ecwholic

From http://www.geocities.com/elitemadcow1/Topics/Diet.htm,


What Is a Reasonable Diet?



First, a lot of BBers claim that diet is 90% of everything - that's some nice crap to spew when a guy is running the test levels of 20 men, has no performance criteria whatsoever to be judged by, and even a horrible training stimulus will still get him results. The bottom line is that for an experienced natural or someone who isn't living on large dosages of drugs, as long as your diet is "reasonable" you will gain muscle and get stronger only if the training is in line and provides your body with a need for adaptation. I'm not saying diet isn't a big key, what I'm saying is that once it's in the "reasonable" stage for adding muscle - training is king and substantial effort in that area will compensate one far greater than tweaking some trace mineral balance (so the 90% is true only if one assumes people are going to be dumb, unfortunately this is sometimes the case).

This is common sense blocking and tacking stuff. Eat a good balanced diet, get enough protein, vitamins, whatever, drink lots of water, and make sure you supply yourself with enough calories to grow (i.e. body needs energy and nutrients above and beyond what is required to maintain it). Combine that with a good training program and voila - you will get bigger and stronger.

Of course there is one problem. The assumption of a "reasonable" diet and the key factor here is caloric excess. The key factor is not 6 meals a day, nor is it X grams of protein, nor is it weighing one's food and counting every last scrap of it while extracting yolks from egg whites like a baby salamander. It is also not some very expensive trace mineral that you buy for $50 a month at the supplement store. The key is food and quantity. It is caloric excess. If you don't have it, you can't grow. Contrary to popular BBing mythos, it need not even be a clean diet. You can eat quite a bit of garbage and get big and strong (even staying reasonably lean for a lot of people) as long as there is caloric excess. If you choose to eat clean, more power to you but make sure that you get caloric excess or you won't be adding muscle.





What Is Caloric Excess?



Essentially caloric excess is what allows your body to grow and get bigger than it currently is now. How are you going to add another room on your house with only enough wood or concrete to make small maintenance repair on your existing structure?



Intake - Requirement = Caloric Excess (Deficit if negative and maintenance if zero)


Now some people start with a pretty big margin of bodyfat (approaching 20% or more), these people already have significant caloric excess built into their base diet. Most of them find that they can hold their calories constant and for a while they will add muscle and the maintenance of that muscle will use up the excess calories that are currently going toward maintaining their excess fat. This won't last forever but it will likely get them down to the mid to low teens without any issues. Everybody with lower bodyfat needs to add excess to their base diet as this body recomposition lowers bodyfat by nature and it gets harder and harder to pull off. And really even holding bodyfat constant and gaining muscle requires a proportion of the gain to be fat just to maintain the ratio.

Now this sounds like common sense but here is the kicker. There are a lot of people who really put a lot of effort into their diet and maintain fairly lean physiques. They carefully calculate and maintain a constant diet and precise level of caloric excess - nothing wrong with that. The only problem is that their calculations might not fully reflect their activity level or the requirements of their own individual body.

Keep in mind that they are already fairly lean so there is obviously little to no caloric excess in their base diets. Also understand that the lower your BF is, the less willing your body is to add muscle - very logically, muscle is calorically expensive and increases risk of death from famine, if fat stores are already low, it is very hard to convince the body to add muscle (the people with this genetic makeup died millions of years ago). This is also why people loose muscle when cutting (this is all based on natural lifters, steroids enhance certain abilities but don't erase restrictions completely). Granted a total novice can pull it off for a short while if there's a margin present but that's still suboptimal and generally they'd do fine adding excess, gaining a little fat and adding a whole lot more muscle.




How Can I Tell If Caloric Excess Is Present?


So given that some of these people are already lean (no caloric excess) and run their diets based at the margin of a calculation, these people can go through a good training program, get strong as hell raising their capacities in all the lifts and not gain any weight. How is this possible? Very simple, no caloric excess. All any good training program can do is get you better at the activity (this is true in any sport). If you eat more than you need you will gain weight. If you are a couch potato, that weight might be all fat. A good training program will ensure that a large portion is muscle. Either way, if caloric excess is present - one will not be the same weight and body composition by the very definition of caloric excess. Lift bigger, eat bigger, get bigger. Very easy.

