SpyderEdgeForever wrote:tvenuto, that is an interesting quote about the 'you can't out-exercise a terrible diet". It reminds me of something I once got into a discussion about, I'd like your view on this:
I was chatting with two extreme body-builder guys, the types who have literally visible muscles upon muscles, and I was asking them nutrition questions. They told me how they each eat something like FORTY EGGS at a sitting (in shake form), entire trays of fish sticks and related foods. I was surprised and they claimed they were absolutely serious and not kidding. Have you heard of that? I have been told some extreme distance runners have also been known to consume mass quantities in one sitting, too.
Heard of it? I've done it! When I was powerlifting competitively I went from 168 to 215, on a diet that made several members of my friends and family consider having a food intervention on me. I went from 168 to 180 in 2 weeks, which is close to 1 lb per day. There were many food crimes during this period, but some of the most memorable ones was my occasional breakfast of 4 Mcdonalds breakfast sandwiches and 3 hashbrowns (equal to 2,370 Cals, or 9.9 mega Joules, which is about the energy released by 2kg of TNT). Also, after some workouts we'd drink a protein shake, 1 can of coconut milk (harder than you think), and one of those prepackaged fruit pies (high palatability!).
This is a perfect example of why diet should be highly individualized to the person and goal. My goal at the time wasn't leanness, nor longevity, it was to squat more weight. As such, my diet matched my goals and I was happy with it. This diet would be completely insane for almost any other purpose, though, so emulating it would be folly unless your current state (I was pretty lean to start this) and goals (squatting!) matched mine. In the end I squatted 468 in competition, which was 2.2 times my bodyweight, and won the MD State powerlifting championship in my weight class.
bearfacedkiller wrote:Excellent points Tvenuto. I think we do largely agree and like you said in the other thread, diet is a very personal thing and people hold strong convictions when it comes to their diet. I still question a low or no carb diet and probably couldn't do it myself. It also seems as though different exercise communities each have their own popular dietary beliefs. Obviously as an endurance athlete I have been surrounded by the beliefs that carbs aren't bad and that you need some.
As mentioned previously you would likely need to lower your running volume if you switched to a ketogenic diet, which might not be desirable. There is a really good reason that each "exercise community" has it's own sort of diet lore, and often that's due to the demands of that particular athletic pursuit. However, we need to be careful not to inappropriately emulate people who aren't like us. For instance, if I'm a 250lb "over-fat" male, and want to get into endurance running, I do NOT need to be carb loading even though that's what the "big dogs" do.
bearfacedkiller wrote:You being a Crossfit instructor I would like to ask you if you support the paleo diet? It seems to be very popular in the Crossfit community and your evolutionary comment also might lead me to believe that you support that diet.
I think that the paleo diet has some great utility. For instance, if I have a client that won't control portion size, and doesn't want to think about maconutrient ratios, I can tell him/her to follow the paleo diet and each at much as they want. They're probably going to get their calories in line when the bulk of their diet is high in nutrients but low in caloric density (veggies). However, like anything else it has its pitfalls, and we find people overdoing the dried fruit in some cases. Also, the concept becomes less useful when talking about athletes, since they'll likely need some faster absorbing carbs, and nutrient timing becomes important. So the answer is, yes, the paleo diet is a useful concept, especially for the "over-fat" or totally hormonally broken beginner, but hanging onto it once you become a more advanced athlete could be problematic, and it certainly isn't the magic bullet for everyone.
My evolutionary comment was merely that since humans have developed a mechanism for creating sugars when they are absent in the diet, then surely we faced periods of very low carb consumption in our past. However, I do believe that our diet as a whole has an evolutionary basis. It's not a coincidence that the "healthy fats" are the ones that you can readily find in nature. That is, you can squeeze an olive and get some olive oil. You can not squeeze a corn cob and get corn oil, that requires an industrial process and tons of corn, so clearly we aren't used to large amounts of that kind of fat in our diet. The things we're designed to run on are the things we "grew up" eating: meats, veggies, fruits.
bearfacedkiller wrote:I would also like to ask you about different types of carbs. It seems that anti carb folks are largely against grains if I am correct.
This could be one of two different things: anti-carb people might be removing grains because they are dense high glycemic (fast releasing) carbs; OR, anti-grain people might just be removing a lot of high glycemic carbs because they are avoiding grains.
So the first one is pretty simple, grains are very dense sources of carbs, which often leads us to make somewhat unbalanced decisions about food. How about a bagel with 2 eggs. Sounds pretty balanced, right? However that has 16g fat, 54g carbs, and 23g protein. So, if I have a guy who doesn't care to understand macronutrient ratios, I can tell him to avoid grains, and his breakfast switches to 2 eggs, an orange, and a handful of almonds. New ratio: 29g fat, 22g carb, 20g protein, much more balanced, and the guy in question didn't have to really think about anything.
Why worry about macronutrient ratios as opposed to calories? Because your body is responding to the macronutrient ratio, and your experience of how many calories you consume is highly dependent on that. See here for an
interesting article on how they starved people to actual insanity on 1570 cals per day, and in a completely unrelated study, people ate until they were completely satisfied on 1560 cals per day.
Now the anti-grain discussion is a whole can of worms. There was even a
south park episode about it. The short story here is that animals have teeth and claws to bite and scratch you, and legs to run away. If you catch and kill them, they've exhausted their means of defense against being eaten. Plants are a different story, they can't run, so resort to chemical warfare to discourage the eating of parts that they don't want to be eaten. Invariably, when you eat grains, you're eating the reproductive parts of the plant, which poses an obvious issue for the plant. As such, these contain various chemicals that may be more or less of a problem depending on the person. Also, because these proteins are resistant to being eaten, they don't break down as small in your gut, and if you're unlucky your body might confuse these proteins for proteins you have in your body, and you may start to get auto-immune issues.
We generally recommend removing them for a time of 2 to 4 weeks, then add them back and see if anything changes.
bearfacedkiller wrote:Is there much of a difference between consuming starches and sugars? I do not eat a lot of grains but I do eat a ton of fruit so I consume a ton of fructose. I eat a 400-500 calories a day in the form of fruit and eat bananas every day, especially before I run.
First answer: all carbohydrates hit your intestine as sugar due to enzymatic processes, so
when it comes to total carb load I wouldn't say there's a huge difference between eating a complex carb (starch) like bread or that exact amount of sugar. HOWEVER, your satiety and appetite will be greatly affected by how those carbs are delivered. Again we go back to the baked potato vs can of soda example, one will leave you satisfied, the other won't due to the speed of absorption and other things.
I would caution that not all of the sugar in fruit is fructose, see the below chart. For instance an orange only has 4 grams, which is less than half of the sugar, and a banana has 6, which is about a third. There is some thought that fructose in particular is problematic and different from other sugars, one of the reasons being that it is processed by the liver almost exclusively, see this
brief article. However, remember that we also have gut flora (microbes), which are capable of digesting things that we otherwise would have trouble with, and by eating fruit and its soluble fiber, you give that flora a chance to work on that sugar before your body is forced to decide what to do with it.
In the before run example you would definitely want a faster absorbing sugar as you don't want it sitting in your stomach like a baked potato would. Normally, this fast absorption is a problem, since people just sit at their desk and it gets stored as fat, but that's not the case with you. One of my clients was a marathon runner and said he used to fill his water bottle with flat coke for a race, which is obviously different than sitting at your desk and drinking it.
Donut wrote:Any thoughts on multi vitamins/vitamins? I take a potassium pill, but it only gives me ~100mg per pill.
I take one, because why not? It's a relatively cheap way of ensuring that your dietary needs are being met.
