Nutrition for beginners part 1

"Bodybuilding is at least 80% nutrition" - Vince Gironda
"Nutrition is 100%, training is 100%, recovery is 100%" - Dorian Yates
"If you're not growing, it's probably your diet and not your training that's holding you back" - Dr. John Berardi

I remember when I first got serious about Olympic weightlifting: after every good training session I would reward myself with five burgers. And this wasn't just something I did occasionally. I practically always ate like this. It was therefore not surprising that, although I was quite strong, I basically looked like a pile of shit or the Michelin Man's fatter brother.

I trained hard - sometimes twice a day

I used pretty much every supplement known to mankind and still looked like a fatso moving weights. Which, of course, is exactly what I was. Why on earth wasn't I a lean, muscular Adonis? Was it a genetic curse? No, it was just old-fashioned lousy eating habits. One of my former clients, a 180 cm tall, 75 kilo field hockey player had the opposite problem: he trained like a maniac (I checked) and could also make reasonable strength gains (he once surprised the NY Rangers strength coach by easily power lifting 275 pounds) but he couldn't build an ounce of muscle. I suspected inadequate nutrition. He told me he was eating a lot, so I had him keep a food diary in which he was to write down everything he ate for a week. His eating pattern was exactly as I expected: he ate like a bird throughout the day, followed by a big meal in the evening. After this big meal he felt so full that he really thought he was eating a lot, but his average calorie intake was only 1700 kcal per day. This was a young man with a very fast metabolism who trained four days a week, twice a day (one training session with weights and one training session on the pitch). 1700 kcal was barely enough to keep him alive, let alone build muscle! I changed his diet and he was able to increase his weight from 75 to 90 kilos in less than a year.

The moral of this story is that if you are training hard and not building muscle, your nutrition plan (assuming you have such a plan) is not adequate. If you have the opposite problem of training hard but not being able to lose fat, then the reason is probably the same: your diet sucks. If your nutritional approach is not optimal for your goals, then you won't get the results you want.

With this information in mind, this article will show you the basics of good nutrition for your body composition (muscle gain and/or fat loss). Of course, knowing the basics is not enough. Maintaining a muscle-friendly diet is hard, hard work. In some ways, it's even harder than training: you can usually motivate yourself to train hard for an hour a few times a week. Diet is different. You have to stay disciplined 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Controlling your cravings and urges can be painful. Believe me, I know. It's not fun. After a hard day, when you're tired and stressed, that big pot of chocolate ice cream will start to look damn tempting. Proper nutrition can be rewarding, but the psychological price is high.

Having said that, if you're still willing to go that extra step on the road to your dream body, then you should definitely read on.

What are we actually talking about?

Understanding how to plan an adequate diet to improve body composition or build muscle requires a basic understanding of some fundamental concepts. My goal is not to give you a comprehensive course on every single component of a good nutrition program. Instead, I hope to give you enough information so that you'll be able to read a nutrition article or plan a nutrition program without feeling like you're lost in a foreign country.

Protein

Each gram of protein provides four kcal. The word protein comes from the Greek and means "the first" or "of primary importance". For bodybuilders and strength athletes, this nutrient is of primary importance because proteins are, among other things, the building blocks of muscle tissue. Protein is broken down into amino acids in the body and these amino acids are converted into muscle tissue through a process called protein synthesis or muscle anabolism (which comes from another Greek word meaning "to build").

Proteins (amino acids) make up most of the solid part of a muscle. About 20 to 25% of muscle is protein, 70% is water and other fluids, and the remaining 5 to 10% is muscle glycogen, minerals, intramuscular fatty acids and other elements. You do not need to memorize these ratios in detail. Suffice it to say that protein is the most important nutrient for muscle growth. No protein - no muscles.

How much protein is needed for maximum muscle growth?

Good question. Studies have shown time and time again that a high protein intake is associated with a more positive nitrogen balance and a higher rate of protein synthesis. In other words, the more protein you eat, the more muscle you build.

However, it's not quite that simple. At some point, the law of diminishing returns comes into play. Once you reach the maximum amount of protein your body can use to build muscle, any additional protein intake will stop increasing the rate at which you build muscle.