This may sound like common sense but it snafu's tons of people, particularly BBers because many of them like to maintain lower levels of BF and spend a lot of time on their diet and eat right at the margin of a somewhat arbitrary calculation that works on the average but in reality needs to be tailored to their own requirements. In addition, many will make their diet squeaky clean and not realize that their volume of consumption has to increase drastically to get the same number of total calories - so they wind up putting themselves in caloric maintenance or worse, deficit.

In addition, as people gain muscle their base requirement increases and thus their diet must be adjusted to maintain the same caloric excess margin. I know it sounds easy but a lot of people eat the same diet at 195 as they did when they were working their way up from 180. They sit there with this nice lean body and wonder why they can't ever seem to break the 200 barrier because their training is good and they eat the same good healthy diet that got them all the way to 195. Also some people think they are eating a ton, far more than enough, but if their weight isn't increasing...how can excess be present? It can't, and that's what these people need to accept despite the fact that their "diet faith" is rather strong.




Some Perspective:


Another good thing to remember is that you don't eat too much one day and wake up to find that you went from 8% to 20% BF overnight. A lot of people have a good feel for their base diet and just consume more when they want to gain. If they start getting too fat too quickly, they cut back appropriately. For the vast majority of people, they can likely monitor this without every doing heavy micromanagement while gaining muscle. If your goal is hardcore cutting and getting down much below 10%, well that takes work but adding muscle is pretty easy without micromanagement. But, if one wishes to quantify their diets and spend time on this then go right ahead, I just don't like to see people with pretty mundane and attainable goals think that this it's absolutely necessary if they want to add even an ounce of muscle.

I'm not crapping on the desire to eat clean wholesome foods but it is not necessary for the purpose of adding muscle whereas caloric excess is. Eating clean is a separate goal from adding muscle, it's a lifestyle goal and takes work - kudos to those that do it because it makes the whole thing a bit harder and requires more planning. I'm not saying to eat total garbage but a reasonable diet is fine and to be honest more than a few people have found it necessary to add in more calorically dense foods (i.e. fried chicken etc...) when bulking simply because they can't consume the volume and get all the calories any other way (I'm not talking about your standard 150lbs kid here obviously).

What do you all think about this if you are bulking?

PWGriffin

Good read...I agree with some points. A lot of people don't eat enough food and take in enough calories when they are trying to bulk. I myself don't eat too clean when I bulk. I don't look down on people who do, I look up to them...if they in fact are getting enough calories to get bigger and stronger while consuming healthy meals. Big props to them. One day I will get to that level, as I learn more about how and why.

yeah, that shit!!!

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ecwholic

So you do agree with the fact that even if in some aspects its not the cleanest of diets, that in order to gain mass, its all about caloric excess?

wilwn

of course it's all about caloric exxcess, in terms of gaining mass. if you don't eat more than your body needs, how can you gain mass?

PWGriffin

yeah, that shit!!!

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ecwholic

yeah I figured its a lot easier to just eat and not worry too much about micromanagement a whole lot when it comes to bulking. Do most of you throw out micromanaging your diets on a bulk and just whatever you can?

PWGriffin

I think everyone would agree that a person would feel better and look better if they took in the same amount of calories from clean, healthy sources as opposed to bullshit. What seperates the two groups of people is knowledge, willpower, dedication...and perhaps time and money.

I for one don't bulk the cleanest. I don't cook, don't really have the time for it. And am pretty freakin broke right now to say the least.

yeah, that shit!!!

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Trouble

Misguided logic. Basic lack of understanding of dietary factors that control energetics and the autonomic system.

PWGriffin

english please?? And where was that directed??

yeah, that shit!!!

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Gordo

I think in a nutshell she's saying, don't 'dirty bulk',

I know what autonomic systems are....never heard the word enegetics before though....not sure what that means. Internal changes and uses of energy? (shot in the dark).

Trouble

Comment not directed at you PW, nor any other poster.

