having throwing arm problems as a college pitcher so severe as to lose 10 mph on my fastball and have chronic pain severe enough to force me to stop playing at age 19.  With severe back problems to go with it at that age from a lovely degenerating spine at that age.  Fun!

Plus, other forms of weight training can be daunting in complexity (like Scott Abel’s Metabolic Enhancement Training), long enough in duration to be painfully boring even if you do have the time to do it, and the risk of overtraining is high.  All of these concerns are more or less removed in Body By Science.

That’s enough hype I think.  Let’s talk about the training itself.  While it alone won’t get you onto any podiums at any bodybuilding competitions, I am still going to call it the best form of exercise.  Because I define the best form of exercise very differently.

“Our purpose is to give you a program that will have broad applicability and impart a lot of bang for your metabolic buck.  It is not intended as an ‘ultimate bodybuilding routine’ for someone who plans to enter a national competition, although this workout program may prove to be superior for that purpose as well.”  ~Doug McGuff

The best form of exercise is the type that is metabolically safe and that you are most likely to continue on a regular basis for the rest of your life.  A once-weekly 10-minute weight training session that is safe, simple, and productive fits that description.  In today’s society, especially amongst those who have a history of a low metabolism, and as you age – not much else qualifies.  But I do think that this can be reasonably incorporated into anyone’s lifestyle with predominantly positive outcomes.  It can probably even be thrown in from the beginning if you are trying to rehabilitate your metabolism (meaning you can even start doing it while your body temperature is still low).

The exercise is very simple:

• You perform one set of one exercise for each major muscle group – usually 3-5 exercises per workout
• Repetitions should be very slow both up and down with no momentum, 6-12 seconds each way (you don’t want to allow the muscle to briefly rest – you want it under strain throughout the duration to activate all types of muscle fibers)
• Each set should go until you absolutely cannot move the weight another inch, and then you still push as hard as you can, without the weight moving, for a count of 10 seconds – followed by letting the weight down as slowly as possible (it is important to truly fail at moving the weight, which sends a signal to your body that it was presented with something that was truly too strenuous to manage, and it adapts to be better prepared the next time.  This is where all the benefits come from).
• Each set should last from 75 to 120 seconds – 90 seconds is a good target… so you should select the weight for each exercise based on which weight causes you to reach this point of failure roughly in this time frame
• There should be as little rest in between exercises as possible, for extra cardiovascular and metabolic benefits
• You perform one workout typically every 7-10 days, depending on recovery time needed (the longer you train, the stronger you get, the more damage you do to your muscle, and the more time you may need to recover)
• You should record the weight you use for each exercise and the total time you are pushing against the weight (the time to failure) to track progress
• It is preferably performed with machines, but free weights can be used as well. A simple home barbell weight set can be sufficient for those with time and financial concerns, or a sex drive that is insufficient to desire going to a public gym to see fit people covered in sweat in tight clothing doing exercises in vulnerable positions while breathing heavily and grunting

Anyway, that’s a pretty good introduction.  We will be discussing and breaking this down more in future posts.  This type of exercise should be particularly beneficial to the elderly and women, those who have the greatest physiological need for this type of exercise (young people and men have fewer problems with sarcopenia/muscle loss and osteoporosis/osteopenia).

0 The GAPS Diet

I first wrote about Natasha Campbell-McBride and the GAPS diet many years ago, commenting on what an excellent public speaker Campbell-McBride is.  She speaks with a tremendous amount of confidence and fervor.  You are convinced, after hearing her speak, that she really knows something and is eager to bring it to those in need.  But these good intentions and good impressions aside, most find the GAPS diet to be woefully ineffective.  For some, like a young girl who recently contacted me after what seems to be some electrolyte-related heart troubles caused in part by her GAPS experience, it can do a lot of damage.

So what, in my assessment, is the good, bad, and ugly of GAPS (with an emphasis on bad and ugly as everyone else only talks about the good)?  As always, I bring this up and give my honest appraisal of it for discussion.  I have no doubt the discussions will be lively.  Enjoy this primer, as I plan to discuss this in much greater detail in an upcoming live GAPS podcast with Josh and Jeanne Rubin on April 30^th…

For those of you unfamiliar with GAPS, it stems mostly from concepts that led to the development of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) decades ago.  The concept was that larger carbohydrate molecules cannot be broken down by an unhealthy digestive tract, and merely cause a great deal of irritation.  Thus, the carbohydrates you “specifically” eat are simpler carbohydrates – while avoiding complex polysaccharides such as those found in starchy foods.

The idea behind the GAPS diet, for simplicity’s sake, is to undergo a prolonged healing period in which the villi of the large intestine, the gut wall, and the bacterial flora of the gut can be healed and properly reestablished.  Proponents of the diet say it can take years to heal the gut.  On the diet, meats and fats are championed, as are many well-cooked vegetables.  For carbohydrates, honey and some fruits and nuts are allowed, but not necessarily emphasized.  Bone broths and probiotic supplementation are highly encouraged and considered mandatory.  Gluten and casein are restricted, but with the hope that they can one day be reintroduced after the gut has undergone its healing.  The diet is recommended for those with autism, schizophrenia, and other psychological disorders among a wide range of other illnesses – from constipation to food allergies.

I’m very thankful for having encountered Campbell-McBride, as it was her that got me thinking beyond the simple concept of what is and is not healthy – and thinking instead of targeted strategies to overcome specific problems.  It was this mindset that led me to identify low metabolism/body temperature as a specific problem – later developing a strategy for addressing it.