That sucks, right? Wouldn't it be great if all we had to do to build muscle was eat tons of protein? We'd all be 115 kilo defined monsters in no time! Even the women! Sadly, we are limited by our natural biochemistry when it comes to being able to use protein (amino acids) to build muscle.

Protein synthesis (the use of protein to build muscle) is heavily dependent on our hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers that circulate in our body and are responsible for our body "doing things." One of these "things" is the synthesis of protein. The hormones that are primarily responsible for stimulating this process include testosterone (the male hormone), growth hormone, insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), insulin and cortisol.

Testosterone directly increases protein synthesis, allowing you to effectively utilize the protein you just ate. The more testosterone you have in your body, the more protein you can convert into muscle. This is the reason why bodybuilders and other athletes use injectable testosterone or synthetic hormones (steroids): by artificially increasing their hormone levels, they increase their body's capacity to use protein to build muscle.

Some people naturally have higher testosterone levels than others, which allows them to build muscle faster than others, especially if they consume more protein. But the fact is, if you're not using anabolic or androgenic steroids (and as a beginner you shouldn't be), then your body has a limited capacity to use protein to build muscle and testosterone is the primary limiting factor.

You may now be asking what about growth hormones. You might imagine that a substance called "human growth hormone" makes people grow. Well, this is also the case if you are a child, but growth hormones only have a mild anabolic effect in adults, meaning that growth hormones only slightly increase your capacity to build muscle. The hormone IGF-1, however, is highly anabolic. IGF-1 and growth hormones are produced in spurts (IGF-1 production follows a spurt of growth hormone production). As with other hormones, the amount of these hormones produced varies from person to person and this can be a limiting factor when it comes to building muscle.

Insulin is often referred to as the most anabolic hormone. This is because its main function is to tell the body's storage units to open up, suck stuff in and store it. The main storage units of the body are muscles, liver and fat cells and the "stuff" that is stored is the nutrients we eat (protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc.). Insulin opens these storage units, but each has its own level of sensitivity to insulin. The more sensitive a storage unit is, the easier it will open and store nutrients.

In an ideal world, our muscle cells would be super-sensitive to insulin, while our fat cells would be only slightly sensitive to insulin. This would certainly promote muscle gains and minimize fat gains. Basically, the more sensitive your muscle cells are to insulin, the greater your muscle building potential will be. The more sensitive your fat cells are to insulin, the greater your flab-building potential will be.

We'll come back to this concept later, but for now, it's enough to remember that the more sensitive your muscles are to insulin, the more amino acids you can store in your muscle cells and therefore the more new muscle tissue you can build.

Let's move on to cortisol

Cortisol is a hormone that inhibits muscle growth. But not only that - it can even reduce your muscle mass. Cortisol is what we call a catabolic hormone. Its role is to mobilize nutrients (release them from storage units) so that the body can produce more energy. This includes the muscles: Cortisol can break down muscle tissue into amino acids, which can then be converted by the liver into sugar (glucose), which serves as a readily available source of energy. This is what we call catabolism (sounds like cannibalism). Catabolism is the opposite of anabolism and for a bodybuilder this is a bad thing. So it seems like cortisol is a bad hormone.

Well, yes and no. Cortisol is actually necessary during exercise as it helps with energy production and increases the body's capacity to cope with physical stress. However, if cortisol levels remain chronically elevated after a training session, then the body remains in a catabolic state instead of entering an anabolic (muscle building) state. This often happens when people are under a lot of stress. Cortisol is a stress hormone that is released when stress levels rise. People who are exposed to a large amount of stress will therefore find it harder to use a lot of protein to build muscle, as their body is in a constant state of breaking down rather than building up.

As you can see, eating tons of protein will not necessarily mean that you will build more muscle. Excessive protein intake can also have another drawback: if protein is the dominant nutrient in your diet, then you run the risk of your body adapting to using protein as its primary energy source. If this happens, then your body will burn more protein for energy, resulting in less protein being available for muscle building purposes. The trick is to increase your protein intake to the point where you reach the maximum amount for optimal muscle growth.

