Nutrition Wave - Ten Steps Forward, Nine Steps Backward

Nutrition Wave - Ending the Sisyphus Syndrome

See if this sounds familiar: you get an invitation to attend your 20^th class reunion. You get a vision. The vision is of you — a transformed, streamlined, muscled-up you — blowing minds and dropping jaws as you saunter into your reunion. You see an idealized version of yourself, vividly and repeatedly. This vision is so strong, so motivating, that it converts into real enthusiasm, enthusiasm for embarking on a nutrition and exercise program, one that will transform you to the degree you envision within the allotted timeframe.

The Class-Reunion Vision

You hatch a plan: during the next three months, you will lose 25 pounds of bodyweight. The vision of your transformed body is so strong that yearning and desire are converted into action. After some research, you find a low-fat / low-calorie nutrition plan that is all the rage and seems doable. You join the YMCA and you have a treadmill set up and ready to go in your garage.

The strategy is simple: eat ever smaller amounts of low-fat food and perform more and more cardio exercise as the date draws closer. This is the classical mainstream prescription for losing weight: cut calories, increase “exercise,” i.e. cardio training.

The main dietary emphasis is placed on lowering calories, and this starts by eliminating as much saturated fat as possible from the diet. At 9 calories per gram, long-chain triglycerides are more energy dense than protein or carbohydrate at 4 calories per gram. From a calorie-counting perspective, you can eat more volume of protein or carbohydrate for the same caloric cost.

The process becomes one of greater and greater degrees of deprivation. The deeper you delve into the three-month process, the more calories you cut. You might start off eating 3,000 indiscriminate “dirty” calories per day, but by the week of the reunion, under this punishment model, you could be trying to exist on less than 1,000 calories per day.

That is not a recommendation. That is the trap.

The Starvation-and-Cardio Trap

The other part of the mainstream weight-loss prescription is to systematically increase exercise. The far and away favored form of exercise, favored by the mainstream, is frequent, long-duration, moderate-intensity cardiovascular exercise, aerobics, done daily and sometimes twice a day.

Everything is about the calorie: dietary discipline, willpower, is used to reduce calories as much as possible; constant cardio is used to oxidize more calories via exercise.

The energy-balance equation requires followers to determine how many calories a day are needed to maintain homeostasis. By way of example, if the current number of calories needed to maintain current bodyweight is 3,000 calories, the mainstream solution starts by replacing higher-calorie foods with “Lite” or low-fat carbohydrate foods. Theoretically, if a person reduces daily calories by 500 calories per day, every seven days 3,500 calories are saved, the old arithmetic equivalent of 1 pound of body fat.

The deeper into the three-month process you travel, the less food you are expected to eat and the more cardio you are expected to do. This requires willpower. Boring, no-taste eating is combined with boring gerbil-mill cardio in a ceaseless daily grind that offers no letup.

Akin to Cool Hand Luke being sentenced to county lock-up for three months, you are forced to do endless exercise: him on a chain gang swinging a grass-cutting scythe versus you on the stationary bike pedaling mindlessly. In terms of intensity, what is the difference? Like Luke, you are being overworked and underfed.

Over time, this approach — fewer and fewer calories, more and more cardio — creates a depleted, emaciated-looking physique using what I would call starvation-and-drudgery fitness for extreme short-term weight loss.

The last two to three weeks leading up to the reunion are pure hell. To keep the weight loss moving ahead, double cardio sessions are instituted. Every morning starts with a 45-minute stationary bike or treadmill cardio session. The goal is to attain a pace and sustain it for the 45-minute duration. You listen to music, watch TV, text, send emails, anything to try and distract yourself from the drudgery of the exercise. The minutes tick by like hours.

As you get closer to the event, you stall. Zero progress for 14 days. What to do?

You add a second cardio session. Shorter, 30 minutes, done late in the day. You ride the exercise bike twice a day and live on less than 1,000 calories a day. You dread every workout and think about food — dirty, bad, evil food — all the time. Listless, zero energy, mentally fuzzy and in a continual foul temper, you count down the days, the hours and the minutes until you walk into the ballroom at the Sheraton, see your classmates and end this hell.