Bulking is a significant overshoot, in most cases, of needed calories. The only case in which you might under-estimate macronutrient needs is if you are using steroids, and even then, only in the first few cycles, when growth may be outlandishly high. After that, its a more moderate pace of growth. Otherwise, bulking is a misnomer and misguided, as I said.

What you want to do is to increase the bulk density of foods, with fiber that slows down transit time and affords a slower and useable rate of nutrient feed to the bloodstream, so that calories are used for growth and are not stored as fat.

These same fibers, insoluble and soluble, are also important conditioners for the gut, and they accomplish to important tasts: first, they provide sustained energy release in the large colon through anaerobic fermentation. These release important fermentation products of fiberous carb breakdown, short chain fatty acids. These have been shown to help regulate energy metabolism (energetics) - storage and basal rate of energy provided for maintaining body temperature and water balance. These fiberous food sources also provide glucans, a family of biopolymers that vastly boost immune competence (the repair end) and decrease immune sensitivity (the response end of immune functions). Beyond these immediate action, fibers also taper glucose loading in larger meals, and prevent bile and stomach acids from damaging the gut microbial community and delicate mucosal lining.

I doubt very many of you feature vegetables in your "bulking". Its quite likely you don't feature much of them in your regular diet.

You do not instantly bulk efficiently just because you add fiber to your diet..you need to condition your gut with a more moderate caloric intake featuring a full 6-10 cups of vegetables per day, for a period of no less than 6-9 months. But if you do this prep work, along with use of probiotics, you will find that when you do "bulk" (enter a hypercaloric status), the food value of the nutrients ingested is more likely to be correctly absorbed and utilized for lean mass gains (assuming you have the correct training and aerobic/cardio training elements in place) and thus avoids the need for cutting.

In fact, its possible to DROP body fat and gain lean mass, at a rate of 1-2 lbs per week (10 or more lbs gained per month, not counting fat mass percent loss) while using this approach, for those not close to their natural body mass maxiumums.

For anyone contemplating competition in a year, or considering use of anabolic steroids, this approach should be used to optimize lean mass and strength gains.

BulkMeUp

I've calculated 300g to a max of 400g veggies per day. Guess i need to slowly increase that!

Trouble

Six cups for your size is good (its a lot of food). Ten cups are for the big dudes.

Tom_B

Trouble is there such a thing as too much vegetables/fibre? Would it be counterproductive?
I'm 5'8 and currently around 138lbs ... I get around 70G of fibre a day. 1 cup of fibre 1 cereal (30G of fibre), 11-15 cups of vegetables a day, 4 - 8 tsp of pysllium seed husks and any extra from other foods.

poloblue22

Personally I think a dirty bulk is probably one of the worst things you can do. Last winter when I was in my bulk I completely disregarded the micromanagement of this and I did put on mass but also put on a lot of fat. I think you will end up way too long cutting which is what I am doing to get back in decent shape. I am still cutting until I get back into a decent body fat range and this time I will bulk but watch what I am eating. No more triple cheese burgers and such

The Higher you aspire the more you grow - Adolf Hitler

Only goal is to get 10% body fat.

Trouble

Fiber One has 18gm of fiber per serving. You don't need the psyllium husks in this case. Yes, too much fiber can strip out (bind) certain ions and fats. That much fiber might also reduce protein absorption...not sure though.

Consider decreasing cereal intake and psyllium intake. How in the heck are you eating 11 cups of veggies a day? Holy moley.

Tom_B

K thanks trouble!
lol I can eat tons and it takes alot of food/volume to keep me full/satisfied.
I have 3-4cups of lettuce for breakfast, then another 3-4 cups in my next meal, then 5 cups of a mix of bean sprouts, celery, onions, and chinese cabbage and every second day I will have another 4-5 cups of a mix of Bok Choy, green peppers, onions, celery and button mushrooms.

boilermaker

This is the guy that last winter I couldn't convince to start his own garden . How ironic.

My Journal: Are We Almost There Yet?

Tom_B

^ hahaha. Knowing me I would of failed horribly at trying to make my own garden! LOL I seriously might have to consider doing that next year though after I move away .. currently since my dad owns a restuarant I get all my veggies for free (except for the lettuce), but if I had to pay for it all ..