How much is that exactly? As you probably understand by now, this is a very individual thing. However, most steroid-free exercisers will benefit from a protein intake in the range of 2.7 to 3.3 grams per kilogram of body weight. More than this is unlikely to lead to further gains. Protein is primarily found in animal products such as meat, fish, seafood, eggs, milk and cheese. And to make sure you get enough high-quality protein, you can also use a high-quality protein powder.

Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are the first of the two energy nutrients. Each gram of carbohydrate provides 4 kcal. The main function of carbohydrates in the body is to provide a quick source of energy for physical and mental work. Carbohydrates can be stored in one of the body's three main storage units: in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen, but also in the form of body fat. Carbohydrates are the body's preferred source of energy under most circumstances. So if there are sufficient amounts of carbohydrates in the diet, then it becomes difficult to force the body to use fat as an energy source. In other words, your fat will stay where it is if you eat a lot of carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates also cause the strongest insulin release of all three macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, fat). The increase in blood sugar levels (carbohydrates are sugar) is the primary stimulus for insulin release. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage: Insulin helps move protein and carbohydrates into the muscles (which is a good thing), but it can also stimulate fat storage (which is not so good). Furthermore, as long as insulin levels are elevated under normal circumstances, it is almost impossible to stimulate the release of fatty acids from fat cells. This means that fat loss is almost impossible as long as insulin levels are elevated. Remember that elevated insulin levels put your body into storage mode.

So elevated insulin levels are a good thing in certain circumstances (when you need to get nutrients into your muscles as quickly as possible), but most of the time elevated insulin levels are not desirable. The only two times you should eat a lot of carbohydrates (and thereby raise insulin levels) are at breakfast and immediately after a workout.

After waking up, the increase in insulin levels from breakfast will help you end the catabolic (muscle-depleting) state that comes from eight or more hours of fasting. After exercise, an increase in insulin levels will quickly transport nutrients to the muscles. This will initiate the recovery and muscle-building process while simultaneously ending the actions of cortisol. However, you should keep in mind that the amount of carbohydrates you should consume at these times will vary greatly depending on your goals and body fat percentage.

Any other time is not a good time to consume significant amounts of carbohydrates, as the resulting increase in insulin levels will have a negative impact on your body composition. Your insulin levels will remain elevated for up to 4 to 5 hours after a high carbohydrate meal, which can stall fat loss for this period of time. So not only will a high sugar meal add new fat to your fat stores, it will also effectively prevent you from using fat, turning you into a fat storing machine.

Even though carbohydrates are your body's preferred source of energy, carbohydrates are not essential in the same way that many amino acids and fatty acids are. This means that your body could function correctly even on a diet completely devoid of carbohydrates - the body would adapt to other energy sources and continue to function well.

There are many types of carbohydrates. Without going into too much detail, it should be mentioned that every carbohydrate from pure sugar to whole wheat is converted into glucose in the body. The main difference is the speed at which these carbohydrates are converted into glucose. The faster a carbohydrate is converted into glucose, the greater the insulin release will be (because more glucose enters the bloodstream at once). The rate at which a carbohydrate (or any other food) raises blood sugar is measured by the glycemic index (GI). Each food can be assigned a GI value and the higher this value is, the faster the food raises blood sugar levels. Even if this information is not perfectly accurate, it does give an indication of how much a given food will affect insulin production. However, you don't need to make a science out of this. If your goal is to improve your body composition, then the following rules apply:

• Carbohydrates that are a must: green vegetables (broccoli, cucumber, spinach, celery, asparagus, lettuce, etc.)
• Carbohydrates that can be eaten: other vegetables (except potatoes), berries (blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, currants, etc.)
• Carbohydrates for occasional consumption: other fruit
• Carbohydrates that should be eaten infrequently: brown rice, wholemeal bread, wholemeal pasta, semolina porridge, potatoes, yams
• Carbohydrates that should be avoided: White bread, pasta, oatmeal
• Carbohydrates that must be avoided: Cookies, cakes, sweets and other sugary foods

Fat

Each gram provides 9 kcal. Let me first mention that fat is not a bad thing. At least not all fats are bad. The "good" fats are the essential fatty acids - fatty acids that your body can't make itself but needs for optimal function. These fats must be supplied through food or in the form of supplements. These essential fatty acids fall into two broad categories: Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. Most people consume plenty of omega-6 fatty acids in their diet, especially if they eat a lot of animal protein sources. However, a lack of omega-3 fatty acids is widespread in the USA and Europe, primarily due to the fact that fish consumption is generally quite low. Omega-3 fatty acids - especially the important fatty acids DHA and EPA - have numerous benefits for health and building a muscular body.