But that doesn’t mean I’m supportive of the GAPS diet.  In all honesty, I think it’s a pretty poor strategy that applies to only a rare few, and the system itself lacks a great deal of understanding about the collective functioning of the entire human organism – such as the ties between metabolic rate and countless digestive processes.

Take for example constipation.  When we take a broad look at the processes involved with transit time, stool moisture and volume, and other factors – we can see that it’s certainly not just a matter of what takes place with gut flora and the villi.  There are many factors that contribute, much more dominant factors at that, many of them being inseparably tied to rate of metabolism.

To keep this post from being book length, let me briefly point out the metabolism-digestion link.  Keep in mind that diets low in carbohydrates, or even diets that are overly restrictive and monotonous, which GAPS usually ends up being – can be highly detrimental to metabolic rate – my main criticism of basically all diets and other “health” interventions.

Metabolism controls the strength of the gastric secretions.  How well you digest your food – and how well it is broken down during the early stages of digestion depend on metabolic rate, gastrin secretion (governed in large part by thyroid), etc.  Thus, the first step of digestion is very metabolic.

How long food sits in your stomach depends upon metabolism too.  Delayed stomach emptying, or gastroparesis, is a frequent result of a slow metabolism.  You might see other apertures remaining open, allowing stomach acid to flow up the esophagus as in acid reflux/GERD when metabolism is low.  I experienced this phenomenon myself on several different diets, and even had this problem spring up from doing excessive hiking.  It didn’t matter what I ate.  Until I raised my metabolic rate, it did not go away.  It has been gone for many years now, except for brief periods when it has reemerged due to doing something metabolically stupid.

Metabolism largely controls the rate at which food passes through the digestive tract as well.  The mammal with the lowest metabolic rate also happens to have the longest bowel transit time (sloth).  When food travels through the digestive tract more slowly, fibers and sugars ferment excessively.  This can lead to gas, bloating, bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine/SIBO (presumed to be the cause of most cases of IBS thanks to the work of Mark Pimentel at the gastroenterology department at Cedars-Sinai), constipation, changes in bacterial flora, diverticulosis, and disorders attributable to straining at stool time – anal fissures, hemorrhoids, and perhaps even varicose veins.

Metabolism even seems to have some direct impact on gut permeability (leaky gut) and the strength of the gut wall.  As was observed in prolonged calorie-restriction…

“There is reason to believe that the epithelial lining of the gastrointestinal tract becomes more permeable to microorganisms in severe undernutrition.  The morphological changes in the intestinal tract would strongly suggest this.”

It’s well known that the rate in which new tissues are regenerated, as in wound healing, goes up and down with the rate of metabolism.  I even suspect that rebuilding the strength of the gut wall and repairing a damaged gut can be accelerated by metabolic increase – making more headway in a shorter period of time than with the use of other isolated approaches.  Like GAPS for example.

Overall GAPS is a speculative approach to fixing an isolated area.  One who follows the diet takes it on faith that the diet is performing healing work, but there’s no real way of knowing if this is actually occurring or not.  It seems more like a story to me, one that is partly true but may be riddled with far too much fiction.  A Santa Claus story if you will.

I understand that there can be many short-term symptom improvements in many health problems, but this is probably not too different from the honeymoon period one can find on any number of new eating regimes – from raw foodism to fasting to juicing to veganism to Paleo to carb restriction to removing various allergenic foods, all of which are fraught with danger from a long-term metabolic standpoint.

If decreasing metabolic rate is capable of contributing to heartburn, gastroparesis, gas, bloating, diverticulosis, hemorrhoids, constipation, IBS, gut permeability, and more – and the GAPS diet really does lower metabolic rate as often as my personal communications with others suggest, then I suspect the diet probably causes more digestive problems than it heals.  This says nothing of the barbaric restrictiveness and social crippling provided by the diet.  And it speaks nothing about the Santa-length list of health problems outside of the digestive tract that can surface as metabolism falls (problems with fertility, sex drive, menstruation, sexual function, sleep, anxiety, and so forth).

There is no diet or program or health pursuit that doesn’t have both positive and negative outcomes for those testing ‘em out.  There are successes and failures in every arena.  It is fair to recognize and discuss openly what those failures are, and why they occur.  Don’t get too swept away and infatuated with the idea that a few hard years of GAPS is going to deliver the health you are looking for.  You might totally ruin your health working so hard to get healthy.  There are real risks and real downsides to the approach.

I would be cautious about probiotic supplementation as well.  Many digestive problems stem from “probiotics” inhabiting portions of the digestive tract that should be sterile.  Mark Pimentel at Cedars Sinai certainly doesn’t use them – noting his belief that they can be fuel on the fire, and even the Rubins – who I will be discussing the GAPS diet with in an upcoming podcast, have noted that even people who have been taking antibiotics for long periods of time still show adequate or even excessive amounts of these “healthy bacteria” in the gut.

Anyway, in closing I will share with you what someone wanted to be shared with those blindly following GAPS without any clue as to the potential negatives.  This is not necessarily something to attribute directly to GAPS as it is low carbohydrate consumption and excessive fluid intake, but low-carbohydrate consumption happens by default on the diet, as does fluid intake with the broth-o-philia.  I would pay particular attention to this if low-carbohydrate or overly-restricted eating has resulted in frequent, clear urination (polyuria) or muscle cramping. You’ll notice many of the common themes in her symptomology that lots of people can experience with carbohydrate and/or calorie restriction – most of it metabolic in origin…

0 Stalling the Aging Metabolism

 

My girlfriend’s daughter just turned 7.  We were eating some food at a restaurant the other day and I watched her eat 2 cheeseburgers, half an order of French fries, a small milkshake, and a few good sips of a soft drink.  I looked up all the nutrition data for her meal, and it totaled, by modest estimates, 1,200 calories.  She weighs a whopping 49 pounds.  That day she consumed over 2,500 calories.  No I don’t meticulously count all her calories.  But I did that day because her appetite was extraordinarily large, and well, you know, I’m a nerd.  Metabolism has been the epicenter of my research for the last several years, and that’s just too impressive not to calculate and ponder.

