Bread in your eating plan?

i only eat bread and peanut butter.. sometimes with honey.. as a snack usually

Short version: you have to choose which you want to do first, build muscle or get a sixpack. You can only do one of those at a time. The exact food you're eating isn't very important for this, only the total energy in or out.

Long version: This has nothing to do with bread, rice, or whatever. What matters is energy in vs energy out. Whether that energy comes from rice or chicken or Hungry Jacks or whatever makes no difference. Assuming some lifting,

Energy in > energy out .... gain muscle and gain fat
Energy in < energy out ... lose some muscle and lots of fat

The exception is a person who begins overfat (eg a waist size around 100cm for males under 190cm tall, or around 90cm for women). In that case, they can have energy in < energy out and gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, because the energy surplus they need to gain muscle is coming from their fat instead of their dinner plate. But once their waist gets to a healthier size (males 85-90cm females 80-85cm) this effect stops and they return to the basic inequations above.

This is why bodybuilders have bulking and cutting cycles, where they grow muscle and fat both for a bit, then cut down, lose some muscle but keep most of it, and lose some fat, hoping that in the end they'll have gained more muscle than fat.

So much for the energy. What about nutrition? There are all sorts of theories floating around about good and bad foods to eat to achieve various results, but the simple fact is that people have achieved the same results with very different diets, and the theories are all attached to people who are making a buck from selling you those diets.

Forgetting all that nonsense, a "healthy" diet means lots of fresh fruit and vegies, nuts and beans, some meat, fish or dairy, and some starchy stuff (rice, spuds, pasta, bread), so that you get enough vitamins and minerals. It's possible to be overfat but malnourished, eg if you eat a kilogram of sugar every day and nothing else you'll have plenty of energy coming in but will soon get sick.

Good post, Kyle! I am still bulking and my stomach isn't changing, everything else is though

Although Kyle has got it mostly right, the type of food you eat does make a difference. A simple example is this - bread and rice are carbs -> digesting carbs encourages your body to produce insulin -> insulin is anabolic to both muscle and fat and therefore greatly limits your ability to break down fat.

Sigh.

Life's too simple for some people, they have to complicate it with all sorts of pseudoscience.

I have not yet seen a study showing that the insulin spike post-carbs has any longer-term effect. This would be difficult to test, since people who eat no carbs at all do not put on any muscle at all; you need some for energy for your workouts and recovery.

Insulin, cortisol, Anabolic 6000... There's such a thing as irrelevant details. The body's hormones go up and down naturally over the course of a day or a month through various things you do and consume.

If you have such a study, please refer us to it, I'm always interested to learn more. Until then, let's stick to things demonstrated by science and experience to be true, rather than things we got from broscience.

eat like a horse
lift like an ox
sleep like a log
the rest is commentary

I absolutely love the simplicity of the calories in versus the calories out. I hear it so often it must be right.

If my maintenance level is 3000 calories per day, and I eat 2,900 calories per day, I am in deficit, therefore I'm going to lose weight.

So today, I'm not going to eat a thing all day, then right before I go to bed I'm going to eat 2,900 calories of Tim Tams, then wake up leaner in the morning lol

Did it ever occur to you guys that those that SELL nutrition plans do so because they may know what theyre doing?

K 21, a few things you need to consider are macro nutrient breakdowns, your body type and nutrient timing. Determining your basic metabolic rate is easy, using your goals you can determine how many calories you need, identifying your body type for macronutrient breakdown, then your training/eating patterns for your nutrient timing.

Simple.

Now, bread. Nobody on here can answer that question for you until they see a pic of you, even giving us your weight and height is no help, we need to see whether your are carbohydrate sensitive. Most of the overweight population is, so they need to avoid processed carbs, such as bread, rice and pasta.

If you are trying to bulk, then you can succesfully eat these foods at the right time. The right time is when your trying to create an anabolic enviroment in your body, because as stated, insulin is VERY anabolic. This all comes down to nutrient timing.

Good luck big fella

I dont post in this section so if you want to ask me something pm me

Splendid! Post.

I try to stay as lean as possible, not always easy.

Cardio- along with weight training as a means of controlling fat is specious at best
Energy in vs energy out just makes you hungry

for me: small food portions, two meals a day and I always try to stay a little hungry after a feeding.

PTC said:

Did it ever occur to you guys that those that SELL nutrition plans do so because they may know what theyre doing?

Click to expand...

There are a zillion different nutrition plans. With five minutes on google we can find ones that say you must eat food X, and then others that say you must not eat food X.

"Drink a gallon of milk a day," says one guy, "But milk isn't a human food and it has chemicals that will kill you," says another. And so on, with rice, soy, corn, salt, meat, eggs, and a zillion other foods all the subject of someone's pet hate or fetish.

They can't all be right.

We can have a variety of diets and training plans and still get decent results. It's amazing the crap people shovel into themselves, the bad training habits they have, and they don't actually hurt themselves, and actually make gains. The human body is pretty resilient.

Aside from actually bad diets, there are a big variety, not only in simple things like vegetarian vs non-vegetarian, but in more funky things like how much protein to have to grow muscle. Markos I understand advocates 4g protein per kg bodyweight daily - so for an 80kg person, 320g protein, equivalent to 1.2kg steak, tuna, a whole small chicken, etc. Whereas the AIS advocates 1.2-1.8g, or 96-154g daily, equivalent to 400-600g steak.

Who's right? Which is it, do I have to eat a whole chook a day, or just a big chicken breast? Let's look at results! Do either of them have everyone come down with gout, kidney stones, or protein deficiency? Nope. Strength results? Well... they both get really impressive results. Conclusion? Eat the breast, if you want to eat the whole chook you can, it won't do you any harm.

Apparently the body is pretty resilient and versatile. The mind, however...

In Red Dwarf once they explained why Rimmer had never become an officer. He had to sit an exam for it, and when the exam was three months away, he'd do a big elaborate study plan. It'd take him a week or two to do it, by which time his plan needed to be updated. Which would take another week, and then... it was the day before the exam, and he'd write up a final 24 hour cramming plan. Then pass out from exhaustion, show up late for the exam and write "fish" down the page.

This sort of thing happens in physical training. People look for the One True Perfect Workout Plan and Diet, and spend so long planning it that they never actually get out there and just lift heavy and eat some good food.