Omega-3 fatty acids

• Increase insulin sensitivity, which has positive effects on both muscle building (promoting the transport of nutrients to the muscles) and fat loss (reducing the amount of nutrients stored as fat).
• Increasing the use of body fat as an energy source - especially during training.
• Improving regeneration and function of the nervous system.
• Improve cardiovascular health by improving blood flow, reducing triglyceride levels and reducing the formation of plaques and blood clots.
• Reduce inflammation and promote healing.

In addition to the benefits associated with omega-3 fatty acids, fat consumption has other benefits. One of the main benefits is an increase in testosterone production. Cholesterol is the raw material for the production of our favorite hormone, testosterone. If you don't consume at least 20% of your total calories in the form of fat, then your testosterone production can drop. And as you should know by now, less testosterone means less muscle.

I'm not recommending that you stuff yourself with butter and lard with both hands or drink cups of cream - I'm just reminding you that reducing your fat intake too much can seriously sabotage your muscle building goals.

Fat is also required for the absorption of several vitamins (A, D, E and K) that are needed for optimal health. If your fat intake is too low, you may develop a deficiency in one or more of these vitamins.

The basal metabolic rate (BMR)

Your basal metabolic rate describes the amount of energy your body burns in 24 hours while doing absolutely nothing. If you were to sit on the couch and watch TV for 24 hours, you would burn this amount of calories. It is possible to estimate the basal metabolic rate using a formula. This is of course not 100% accurate, but this formula can give you a pretty good idea of what your body needs to function.

These formulas look like this:

• Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 x weight in kg) + (5 x height in cm) - (6.8 x age)
• Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 x weight in kg) + (1.7 x height in cm) - (4.7 x age)

As an example, let's take a 29-year-old man who is 175 cm tall and weighs 94 kilos:

• BMR = 66 + (13.7 x 94) + (1.7 x 175) - (6.8 x 29)
• BMR = 66 + 1287 + 297 - 197
• BMR = 1453 kcal

This man would burn 1453 kcal within 24 hours while doing absolutely nothing. Depending on your daily activities, your actual daily energy expenditure, i.e. the amount of calories you burn in the course of a day, will vary. You can estimate this amount by multiplying your basal metabolic rate by an activity factor.

• 0: inactive (you do nothing but watch TV and eat potato chips)
• 1.2: very light activity (desk job, no exercise, some walking)
• 1.4: light activity (no exercise, a job that involves some light physical work)
• 1.6: moderate activity (most of us: a job that is not physically demanding, but regular exercise)
• 1.8: high activity (daily exercise and a physically active job or lifestyle)
• 2.0: very high activity (training twice a day, sport + training or training and a very physically demanding job)

In our example, if our 1453 kcal man is moderately active, then his total daily calorie consumption would be around 2324 kcal (1453 * 1.6). This means that he needs to consume 2324 kcal per day to maintain the status quo (neither gaining nor losing weight).

You should remember that these are only approximate values. It's better than guessing, but it's only really accurate for "normal" people. For example, if you are a mesomorph (naturally very muscular and lean), then this formula tends to underestimate your calorie consumption by about 10%. It's still a useful formula, but it may need a few adjustments.

Another way to determine your total calorie consumption is to write down everything you eat for a week and then calculate your calorie intake. If you have neither gained nor lost weight during these 7 days, then you have basically consumed as many calories as you have burned. Even though this method is a little more precise, it can be a real pain, which is why most people stick to calculating via a formula and adjust their calorie intake depending on how their body reacts.

By Christian Thibaudeau | 11/05/07
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/nutrition-for-newbies-1