To put it into perspective, that single meal equaled nearly 25 calories per pound of bodyweight – in 15 minutes flat.  For a 200-pound adult male that would be 5,000 calories.  And she’s lost 3 pounds in the last 10 weeks eating that way.

Yeah, metabolic rate declines as we age.  The declines with aging are inevitable.  We’ll probably never see an 80-year old win a gold medal in a 100 Meter sprint at the Olympics.  I think the oldest ever was an ancient 32.  But there are a great many things we can do via our diets and lifestyles to either hasten the decline, slow the decline, or in some cases even reverse the decline.  To better understand this, we turn to some really basic principles of how our bodies work, and a shift in thinking when it comes to how we look at diet and exercise…

In the 20^th century, people looked at nutrition in a very Neanderthal-like manner.

“Cholesterol bad.  Saturated fat bad.  Saturated fat raise cholesterol.  Saturated fat cause heart disease.  Me eat canola oil instead.  Me fat.  Me eat less Wooly Mammoth.  Me eat only lean cuts Wooly Mammoth.  Me cook Wooly Mammoth on Foreman George.  Me burn more calories on stairmaster.”

But this ain’t the 20^th century anymore.  We don’t use typewriters or travel agents, and kids don’t even want Lite Brites anymore.  And those things were totally sweet.  Instead, we recognize that, like bellbottoms and parachute pants, the relationship between the food we eat and things like blood cholesterol levels are not direct, but indirect.  Okay, that was a terrible metaphor that made no sense, but I squeeze in parachute pants whenever I can. Halloween is just around the corner.  I hope to squeeze into some then.  They’ve gotten tighter every year since age 30, when the first major hallmarks of aging start to set in.

Fashion from the past aside, what I mean by a shift in thinking in how we see nutrition and exercise is this…

As we age, statistically-speaking, we consume fewer calories, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less salt, less sugar, and the list goes on.  We consume less of everything “naughty” because appetite decreases with aging.  We eat less of everything, period.  And, parallel with that decreased consumption we see rises in cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, body fat, blood sugar, rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and well, pretty much everything undesirable.

The reason?  Could it be something other than butter and steak and apple pie that causes these changes?  Well gee whiz I think it might!  Decline in metabolism?  You betcha!

All of the changes mentioned can pretty neatly be tied back to our rate of cellular energy production and respiration.  The higher the rate of cellular respiration and energy production, or metabolic intensity you could call it, the better one’s health, body composition, hormonal balance, cellular repair, longevity stats, and so on.

“…increasing cellular energy production appears to improve EVERYTHING, and follow-up research is underway to look at immunity, strength, endurance, and cardiovascular health.” 

-Stephen Cherniske; The Metabolic Plan

Does your diet and lifestyle have an impact on metabolic intensity?  Of course it does.  It has a huge impact – an impact larger than probably any two other factors.  But it’s not a neat and direct impact such as the small, temporary, and insignificant rise you might see in blood pressure when you have a few too many Doritos, or the half pound you might lose after a week of obediently grinding out time on a treadmill.  It’s more of a long-term impact, and one that has little to do with various health religions, most of which revolve around some puritanical, joyless, restricted diet or self-assaulting and/or ridiculous New Age workout.

If I had to trim the concept of aging down to an oversimplified summary, I would call it the outcome of a lengthy tug-of-war battle between the body’s hormonal forces of building vs. breaking down.  This is referred to as the anabolic vs. the catabolic.  This can probably further be distilled down to what goes on in the adrenal glands, and the battle of DHEA vs. cortisol.

We know more and more each year about the balance between these pivotal opposing forces.  Most of the major things we can do to enhance metabolism and DHEA and decrease our exposure to cortisol are far out of line with typical healthy eating guidelines.  With our diets, the major metabolism promoters and cortisol suppressors are what I call the “Anti-stress S’s.”  They are, primarily…

1)      Salt

2)      Sugar

3)      Starch – Potatoes, yams, rice, oats, beans, and others

4)      Saturated fat – Red meat, dairy products, coconut, chocolate

These are the de-stressing foods – the things you crave when you have gone too long without food, have done some hard exercise or overexerted yourself somehow, have been dieting, have experienced some kind of emotional turbulence, have been forcing yourself to drink tons of water and tea because some bonehead said it was good for you (that bonehead being everybody, more or less), or haven’t been sleeping enough.  If you can’t remember these, at least remember to eat foods that you enjoy and crave.  The lower the metabolism gets, the more important these foods become.  Salt and sugar seem to be particularly potent, and exceptionally maligned by those with eating disorders (nutritionists, dieticians, internet health gurus).  The opposite of eating foods you enjoy would be to do some hard dieting of some sort.  Cut out the carbs or calories, do some vegan dieting or a cleanse – that will cleanse you all right – cleanse you of DHEA, sex hormones, strength, and an immune system.  To name just a few of the downsides.

