Insulin Sensitivity and Fat Loss
In theory, you can make arguments for or against any of these approaches in terms of superiority. In the real world, it’s not quite that simple. You can always find folks (and this is true whether they are bodybuilders or just general dieters) who either succeeded staggeringly well or failed miserably on one or another approaches.
Fat Loss for Athletes: Part 3
The final issue I want to discuss regarding fat loss for athletes is how training can or should be modified while dieting. Again, this is a place where a lot of people make mistakes and where (especially given the role of anabolics in bodybuilding preparation since about the 80’s) following bodybuilders can be problematic. I’ll come back to this below.
Fat Loss for Athletes: Part 2
As mentioned above, this is the single most important aspect of fat loss as far as I’m concerned. It’s usually pretty trivial to out-eat the calories burned from training and if you don’t control calories you’re not going to lose fat no matter what you do. And all of the weird macronutrient manipulations still don’t make a shit’s worth of difference if calories aren’t controlled so you can stop worrying about food combining, or not eating carbs after 6pm or whatever. With no exception all of those strategies only work to hide caloric restriction in the guise of something else. It’s still calories at the end of the day.
Fat Loss for Athletes: Part 1
Losing body fat is often an issue for athletes and there are various and sundry (yes, sundry) reasons that they either want or need to do this. Clearly for the physique sports (bodybuilding, fitness, figure), it’s an issue of appearance. For performance sports (everything else), losing fat or weight can often improve performance. Either the athlete can get into a lower weight class (if their sport has such) or they can improve their strength or power to weight ratio, improving performance.
Diet Percentages: Part 2
On a day to day basis, your body has certain nutrient requirements, a topic which is discussed in detail elsewhere in this book. As described in those chapters, those nutrient requirements are generally related to how much you weigh (or how much lean body mass you have). There are a few exceptions, places where the requirements for a given nutrient are absolute which I’ll mention when necessary.
Diet Percentages: Part 1
Commonly, when you see diet plans laid out, the intake of the various macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, fat) is presented in terms of percentages of total caloric intake. So you might see a diet which was 60% carbohydrates, 30% protein and 10% fat or some other set of percentages. Or you’ll see recommendations that ‘…athletes only need 15% of their calories from protein.’ or ‘don’t eat more than 30% of your total calories from fat’, that sort of thing.
Contest Dieting Part 1
Of all athletes in the world, bodybuilders (and other physique oriented folks such as fitness and figure girls) tend to be the most anal compulsive and neurotic about their food intake. Nowhere is this seen more than during contest dieting where folks that are already on the far edge of what most would consider sane turn batshit crazy about their food intake.
Comparing the Diets: Part 4
And finally we come to the low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet, the diet with perhaps the greatest amount of controversy and argument surrounding it. Now, at the risk of beating a dead horse, and since I find many of my critics to be a little slow on the uptake, I’m going to go off on one last rant about this topic.
Comparing the Diets: Part 3
The next major dietary camp refers to any diet consisting of relatively moderate carbohydrate and dietary fat intakes. This includes diets such as Barry Sear’s “The Zone”, Dan Duchaine’s “Isocaloric diet”, 30/40/30 nutrition and others. Such diets generally recommend a macronutrient split based on fairly equal amounts of protein, carbs and fat. Various scientific rationales, usually involving hormonal control are typically given.
Comparing the Diets: Part 2
In Comparing the Diets: Part 1, I made some introductory comments about the different primary approaches to dieting which are high-carbohydrate/low-fat, moderate carb/moderate fat, and low-carbohydrate/high-fat. I also defined my terms as to what I mean by high, moderate and low. In the next parts of this article series, I want to examine [...]
