Eat a lot and build nothing but muscle
Here's what you need to know....
- What you eat is either used by your muscles or stored as fat. This process is called nutrient partitioning.
- If your body is partitioning nutrients well, then they will end up in your muscles. If it doesn't, then you can expect to gain 2 to 3 pounds of fat for every pound of muscle you build.
- If you are a good nutrient partitioner, almost every calorie burned will come from stored body fat and not muscle. If you are not a good nutrient partitioner, then you can easily lose a pound of muscle for every few pounds of fat you lose.
- The good news is that you can acquire the ability to partition nutrients effectively by using a few simple strategies.
Bad genetics? Here's what you can change
Do you know someone who is well built? I mean really well built? One of those rare people who is a mix of chiseled granite, meat and a comic book superhero? Nearly every calorie these genetically blessed men and women eat goes straight to muscle. If for some reason these people feel the need to diet, every calorie burned comes from fat stores, not muscle. No matter how they train or eat, they get better - with round muscle bellies and low body fat levels.
And you?
Hah! When you eat for mass, for every pound you gain, you gain 2 to 3 pounds of fat. And if you're cutting calories, then for every 2 to 3 pounds of fat you lose, you lose a pound of muscle.
The difference between you and them is largely genetic. Testosterone levels and insulin sensitivity play a role, as do cortisol levels. The genetically blessed also have a thyroid gland and nervous system that work with the efficiency of a German automobile engineer. Another significant advantage of these genetically blessed has to do with how well they partition nutrients, which fortunately is a gift that you too can acquire.
Not all calories are treated equally
Nutrient partitioning is the process by which the body decides what to do with the energy you take in through food.
When you eat something, those nutrients are either burned or stored for future use. Ideally, you would want all those storage nutrients to end up in your muscles instead of your body fat.
That's why the old saying "a calorie is a calorie" isn't really true - at least not in terms of how a calorie is treated by the body. When nutrients are partitioned towards the muscles, they can potentially stimulate new muscle growth and replenish muscle glycogen stores, allowing for even more growth in combination with increased work capacity and faster recovery.
A number of different factors are involved in efficient nutrient partitioning, including coordination between the digestive tract, liver, central nervous system and muscles, which is not yet fully understood and is most likely coordinated by hormones and secondary chemical messengers.
The primary determining component of nutrient partitioning is insulin If you are a diabetic or suffer from obesity, your ability to partition nutrients is likely impaired. And if you are simply a bit insulin resistant, then your nutrient partitioning is sluggish and inefficient.
Insulin will continue to try to enter the muscle cells of insulin-resistant people by contacting a receptor on the cell, but its attempts are ignored. Normally, insulin would activate this specific protein called GLUT4, which allows glucose to enter the cell. But in insulin-resistant people, GLUT4 doesn't answer the call, so glucose (along with branched-chain amino acids that insulin might transport) doesn't enter the cell.
Insulin then allows the unwanted glucose to be converted into fatty acids, which are transported to fat storage centers such as your belly or love handles, where they are stored in addition to the mountain of fat that already exists.
However, if you are insulin sensitive, carbohydrates and branched chain amino acids are transported Fed-Ex style to muscle cells where the beautiful GLUT4 lady of the house signs for them and escorts them in, where they are heartily absorbed by the machinery of the cell and incorporated into brand new muscle - always assuming you are exercising correctly.
Genetically blessed vs. skinny flabby people
You now know the overall picture of the haves and the have-nots. On one side we have genetically perfect guys with idealized nutrient partitioning abilities and on the other side we have scrawny and flabby guys going to war against the perfect guys. The truth is that everyone's nutrient partitioning abilities lie somewhere on a broad spectrum. Even the hypothetically perfect nutrient-partitioning people can suffer a setback if they eat too many carbs.
When this happens, these people will experience some of what insulin-resistant people succumb to every day - and that is that the extra glucose is converted into fatty acids and stored as triglycerides in adipose tissue.
Regardless of where you are on the spectrum, there are things you can do to improve your nutrient partitioning abilities.
Become a blessed nutrient partitioner
The traditional remedy for poor nutrient partitioning skills is to pay attention to the types of carbohydrates you eat and when you eat them. You've heard it many times before: eat fast-digesting carbohydrates during the period around your workout. Eat small amounts of complex carbohydrates the rest of the time. Likewise, you've been told time and time again to limit your total carbohydrate intake because excessive carbohydrate intake, even in genetically blessed people with excellent insulin sensitivity, can reduce insulin sensitivity and cause the body to behave more like that of a fat person metabolically. All of this is true, but taking cyanidin 3-glucoside (C3G) - a nutrient-partitioning supplement - changes the rules.
The supplement - a compound found in various berries - significantly increases the insulin sensitivity of muscle cells while reducing the insulin sensitivity of fat cells.
This means that glucose uptake into muscle cells increases and glucose, nutrients and BCAAs are partitioned into these cells, while fat storage is hindered and fatty acid oxidation is increased.
With C3G, you're even better off eating more carbohydrates - especially during the time around training, but also during other times of the day. The C3G makes your body act more like that of a genetically blessed partitioner. The calories you eat are preferentially partitioned into muscle and thus your weight gain comes from building muscle and not fat.
If you diet while using C3G - or even if you don't - fat is preferentially burned while muscle tissue is maintained. Through a chemical optimization brought on by C3G, your body suddenly begins to respond like the body of a genetically blessed nutrient partitioner.
And please excuse me for not citing tons of studies. You can do this yourself. Just type "cyanidin 3-glucoside" into Google Scholar.
The fatty acid solution
Another way to improve nutrient partitioning is to pay attention to fatty acid ratios. As you've probably read somewhere, the typical Western diet is high in omega-6 fatty acids and relatively low in omega-3 fatty acids.
It has been reported that the American diet typically has an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio of 20 to 1, when ideally it should be closer to 4 to 1. This huge imbalance leads to a chronic state of inflammation, and chronic inflammation is a common cause of poor insulin sensitivity - not to mention diabetes and obesity in general.
For these reasons, you should eat more fish or at least take fish oil to balance the ratio.
Two paths you can take
You have a choice of two options if you want to improve the way you partition nutrients:
1. restriction
You can watch your carbohydrate intake, spreading the largest amount of carbohydrates around your workout (eating about 70% of your carbohydrates before, during and immediately after your training session) and eating most of the remaining carbohydrates during a post-workout meal.
This will help you use the nutrient-partitioning abilities you have to your advantage - no matter how modest they may be.
You can also limit your total carbohydrate intake, but this is by and large a "two steps forward, one step back" approach. You are eating less carbohydrate to sensitize your nutrient partitioning system, but you are also providing less carbohydrate to your muscle cells. Therefore, you can't really use the increased nutrient partitioning ability to your advantage!
2. supplement
You can of course also use C3G to improve your nutrient-partitioning powers, so that you can eat more carbohydrates - around training and at other times - and at the same time ensure that most of these carbohydrates end up in your muscles instead of in your fat stores.
Furthermore, you can increase your omega-3 fatty acid consumption to stop chronic fat cell inflammation, which will also improve your insulin sensitivity. The second option will give you much more impressive results than following option 1, but what really matters is that you follow one of these...only if you want to build muscle like the genetically blessed, of course.
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/supplements/eat-big-and-gain-nothing-but-muscle
by TC Luoma | 12/03/13