Kind of a catch-22 here. No, I haven’t seen that and I’m not going searching for it either.
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To own the libs?
I don’t know about this. I don’t think it’s really possible to diet your way into strength gains.
I guess you could do it if you ate in such a way to get super fat, so you would grow more muscle to carry your fat ass around. But I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.
You need to train to gain muscle mass, and if you are lifting heavy, junk food isn’t going to hold back your gainz. It might even help.
Agree on the weight loss part of your claim, though.
Your guy knows what’s up.
https://twitter.com/biolayne/status/1283427781947334661?lang=en
https://twitter.com/biolayne/status/607954501744631809?lang=en
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Of course you need to train in order to make strength gains. What I’m saying is that if you’re eating a clean, nutrition-packed diet and eliminate junk that the body has no need for, those strength gains (as well as weight loss) come far easier than if you’re training even harder in some cases but eating loads of crap. At least that’s been my experience.
Still kind of disagree. I don’t think your body cares too much what form your macros come in as long as you get the right ones. Junk food is not great because the balance of macros is generally high fat and high carb in general. So if that’s all you eat, the numbers are never going to work.
However, you could easily have one McDonald’s meal a day, and plan the rest of your meals around that perfectly and I don’t think you would have any problems making gainz or losing weight (doing both simultaneous, of course, is very tough unless you’re at the novice phase).
The only problem with this plan is compliance. It’s an uncommon person who will eat McDonalds once a day and be happy with chicken breast and steamed vegetables for the rest of the day, while carefully weighing and logging everything. Anyone who has that kind of discipline can just cut out the dumb McDonald’s meal and give himself more freedom for the rest of the day.
So, of course, the 1 McDonalds meal a day weight loser is essentially theoretical and the kind of thing one would do if they wanted to win a bet. No one actually does that or recommends that, but there is no reason it shouldn’t work just fine.
I get what you’re saying and I think that’s the common belief–that you can be MOSTLY healthy and still get away with eating a few cheat meals here and there. This was my approach for decades and it worked to an extent. Maybe it also has to do with what stage of life you’re in. I could get away with way more eating-wise in my 20s than I can now a couple decades later.
But that approach just stopped working for me. My knee injury and subsequent weight gain forced me to take a much stricter approach to diet/nutrition over the past few months. The weight loss I expected, but I was surprised to have also gained quite a bit of lean muscle mass despite not working out any harder than I had been, and probably a bit less hard. I can only attribute this to vastly improved nutrition, since that’s all that’s changed. From like a 80/20 healthy/junk ratio, to something closer to 95/5. For me the difference in the improved diet is clear.
Your mileage may vary, so that’s as far as I will go on this subject and we’ll just have to agree to disagree. But that’s what’s I’ve observed working for me over the last 6 months or so.
Whenever I eat even one meal of fast food I end up feeling like shit and don’t want to do anything, I also never feel satiated either which leads to over eating. So while cico works fine in theory in practice you’re shooting yourself in the foot. It’s a multi billion dollar industry that’s incentivized to make you want to eat more.
Why is it I physically cannot eat more than a certain amount of lean protein but not feel uncomfortably full, but give me some processed food and I can stuff my face until I’m physically ill/uncomfortable and still be craving more.
Did you weigh and log all of your food before and after?
Yeah, no argument there. It’s theoretically possible. But compliance is a bitch. And if you can comply with that, then you can comply with something more sensible.
I did for about 6 months but it made me have an unhealthy relationship with food / cooking. After that I had a pretty good sense of how many calories were in what + the website I use for meal prep has all the macros (meal prep manual). I reduce or increase calories by removing/adding meals or snacks or portioning my prepped meals to larger or smaller servings.
That question was for ikioi, but I do agree that once you do it for a while, you can do a good job estimating. But to get good you really have to be meticulous about it for months or longer.
Right now I’m in bulk mode because I kinda want to test the limits of how heavy I can lift. When I plateau I’ll probably start to do a cut but take it slow instead of going super aggro.
I’ve never weighed out food or counted calories, but I do log everything I eat.
I have a color-code system (red = bad/junk; yellow = questionable; green = good/healthy). As long as I see lots of green and little red and only a bit of yellow, I’m likely to be eating well. I’m written elsewhere about eating one main meal (lunch) and eating only lightly if at all for breakfast & dinner. So eating too many calories is not really a thing for me.
Main conscious diet changes I made were cutting out greasy/oily/buttery foods, wheat, sugar, and empty-calorie snack foods. Alcohol I had already eliminated a few years back. Elimination of wheat & sugar seems to have made the biggest difference.
Slow is good.
I will say that intentional bulk is one of the dumbest things I did. I did get stronger, but losing it the second time around never actually happened completely. Had some kids during that time which made training and diet compliance much, much harder.
Even if your calories were constant (which is unclear), it seems very likely that your macro breakdown was different when you went from your more junky to your less junky diet. So it’s really not possible for anyone confidently state that the better results you got were from less junk or simply from better macro distribution (which is of course correlated with less junk food, but not the same thing).
Yea whatever works is best. I guess I’m just not a very goal oriented person (I mean I play poker for a living), I don’t care much about PRs - looking good and feeling good is just fine for my motivation. I also like running, but reading Spidercrab’s marathon training stuff is nauseating to me. I’d hate doing something so regimented, that would kill most of the fun for me
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Haha sorry! I mean i like reading about it, I just couldn’t do it