The first priority is to get rid of bad food.
Heavily processed products belong to the category of “bad food items,” although some of them are much worse than others. Have a look at food labels and see for yourself how much adulteration there is, and how much abysmal “food” is on supermarket shelves. Check how much sugar, unhealthy fats, and other harmful ingredients are in most mass-produced, packaged food items, and discriminate carefully when you choose what to buy.
This doesn’t mean that all processed foods should be avoided. Many valuable and healthy foods are available only because of the processing that was essential for their production, albeit a minimal level of processing in comparison with the awful level that’s involved in the production of many pseudo foods. Here are some examples:
I have a generous helping of olive oil every day, usually with fish, but olive oil production requires that olives are processed, albeit in a minimal way. Oatmeal, made from scratch, has been a staple part of my breakfast for nearly 20 years, but the oat grain has to be processed by milling to make it more readily edible and digestible. That’s minimal processing, though, in comparison to the sort of adulteration that’s the norm when grain is processed to produce boxed breakfast cereals. I usually have a couple of slices of wholegrain bread with my lunch—typically corn or rye—which necessitated some processing of the ingredients, but very little processing relative to what’s required for white bread, cookies, biscuits, cakes, and pastries.
The second priority is that your dietary regimen supplies you with sufficient calories and nutrients for good health and adequate recovery from training. The more foods you proscribe, the greater your likelihood of developing nutritional inadequacies. Provided you’re sufficiently knowledgeable about nutrition, it’s possible to eliminate some major foods—meat in my case, for example—and yet still get all the calories and nutrients required.
The third priority is to consume food that you can digest well. No matter how healthy a specific food may be, and how many health-conscious people swear by it, if it doesn’t agree with you, it’s not going to be good for you.
But some foods are hard to digest because they aren’t prepared in the right way. For example, raw nuts are hard to digest in anything other than small quantities; but if you soak them in brine overnight, they become digestible because the enzyme inhibitors are neutralized by the soaking.
If some natural foods don’t “agree” with you, investigate improved food preparation before you eliminate them from your diet.
Furthermore, while some natural foods may be readily digestible when eaten by themselves, or in simple meals, they may cause digestive distress when eaten along with certain other foods, especially if a lot of food is eaten. Through trial and error, learn which combinations of foods work best for you.
The fourth priority is to follow a dietary regimen that’s doable over the long-term. No matter how ideal something may be for you, supposedly, and no matter how strong some arguments in favor of it may be, if you can’t stick with it, it’s not going to work for you over the long haul.
Furthermore, I strongly recommend that everyone takes daily probiotic supplementation, to improve gut bacteria.
With all of the aforementioned in order, now you can experiment with your macronutrient proportions, and their timing during the day, to try to find what works best for you.
A variety of non-extreme nutritional regimens can work for bodybuilding, and strength training in general. There isn’t a “one interpretation fits all.”
But even the “best” nutritional intake won’t make a blind bit of difference if your training isn’t good enough, or your recovery time between workouts isn’t sufficient. Conversely, for some trainees, a poor diet can still accompany progress in strength and muscle, at least over the short-term, provided that the training is good, the recovery time between workouts is sufficient, and enough of the poor food is eaten. Better progress would occur, of course, with good nutrition.
Some dietary regimens are more likely to be nutritionally sound than others, some are more costly than others, some are more practical and doable than others, some are more enjoyable than others, and some are more agreeable to certain philosophical views.
If, over the long-term, your health is good, your energy level is high and steady, you’re lean, and you’re gradually improving your strength and physique, whatever you’re doing nutritionally is adequate, although not necessarily optimal.
But if your health is creaking, your energy level isn’t high and stable, you can’t shift excess body fat, and your strength and physique aren’t improving, then no matter how strong you may think your arguments are for what you’re doing nutritionally, something is amiss. Look afresh at your dietary intake, and make changes.
While it’s possible to work out on almost any dietary interpretation, some interpretations hinder one’s ability to train, and hinder one’s capacity to recuperate from the training.
Don’t persist with years of decline before you face facts, and finally make changes. You should know after just a couple of months, if not sooner, if a certain dietary regimen doesn’t suit you.
Some of the trainees who debate dietary issues, and even squabble over them, allow those issues to distract them from properly applying themselves to their training. So, even if the dietary regimen they prefer is good for them, and nutritionally adequate, the deficiencies in their training mean they won’t make any bodybuilding progress.
But even with the best of intentions, and confident arguments from the advocates, some dietary regimens are nutritionally inadequate, not just for bodybuilding, but for health over the long-term.
I remember my time as a vegan, and how sure I was about the correctness of what I was doing. I was so obsessed with veganism that it ruled my life—it temporarily supplanted my bodybuilding obsession. It developed into a cult for me (and for some others I knew at the time). But reality finally struck home after four years of physical decline.
I see similar obsessiveness in some people who follow other nutritional regimens with tremendous passion, and utter certainty about their beliefs. But given time, many of those believers will question their beliefs, and eventually make changes.
Some regimens are expensive to follow because some of the recommended foods are costly, and supplements are sometimes required to compensate for nutritional shortcomings inherent in the regimens.
If a dietary regimen is deficient in one or more essential nutrients unless fortified with supplementation, that should ring a warning bell.
For some people, there’s merit in increased fat intake, just like there can be merit in an increased protein intake for some people, and lower carbs, too. But a change that can be good in moderation can be detrimental when taken too far, and probably difficult to incorporate into an everyday lifestyle for most people.
I recently had a consultation with a well-educated, intelligent man. He was into paleo and a very short window of food intake each day. Properly implemented, paleo can be nutritionally sound, but this fellow wasn’t implementing it properly. He was eating just once a day, in the evening, with very few carbs each day. For several days prior to the consultation he hadn’t had any carbs whatsoever.
With his busy work and family life, he was really struggling to manage. He was able to train in a fashion, only because he was highly motivated. But he was on edge, struggling with energy, using caffeine to keep him going, and not performing at his best. Furthermore, his sleep was terrible.
And his physique and strength were gradually wasting away.
He’d been going through this regimen for about 10 years (during his thirties and forties), and it had devastated his bodybuilding aspirations.
Of course, even “normal” eating without any foodstuff proscriptions can be inadequate for bodybuilding purposes, and disastrous for health over the long term. Even when plenty of the three macronutrients are consumed, if the overall caloric intake is either excessive or insufficient, and lots of heavily processed foods are included, the result will be disastrous, eventually.
If you’re trying to build muscle, be sure that you’ve adopted a good training program, and are implementing it properly. And be sure that you’re consuming sufficient healthy, nutrient-rich food to meet your current caloric needs. Then, but without going to extremes, you can experiment with varying your macronutrient proportions.
Keep careful records of what you do so that you can track your results. Like with your training, you need to know what really works for you.
A macronutrient regimen that can work well for building muscle may not work well for shedding body fat, even when calories are reduced.
And considering nutrition as a whole, the approach required by someone who has a great deal of excess body fat to lose can be very different to the approach required by someone who wants to lose just a small amount of body fat.
Someone who is extremely overweight has many issues to address, some of which are complicated, and probably include psychological matters and food addictions.
But in all cases, dietary plans that are unpleasant to follow, or which would place extreme restrictions on which foods can be eaten, should be avoided. Eating, like training, should be enjoyed if you’re to stay with it for long enough to make a difference. Doability over the long-term should be a priority. |
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