What the Energy-Balance Equation Misses

Psychologically, the goal, the payoff, the motivation, is stronger than the urge to binge or quit. Willpower is the ability to force ourselves to do things we do not want to do. No one needs willpower to do fun stuff, cool stuff. No one needs willpower to eat delicious food or body surf in Hawaii. Willpower is used to voluntarily starve. Willpower is used to push through hateful, boring workouts. Willpower is used to drag ourselves across the finish line.

The energy-balance equation is not bogus in the sense that calories do not matter. Calories do matter. But the popular use of the equation is incomplete, mechanical and often psychologically tone-deaf. It ignores hunger, adaptation, training quality, protein intake, muscle retention, sleep, stress, food quality, the joy or dread of the training, and the likelihood that the athlete can keep doing this after the event passes.

A starving person doing twice-daily cardio can lose scale weight. That does not mean the method builds a durable physique, preserves muscle, improves performance, or creates a lifestyle worth continuing.

The Rebound After the Finish Line

Those who successfully starve and successfully engage in continual cardio will attain a temporary weight-loss result. However, beware the rebound, the aftershock, the celebratory after-party that begins the counter-process.

Nutrition-rich foods include properly prepared proteins and vegetables.

You successfully lose those 25 pounds, squeeze into that new suit and make your grand entrance. Having succeeded, it is only natural to want to have a few drinks, a wonderful meal and then party till dawn. The backsliding begins and continues through the weekend.

The binge continues Monday and lasts the remainder of the week. Every day you tell yourself you will get back on the drudgery bandwagon starting tomorrow. It never happens. Within three weeks, you undo three months of deprivation, starvation and endless hours of mindless cardio.

You now associate transformative fitness with a prison-camp approach: overwork and underfeed to attain the goal. Those class-reunion-inspired gains, those physical improvements, were transitory, temporary, illusions — fleeting instances when the trainee attained a certain targeted bodyweight for the briefest of instants before completely breaking down and quitting.

You morph, literally overnight, from months of slow starvation into bursts of instantaneous gluttony.

The trainee, on the other side of the event, is suddenly liberated from the voluntary prison. He goes buck wild. He ditches exercise, going from twice-a-day cardio to zero cardio. He eats anything he wants, whenever he wants it, and as much as he wants. The starved body, suddenly flooded with refined carbohydrates, sugar, alcohol, and bad fats, freaks out. The trainee goes backwards three times as fast as progress occurred.

There is a natural and predictable adverse psychological reaction to prolonged periods of starvation-style eating and hateful exercise. Now, instead of dreaming about the food you cannot have, you can have the forbidden food you had been denying yourself. It is only natural to stop training when you dread the training.

Willpower Starts the Process, Enthusiasm Sustains It

The elite find joy in training. Because they love to train, they do it often and enthusiastically. A critical psychological shift occurs when enthusiasm takes over from willpower as the motivating mental propellant. Willpower can be used with great initial effect; however, the sooner enthusiasm replaces willpower, the better.

Enthusiasm is born of results: tangible, measurable, objective increases in performance and physique. Real results beget real enthusiasm. Enthusiasm powers the process. Results occur because the trainee is consistent, diligent and enthused. The trainee is enthused about progressive resistance training, cardio exercise — a different type — and applied power nutrition, all skillfully and artfully combined.

Over time, enthusiasm, born of results, begets physiological momentum. Whereas willpower is a finite fossil fuel, enthusiasm is infinite solar power, cold fusion. Results recharge enthusiasm.

Potent Food, Real Training, and Performance Nutrition

Approach nutrition differently: make potency paramount. Taste and deliciousness spring from potency. The most potent foods are often the tastiest. Potent proteins and produce are flavorful. Seek natural, seasonal, locally sourced proteins and produce when you can. Jack LaLanne once said, “If man made it, don’t eat it.” Good advice as a rough strength-culture rule, not a religion. That and learn how to cook.