In terms of lifestyle, the factors that will give you the best youthful metabolic preservation are…

1)      Sleep – the king of all destressors

2)      Anything that decreases psychological/emotional stress – different for everyone and relative to what you find stressful and unstressful

3)      Exercise – particularly strength training and speed training, but not too much, and not if you injure yourself doing it (although to get more exercise, all most people really need to do is decrease their total screen time in front of computers, tv’s, and smart phones to as close to ZERO as possible while still functioning in society)

Simple I know.  Or you could get wrapped up in a bunch of minutiae and supplement propaganda and advanced training strategies and other magic wands and potions and get nowhere (unless you call reading health websites in your spare time somewhere).  Sorry, but the keys to good health aren’t New and Improved or residing in some traditional custom in an undiscovered Himalayan village somewhere.  They are simple, and very basic.  And they go with the flow of what our bodies actually seek, not against it.  Or as I say, “The Health Gods are much kinder than I ever expected.”

0 Why I Don’t Eat Pork

 

In 2006, my natural contrarian tendencies getting the best of me, I decided that fat, not carbohydrates or protein, was the bestest thing ever.  So I embarked on a diet with roughly 70% of my calories coming from fat.  In all the world’s anti-fat hysteria, they must have missed what is truly the optimal human diet.  Or so I led myself to believe as I watched my abs pop out, my moods stabilize, my cravings for all of those “poisonous” modern foods disappear, and so on.  Pork was a huge centerpiece of my menu, especially in Hawaii where tasty pork bellies abound and you can go to a supermarket and pick up weird piggy stuff like the pig’s head shown left (that’s me holding it).

But by spring of 2008 I started noticing something a little bothersome.  It started when I would lay out at the beach, soaking up Hawaiian sun.  I would go to sit up, flip over, or perform some other rigorous task endemic to Hawaiian life, and a pain in the center of my chest would hit me like a brick wall, forcing me to roll over onto my side and sit up other ways.  The trials!  The tribulations!

Over the next few years, the pain in my chest would come and go.  It would get worse, and then better.  I would start getting excited that it had gone, then it would hit me harder than ever.  I never really could make any connections to what caused it.  It seemed to surface during my low-carb era, so I distanced myself from that diet as much as possible – thinking it would go away.  But even eating very little fat or going on brief, fruity vegan stints, the pain in the chest wouldn’t go away.

Finally, in 2011 I decided, despite my better judgment, to do a weird dietary experiment known as RBTI.  Pork is restricted on the diet, and although I had serious doubts that pork was inherently harmful somehow, it didn’t take but a few weeks before I noticed the chest pains had improved.  After a few months I realized that they had really, seriously, gone – as in totally eradicated.  There were many facets to this peculiar dietary regime, and I still didn’t know what, specifically, had led to the chest pains going away.  But I soon found out.

I ate some sausage on a pizza after roughly 8 months of completely avoiding pork – not just the meat but also avoiding pork gelatin, pork fat, and for a while even avoiding touching pork or eating from cookware that had cooked pork before.  And, sure as shit as they say, the chest pains came back and lasted for several days.

Since that time I have had two distinct instances where the chest pains came back very slightly – just enough to be noticeable for a few days each round.  Nothing very severe but an unmistakable feeling.  Once was after eating some roasted marshmallows around a campfire, and another time I was stumped.  I definitely hadn’t eaten any pork.  I hadn’t eaten marshmallows or pork gelatin or anything.  But after it came and went after a predictable time period of a few days I realized that it was from handling pork bacon on two consecutive days – cooking it over a campfire and serving it to two lovely ladies.  Kosher beef weenies for this dogg.

I also must say that, for the first time as far as I know, I developed a very strong aversion to pork.  Something about ham, bacon, sausage, pork chops, and all that stuff I used to eat like a boss seems completely and totally revolting.  I have deleted a lot of stuff out of my diet at various points in my experimental eating career, but it never made a food revolting.  It usually made it more attractive.  But pork?  Yuck.  It’s been a strange adventure.

Anyway, that’s why I, personally, avoid pork.  Plus I got to see several hundred sets of urine chemistry in the last year or so, and pork shows up in an eerily predictable manner in many people’s urine chemistry.  In the world of RBTI, pork is perhaps best known for elevating the urea levels in the urine in proportion to other test values.  And high levels of urea in your urine will give you the stamp of having “chest pain,” a hard heartbeat, and/or pain in the left shoulder depending on how high they are.

There’s a lot of taboo surrounding pork.  Some people just think it’s gross instinctively.  Many others claim that it is toxic for dogs and cats to eat, and makes their pets sick.  There are multiple religions and cultures that forbid consumption of pork to the extent that some followers have been known to turn to cannibalism before eating a fat, juicy hog.  Pork seems to be one of the quickest foods to be shunned without an abundance of evidence as to why a person shouldn’t eat it.  There’s certainly a weird and mystical aura surrounding it as a food item unlike any other food – spanning many religious beliefs, cultures, continents, and centuries.  While I don’t generally hold tradition, culture, or religion in high regard, I can’t dismiss it all as moronic and devoid of credibility.

In terms of modern scientific evidence against pork consumption, the evidence that was the catalyst for my recommendation against the consumption of pork (and poultry) in favor of other meats was that pork fat has the highest concentration of arachidonic acid of any known fat.  Arachidonic acid is a type of fat that is highly involved in many inflammatory processes, and reduction of dietary arachidonic acid intake has been found in some cases to immediately reduce the incidence of over-inflammatory conditions like asthma.  Floyd Chilton’s book Inflammation Nation is a good read on this topic.  I wrote about Floyd “Ski” Chilton and his work in a post a while back.

But if you would like some further reading on some scientific perspectives damning pork, try reading the Weston A. Price Foundation’s article showing blood changes from consuming pork, as well as Paul Jaminet’s series on pork.

0 How We Get Fat

No this is not a book review of Gary Taubes’s Why We Get Fat.  Rather, this is a post about the reality of how people pack on extra weight minus Taubes’s incorrect and shortsighted assessment of biochemistry.

