Regardless of your exercise, feeding your body nothing but colourised, flavourised, preservatised, nutrient drained processed foods will probably make you sick and fat irrespective of your calorie intake. That is why the biggest, fattest people to walk into Biologic Labs are never big calorie consumers; they are completely malnourished by ‘fast food’; and full of ‘pollution’. That is why Milton Spurlock got so fat and so sick in the movie, ‘Supersize Me’. He wouldnt have gotten that sick and that fat from the same calories of organic rice and almonds! The ‘calories’ weren’t the issue!
It is ridiculous to expect your body to look and perform the same regardless of the quality of your nutrition. Tim Tams do not compare to organic eggs for nutrient supply nor the body that results; even if the calories are the same! Neither does KFC compare with free-range chicken breast and rice!
Our bodies are designed to change in order to keep us alive despite all the dumb things we do! If you feed it a leaf of lettuce per day and tell it to run for 6 hours per day, it will adjust to become able to do that; or until it falls over dead. Your body doesn’t need to burn fat to find fuel. It can just stop using fuel that should be used to keep you healthy! So adaptations to starvation and overtraining might involve losing weight. Or they might not. Either way, the response will not be a mechanical reduction in stored fuel; it will be an adaptation to your actions and therefore probably not all what you expected!
The smart option is to use the adaptive nature of your body positively. Rather than trying to “waste away the body you hate”, work to “build the body you want”. Looking strong/‘athletic’ and healthy is a function of BEING strong/‘athletic’ and healthy! That means quality nutrition and quality strength exercise. Not starving on a treadmill!
The positive adaptations - ie those changes your body makes to itself to yield an improvement in physical ability and capacity - require a range of resources (ie nutrients) from food, to meet the needs of your training. Some resources (nutrients) are absolutely critical; others are highly significant; others are just nice to have. If you can find and feed your body ONLY the perfect balance of critical, significant and nice-to-have resources, you will watch yourself transform rapidly and positively in the direction your exercise stresses require it. And you will ultimately be able to improve your body to an extraordinary extent. Basically, your body will adapt to become a physical manifestation of its purpose and environment. If your purpose becomes pure strength and your environment is richly nourishing, your body will reflect it with low bodyfat and taut muscularity. It would be ridiculous to expect a replication of such bodily perfection with a baron diet combined with soulless, purposeless exercise (eg ‘cardio’)!
For most people, even small deviations from perfect dietary nirvana results in massive slow-downs to their adaptive changes and a pronounced ceiling to their body and training progress. Those deviations often seem so ridiculous and so insignificant that they could not possibly matter. But when they do, they just do! How you feel about it - how unfair it seems - doesnt change the reality.
For example, it is typical to see an almost complete stop to fat loss in our clients who add pre-made sauces to their meals. Even diet soft-drinks significantly stunt positive body change. Our clients who regularly eat out - even when they order plain meals - never achieve even 1/4 of the fat loss of our clients who prepare the exact same food in the exact same way, everyday. I cannot tell you why this seems to consistently occur? But the simple answer is: the price of that dietary ‘variety’ and ‘lifestyle’ is a buffer of bodyfat to make up for the nutritional inconsistencies!
The fact is, any food that your body cannot use for a positive purpose is pollution. And one of the worst things about a polluted environment is that it cannot even benefit from beneficial resources. The pollution just seems to have a way of screwing everything up!
The pollution you eat is stored (as fat) and/or uses quality resources to process and ‘clean up’ after. Either way, its a “double whammy”. You got fat AND the food that WOULD have been used for productive ends, won’t be.
So no matter how you or anybody tries to justify that tasty Pizza Hut pizza or Cold Rock ice cream, it IS garbage, its going to make you fat and its going to do nothing positive for you! And counting the calories just does not make the slightest bit of difference to that!
In closing, consider this quote from Jim Rohn: “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment”. Thats your diet!
1 comment:
Hey Damon,
Have you looked into Alan Aragon, Lyle McDonald and Anthony Colpo's take on this topic? They report that the research from randomised controlled trials shows that, provided protein intake is controlled as a variable, it really is just energy balance that regulates the fat loss in hypo-caloric conditions. As for health and longevity, that's a whole different ball-game, of course.
Of course, the fact that energy balance is the physiological proximate cause for fat loss doesn't mean that it provides a basis for fre-living advice on fat loss (as the best free-living protocol is one that encourages diet compliance, and macro-nutrient choices have a huge impact on satiety and compliance).
Anyhow, I'd be interested to get your take on this, as these guys are not your average purveyors of 'bro-science'; they are the real deal as far as evidence-based fitness advice is concerned.
Love your work - keep it up !
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