Can you roast a chicken? Grill a steak? Sauté vegetables? Smoke meat on a Weber Grill? Create a perfect power meal in less than 15 minutes? Skill in the kitchen, kitchen preparation techniques, are as important as resistance techniques learned in the gym.

Willpower launches the process. Optimally, within 10 to 14 days, willpower is replaced by enthusiasm. Born out of factual, tangible results, enthusiasm is continually replenished by additional improvements in physique and performance. Small gains in physique and performance compound over the life of the periodized cycle and create a radically transformed physique.

Those results are not born from starvation eating and hateful exercise. They come from a better matrix: progressive resistance training, varied cardio, sufficient protein, nutrient-dense food, sleep, recovery and a plan that a serious trainee can live with after the event passes.

Consolidate the Gains Before You Celebrate

When breakthrough gains have been attained, those gains need to be solidified and secured.

This is done by maintaining rough proximity to the training and nutritional regimens that got you there. Maintain the modes and methods that transported you to these new gains. Stay in this approximate groove for three to six weeks. This is the way peak gains are made more permanent.

Some loosening up can occur once the peak is attained, but limit the after-party to 24 to 48 hours. Then it is time to get back into the saddle. Dramatic backsliding is avoided because there is no revulsion to the ongoing nutrition, no abhorrence of the ongoing resistance training and cardio exercise that got us to the goal.

We now love to train. We have figured out how to infuse taste and deliciousness into the mostly organic, nutrient-dense foods we eat. The foods are wholesome, delicious, and nutritious. The meals prepared are looked forward to. No starvation eating ever. No need.

The trainee has learned to love muscle-building progressive resistance training and uses a wide variety of fat-burning cardio exercises. Training fun has replaced training drudgery. Results recharge the ongoing effort. When you look forward to weightlifting and cardio training, when you look forward to nutrient-dense diet foods, the transformative battle is all but won.

The way to solidify gains and end the Sisyphus-like drama of ten steps forward — months of agony — and nine steps backward — the endless binge — is to approach training and nutrition with a brand-new mindset. If you dread training and if proper nutrition is horrific, you need a new approach.

Equipment Notes for Replacing Drudgery With Productive Training

The nutrition wave is primarily a mindset and food-quality article, not an equipment article. Still, the right tools can help replace drudgery with productive, repeatable training.

For cardio that can be rotated and periodized, lifters can compare exercise bikes and treadmills. A commercial upright bike such as the Spirit Fitness CU800 commercial upright fitness bike or a self-powered treadmill such as the Throwdown HIITMill self-powered treadmill can support more purposeful conditioning when the program is sane, scaled, and progressive.

For the resistance-training side of the transformation, readers can compare dumbbells and barbells. Products such as IRON COMPANY urethane hex dumbbells and an IRON COMPANY urethane barbell set are examples of tools that can support productive progressive resistance training. The tools do not create enthusiasm. Results do.

Safety Note for Aggressive Dieting, Double Cardio, and Rebound Eating

Very-low-calorie dieting, sub-1,000-calorie eating, twice-daily cardio, rapid weight-loss goals and binge / rebound cycles are not appropriate for many people. They can be especially risky for people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, eating-disorder history, pregnancy, underweight status, medication concerns, major medical conditions, or significant injury history.

Stop or seek qualified guidance if a diet or training plan produces faintness, chest pain, unusual shortness of breath, dizziness, confusion, obsessive food behavior, uncontrolled binge-restrict cycles, severe weakness, abnormal fatigue, or repeated technical collapse during exercise.

This article preserves Marty Gallagher’s RAW nutrition philosophy and critique of starvation-style transformation attempts. It is not individualized medical, dietetic, rehabilitation, mental-health, or programming advice.

Related Nutrition Reading

For more Marty Gallagher nutrition context, read Performance Nutrition for Fat Loss and Muscle Growth and What Elite Chefs Can Teach Athletes About Nutrition.