A question I get as often, or more often than any other, is “Well then, what does cause people to become fat?”  Believe it or not, this question involves more than just a one-word response, such as “carbs” or “fat” or “junk” or “stress” or “calories.”

I’m finding it difficult to coax some people who really need a dense calorie supply in order to normalize their metabolic rate into eating common foods.  It seems that many people who gravitate towards strange diets find a lot of comfort in the strangeness of their diet because there are a lot of people that eat “normal” and are obese and sick.  Eating abnormally provides a feeling of security that, because you don’t eat like Uncle Diabetes, you therefore cannot ever have diabetes – as if food is the only factor, or even the primary factor, in diabetes… and it probably isn’t.  Hence the frequency of hearing the “How do we get fat?” question when I recommend stocking the freezer with Haagen-Dazs.

For starters, there is no one macronutrient – be it carbohydrates, fat, or protein that causes us to become fat.  One is not really better than the other.  Although there are a few errors, Lyle McDonald lays out a pretty fair summary of the equality among macronutrients when it comes to fat storage in his very own article entitled How We Get Fat.

I thought I would share some common ways that people gain fat in the first place.  Like anything intelligent, it won’t pin it all on one villain, but will take an honest look at what is a multifactorial process.  Here are 10 of the biggest contributors to an increase in body fat…

1)      Binge Eating – Eating a ton of food doesn’t always cause fat gain.  I have some followers that report eating in excess of 8,000 calories per day without following a structured exercise program that have been in fat balance (storing and burning the same amount of fat, and thus not increasing total body fat levels) for a year or longer.  My girlfriend’s daughter who I mention a lot, is just finishing up the equivalent of a 5,000 calorie meal for a full-sized adult.  Eating a ton doesn’t cause fat to accumulate outright.

Binge eating only seems to be particularly fattening when done in a reduced metabolic state, frequently, and/or done while on a restricted diet.  For example, if you are on a low-fat diet that suppresses fat oxidation, and binge on ice cream, you’ll probably store a lot more fat than you burn until that becomes your normal way of eating and your metabolism adjusts to the higher fat and higher calorie intake.  Of course, the gaining of weight and increase in metabolic rate that accompanies the fat gain is your body’s way of healing itself from a suppressed metabolism.  For many, some short-term fat gain is necessarily to achieve peak function.

I think this is why dieting is so fattening long-term, as dieting increases the tendency to binge eat, particularly on foods you have restricted.  This is particularly problematic, as eating a low-carb diet for a long time can make carbs additionally fattening.  Likewise, eating a low-fat diet for a long time can make fatty foods additionally fattening.  You could further break this down to say that eating in any way that reduces the tastiness of the food will cause a return to better food to be fattening in the short-term.  So be careful about eating a diet that you can’t continue.

You can imagine the redundancy with which I am told that “adding ‘x’ food back to my diet makes me gain weight.”  Dietary restriction causes self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you believe that “x” food is making you fat, taking it out of your diet and then putting it back in later will often make you gain weight – one of the reasons I look at dietary restriction as a last resort unlike most nutrition gurus.

But you have to ask yourself a question.  Is it the binge eating or the restriction that actually causes the fat gain?  Without prior restriction, eating a ton of food isn’t nearly as fattening, nor is the desire to binge present.  A gun must be loaded for it to actually kill someone when you pull the trigger.  I’ll let you answer that one for yourself, as it is obvious that I view the restriction, not the calories one consumes, as the primer for fat gain.

2)      Chronic Stress – Acute stress doesn’t seem to have a fattening effect.  Stress of any kind often has a short-term fat lowering effect.  But there’s something about chronic stress, day after day, month after month, that has a fat accumulating property for many people.  My mom, for example, has gained 20 pounds in the last 10 years.  She gained 10 pounds in a month when switching to a new job without noticing any other changes to her diet and lifestyle.  A few years later she switched to a new job again and put on another 10 in a month.  Thus, she gained 20 pounds in 10 years, despite remaining perfectly weight stable for 118 out of the last 120 months.

This is how most people accumulate fat – in quick bursts followed by a stabilization of weight at a slightly higher set point.  This weight comes during stress, or immediately after stress – similarly to what would happen to people if they cycled on and off of amphetamines.  This is because immediate stress decreases appetite and stimulates metabolism, but it does damage to the thyroid gland so that when the stress is finally removed, or the body adjusts to the stress, the metabolic rate is lower and appetite is higher.

Stress can be psychological or physiological due to inflammation, injury, or otherwise.  Humans will probably always have the worst obesity problems because of our complex psychology and complex interaction with food.

3)      Lack of sleep – For similar reasons as stress, the declining amount of time of the average night’s sleep over the past couple of centuries is a big factor in weight problems.  Lack of sleep, like any stress, decreases metabolic rate and often increases appetite along with it.  It only takes a few nights with little sleep to trigger pretty severe insulin resistance, a metabolic state typically seen with obesity.

4)      Television – Television, as well as the use of computers, video games, etc. causes a large reduction in brain wave activity and non-exercise physical activity (NEPA).  Television in particular, which the average American watches 4 hours of daily, puts the brain into a low-alpha wave, high serotonin state – putting the body into a fattening state similar to a bear right before hibernation.  The sort of iconic portrait of obesity would be mindless eating in front of a television, and this is probably somewhat accurate – as engulfing lots of food in a metabolically-suppressed state can certainly add body fat.

5)      Erratic exercise patterns – In my own personal history, I have found erratic exercise patterns to be the single biggest source of cumulative fat gain.  Going from exercising a lot to exercising very little often triggers some short-term weight gain before the body acclimates to the change.  And this weight doesn’t spontaneously come off in any hurry.

6)      Pregnancy – Men and women during pregnancy gain over 10 pounds on average.  Many women eventually have a surge of weight gain with pregnancy that doesn’t resolve itself afterward, especially in the mid to late 30’s and beyond.

7)      Age – Age is of course the greatest stimulus for fat gain, related primarily to the decrease in metabolic rate that occurs with aging.  It certainly isn’t related to increased fat, carbohydrate, or calorie consumption – as consumption of all three of those decreases with advancing age.

8)      Food – The food we eat does have an impact on long-term metabolic rate and thus proneness to store excess fat.  Of all the foods I’ve investigated, the most likely to cause a long-term worsening of metabolic rate are foods containing a large quantity of unsaturated fats.  So our modern junk foods like potato chips, French fries, doughnuts, fried foods, mayonnaise, salad dressings, margarine, and most commercial packaged foods – as well as a high consumption of pork and poultry, certainly appear to contribute.

9)      Heredity – Many of the above factors impact the metabolic programming of a young child during pregnancy and during the early developmental period.  Heredity is obviously the biggest of all factors when it comes to the propensity for storing excess fat in the modern environment.  Obesity researchers estimate that heredity is more than half of the contribution to any individual’s weight.  Studies of identical twins make this the most abundantly clear, as most twins will gain the same amount of fat, stored in the same parts of the body in the same proportions, and gain the fat at the same age even if they are reared in different households.  Certain ethnic groups are a lot more prone to fat gain as well.  Generally-speaking the whiter you are the less obesity prone you will be, which is even true when controlled for socioeconomic status (another well-known fattening factor).

10)  Medication – Medications like anti-depressants, corticosteroids, and birth control pills, just to name a few, are very fattening.  Many gain a great deal of excess fat while taking these medications.

Remember that this is just a list of contributing factors looked at in isolation, and there are dozens of others.  The bigger picture that I want people to see is more the interaction with several factors at once, creating sort of a perfect storm for fat gain.  And even when there is a perfect storm for fat gain, in my experience most people still gain their fat in brief periods of a month or two, while spending most of their lives perfectly weight stable whether retreating to some harsh diet or not.  Hope it helps some to better understand their own personal fat fluctuation history.  YOU can become weight stable.  And you can probably do it eating just about whatever the hell you want.  In other words, you don’t have to drink 1 percent milk. You could drink whole if you wanted to.

0 Fat Loss Secret

 

Everybody wants to know the secret to fat loss.  Today, I’m going to reveal it using one of the people I talk I will not show this young gentleman’s face or reveal his name.  We will call him Coldmember.  He’s Dutch.  Age 20.  On the left you can see his impressive and very inspiring before and multiple after shots.  Now that’s what I call ripped!

He attained much of this “physique improvement,” in a nutshell, by cycling up and down in bodyweight while doing lots of resistance training/weight training.  He would bulk up and build as much mass and strength as possible, and then reduce calories as little as was required to get slowly and steadily leaner.  It was a good strategy.  Slow, steady, and smart.  At one point he actually had extremely low body fat while NEVER going below 3,000 calories daily.  He describes his metabolism at that time as being pretty solid with lots of body warmth and a high sex drive – two of the more reliable indicators of a good functioning metabolism.

I would say that this method of fat loss is the safest, most reliable, and least detrimental of all fat loss methods formally known and commonly used.  So if you were looking for a big secret to fat loss, well, that’s the secret I guess.  Although it’s really not that big of a secret, nor does it happen to be all that safe and realistic of an approach for older persons, people with less than militant discipline, or people with a damaged metabolism.  This is, of course, why I investigate alternatives that may be better, healthier, and realistic for “normal” people.

But this post isn’t about the big secret to losing fat.  This post is about fat loss’s secret – the secret that fat loss doesn’t want you to know about.  And Coldmember has got plenty of secrets not revealed in a before and after snapshot.  We’re far from being done with how he got from the before picture to the ripped ones.

The danger with this type of pursuit, in my experience, is that tinkering with your diet leads to more tinkering with your diet.  And tinkering with your diet is like playing roulette, with the extreme dangers and risks swept under the rug by diet gurus who don’t want to face the prospect that their well-intended dietary beliefs could be harmful.

Plus, no one ever looks in the mirror and says, “Wow, okay.  I think I look exactly perfect!”  Even if they did, they wouldn’t necessarily stay looking that way or lose the desire for improvement.  And in today’s day and age, with endless dietary philosophies scattered about – all of them “making sense” the more you expose yourself to one line of thinking (with the added fuel of powerful short-term testimonies that target your irrational emotional desires)… it’s hard not to fall prey to ”the next big thing.”

In Coldmember’s case, his first big plunge into the downward spiral of fat loss came when he went from  a relatively sane and effective approach at changing his body composition, and began practicing intermittent fasting in a poorly-designed way.  He would feast one day on 4000 to 5000 calories roughly, and then fast completely the next day.  He continued alternating with fasting and feasting – his first big step into the world of extremism, until he started to notice some metabolic problems for the first time.

Next he fell for the strangely seductive 80-10-10 raw vegan diet (a diet where fruit provides 90% of one’s caloric energy).  For 6 months he followed it to the best of his ability, getting extremely lean but also losing a considerable amount of muscle mass as shown in the before and after of his legs.  His strength fell approximately in half despite continuiing to do at least some weight training.

That didn’t work so well, so the next logical step was of course to try a zero carb diet!  From fruit only to meat only he went, until he drove himself to the brink of his own extinction.

And I don’t use the word “extinction” lightly.  At his low point he had no sex drive of course, but it was worse than that.  He had driven himself completely mad with conspiracy theories, developed strong suicidal tendencies, and his body was in hormonal shambles.  His diastolic blood pressure reached 35.  He could not walk down the street, much less work out.  Some days it took him 10 minutes just to get his pants on and buttoned up.  His adrenals were shot.  He was producing well below the accepted range in cortisol.

Here are some of his more relevant hormone tests.  Notice, and this is extremely important – his maintenance calories (calorie intake at which your weight stays the same) dropped by more than half, which represents a massive decline in metabolic rate, but his thyroid hormone levels are all (albeit barely) in the acceptable range.  This guy was freezing cold drinking coffee next to a heater in summer with two jackets on, which is why exterior indicators of metabolic health (body heat, body temp, warmth of hands and feet, biofeedback like sex drive) are usually more useful than a snapshot of actual blood hormone values.  But holy peanut balls look at his testosterone values alongside of the reference ranges.  Yikes.  Click on the image once on this screen and once on the next to enlarge it to where you can actually read the thing.  No it’s not English but I’m sure you can decode most of it.  Coldmember did not send me an after pic of his balls, but if he did I would recommend that he eat the hell out of some food to enlarge that image.

Anyway, thanks to a little hormone replacement therapy, Coldmember was able to live.  He’s convinced that HRT, cortisone in particular, saved his life and while that wasn’t the only thing that could have saved his life, I wouldn’t argue with that.  This was damn close to being a diet death.  And all of the after photos were taken very close to his low point.  While some of you, guys especially, may have been really enamored with those lean photos at first glance - take a moment to realize that you were seeing photos of a suicidal nearly-dead 20-year old with no sex drive that couldn’t even walk without getting lightheaded and almost passing out.  This is not health.  This is a modern fantasy.  Being really lean looks like it would be fun, but it usually isn’t, especially if you use extreme dieting tactics – completely ignoring your body’s signals, to achieve it.  What we’re really looking at here is Auschwitz if they had a nice weight training facility.

Don’t worry.  He’ll be fine.  He’s already seeing drastic changes take place since our first talk on Saturday.  If you would like I can do a follow-up post on the general strategy we’re aiming for to get him back on track.  Let me know if that’s something you would like to see in a comment, and I’ll see if I can get that post out early next week.

0 Tips To Cut 200 Calories a Day

Cutting 200 calories a day is one of the ways to ascertain healthy being. Such an initiative could also help you lose weight within a short span. One of the common presumptions is that you need to be on a diet to lose weight. The notion does not hold true as cutting calories is another way to achieve desired weight.

Following a rigid diet schedule does not make any sense at all as, but puts individuals’ health at risk. Changing eating habits or making some dietary changes that cuts down 200 calories each day is a healthy way to lose excess body weight.

Healthy Alternatives

• Slimmed-down dishes should be preferred over higher-calorie meals.
• Green vegetables instead of heavy meat recipes.
• Milk, cheese and butter along with other dairy products to fulfil everyday caloric requirement.
• Skimmed milk should be swapped with cream milk.
• A soup with pureed vegetables, stews and casseroles is another excellent food option.
• Whole grains with vegetables like sandwiches and salads should be included in everyday meals.

Caloric Reduction

• Decreasing meal proportion every day is the easiest way to cut down calories in everyday regimen.
• Opt for meal after looking at its ingredients, as meal contents make a significant difference for both health and weight.
• Ensure that you have enough energy to withstand all day.

Healthy Drinks for Calorie Cutting

Most of us don’t account fizzy and sugary drinks. These are often consumed along snacks like burger or potato munchies, which overload us with calories without providing energy of the same proportion. Therefore, fizzy drinks containing artificial sweeteners should be abstained from. On similar lines, pre-packed fruit drinks are highly calorific. Therefore, give a second though before going for it.

Others Unhealthy Foods to be Avoided

• Healthy snacks within meals such as fruit or nuts should be preferred over high-calorie chocolates.
• Cereal-based breakfast needs to be replaced with protein-based breakfast.
• Avoid carbohydrate diet that brings hunger early and one gets starved to go for munchies early.
• Fried food is unhealthy owing to excessive amount of trans fat. Therefore, roasted and stewed preparations must be preferred in order to cut 200 calories a day.
• Processed foodstuffs are calorific than fresh foods, therefore, later should be consumed.
• Another calorie cutting tip is consumption of lean meat.
• In order to subtract 200 calories every day, one needs to cut out sodas and liquor too.

0 How Much Protein Do You Need to Build Muscle?

 

In short, not very much.  Not very much at all.  That’s the short answer.  Perhaps 5% of caloric intake at the very most.

But this is NOT the whole story of course.

While many reading this may not be interested in building muscle, it is still a very fascinating topic that provides many insights into how the body works.  Most people are more interested in shrinking, not getting bigger (talking about the whole body, not certain parts!).  And the funny thing is – that’s when protein really is very useful.  Unless of course you want to lose more muscle mass than fat so you can be a marathon runner or runway model or something.  Or you want to be a wealthy Manhattan woman for Halloween or something.  Then by all means lose weight on a low-calorie raw vegan diet.  It’s unparalleled for lean tissue loss.  Plus, who wants to be carrying around a huge, heavy brain?  It’s a terrible burden (yes, your brain is part of your lean tissue, and it, along with all your vital organs, can shrink from dieting).

There are a lot of myths about protein intake.  Most bodybuilding information suggests that protein intake needs to be, at the very least, 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight.  For me that might be, oh, 170 grams let’s say.  Some would recommend TWICE that much!

But I just built more muscle than I ever have in my life and increased my squat and deadlift by 80 pounds each over the last 3 months eating below 100 grams of protein per day on a near vegetarian diet.  The trick?  Ah, calorie surplus.  The most relied upon technique for building muscle.

In a calorie surplus you can’t help but grow new lean tissue.  It’s automatic.  Even laying around doing nothing, the average person will gain about a ¼ pound of lean tissue for every pound they gain when intentionally overfeeding.  Doing some weightlifting ensures even more growth.

The higher the calorie intake, the lower the protein requirements for maintaining muscle mass.  30 grams of protein per day is sufficient for maintaining muscle mass or what is called “nitrogen balance” if you are a normal sized adult male – assuming your calorie intake is quite high.  And it doesn’t take much above that level to trigger muscle growth.

Each pound of new muscle contains about 150 grams of protein.  Hypothetically, a person could still grow a pound of muscle in 10 days with only 15 grams of protein above what is required to maintain nitrogen balance.  And if you are eating, say, 5000+ calories per day like I did from February to the end of April, 45 grams of protein daily equates to only 3.6% of all dietary calories coming from protein.  Virtually every food on earth has a higher protein content than that (excluding candy and sweetened drinks).  Thus, eating lots of calories ensures adequate protein for muscle growth.

Keep in mind that human breast milk is only about 6% protein.  And there is plenty of lean tissue gains on a diet of exclusively mother’s milk at 6% protein.

The average American diet is around 15% protein – on the high end of protein consumption worldwide.  Yet bodybuilders throw around all kinds of numbers like 30% protein, 40% protein, and sometimes even higher!

So the answer to the question “How Much Protein Do You Need to Build Muscle?” is not a simple one.  There may be lots of people out there giving simple answers – perhaps to keep people from the tiring activity of thinking about it.  But the answer is not simple.  It depends entirely on the context.  So let’s examine a different context…

How much protein do you need to build muscle while you are in a calorie deficit?  Ha!  Eat as much protein as you like.  And even lift as many weights as you like.  You are unlikely to see any muscle gains at all.  If you do, it will likely last only for a short-time before it comes to a halt.  Take calories low enough and you will lose tons of muscle even eating 200+ grams of protein per day and doing even the most well-designed weight training program for growth.

How about eating a more or less “maintenance” level of calories (whatever that is… One guy who follows the site is eating over 8,000 calories per day and his weight is steady – despite doing only small amounts of exercise… Chief is evidently eating “below maintenance calories” with daily 5-plate buffet splurges on his unique high-calorie weight loss program)?

Aha!  Alas we have found the reason why bodybuilders eat an absolute crapload of protein!  It seems to have almost a dose-response-like impact on one’s ability to grow muscle tissue while at maintenance calories.  While it will be slow goin’ in terms of how fast you can build muscle, if you want to build muscle without eating a ton of calories, protein indeed can help.  Likewise, in a recent overfeeding study, it was found that those eating the diets with the highest percentage of their calories from protein gained the most lean mass.

So there is some validity to high protein intakes for muscle growth, but calories still trump protein overall when it comes to gaining muscle.  And carbohydrates play just as big of a role, if not an even more important role in lean tissue gains – helping protein to be deposited into muscle cells instead of being burned for energy.  As Jamie Eason, perhaps the most visible female fitness model on earth if you look at how many magazine covers and advertisements she has been featured in says, “If I want to grow more muscle, I just eat more carbs.”  I agree.  I had a hell of a time growing muscle on a high-protein diet because my carbs were too low.

No surprises there, as nearly all competitive bodybuilders eat carbs and protein together religiously when trying to put on size.

But I still have one problem with all the high-protein fanaticism when it comes to muscle growth… Protein lowers appetite.  It also takes the most calories to digest, so there are many wasted calories on a high-protein diet.  Excess protein also seems to have a long-term metabolism-lowering effect (which impairs muscle growth and exercise performance), perhaps due to the previous two factors – perhaps for other reasons (like excesses of tryptophan slowing down metabolic rate).

If calories are the single most important factor in achieving muscle growth, with protein functioning like an added bonus, and protein reduces net calories ingested and reduces appetite – it makes it really hard to eat enough total food to grow muscle if protein intake truly becomes too high – like well above 25% of calorie intake.  In other words, I might have fared better overfeeding with more protein, but that is just a hypothetical scenario.  No way I could have eaten 5,000 calories per day trying to choke down egg whites, tuna, skim milk, protein shakes – or even fattier cuts of beef.

My official stance on muscle growth would thus be… eat the food (ETF).  It’s probably a mistake that so many young weight lifters are reaching first for the protein powder and cans of tuna when they first start lifting weights.  I made that mistake in my youth as well, and didn’t get very far with my training.

The times when you really should think about prioritizing protein above other macronutrients is when you are doing enough exercise to trigger weight loss, or losing weight because you’re not eating much.  At least, this would be wise if you care anything about your ratio of muscle mass to body fat (hopefully you don’t… my life was certainly much better before I ever thought about such a thing!).

Currently I’m doing some weightlifting AND I’m hiking quite a bit – maybe 30 miles a week.  And my history with hiking shows me that strength and muscle mass decrease significantly with this amount of hiking unless you eat a ton of protein or do resistance exercise with it.  I’m doing both.  I want to protect this strength and muscle I put on.  With any interest in toning up muscles and keeping them strong, eating a low-protein diet or relying exclusively on endurance exercise for weight loss is a great way to worsen your body composition long-term – especially knowing that your chances of rebound weight gain are thought to coincide with the amount of muscle mass you lose while dropping weight.