Whether your goal is slicing off pounds of fat or packing on pounds of muscle, if you engage in any sort of regular exercise regimen, you're probably doing something wrong. And that something is a pretty big something. Sure, you've got your routine down. You've even seen some results. But what you haven't done is maximize the results from your training, because no matter how important your time in the gym is, you're probably not supplementing that exercise regime with the proper dietary one.
How you eat is just as important as how you train. I don't just mean cutting your calorie intake, and I certainly don't mean the latest fad diet. Your body is a factory, and if you want to get the right outputs from that factory, you have to give it the appropriate raw materials in the right way. Your "diet" is not something done for three weeks. It's a part of your lifestyle, and if you want a healthy lifestyle, you need a healthy diet.
Let's start with the basics: how many calories should you be consuming? In general, for an athletic lifestyle you should be consuming 10-15 calories per pound of body weight, and men need more calories than women. Muscle-building demands greater calorie intake than fat burning, and the more muscle you have, the more you need to eat. A pound of muscle requires three times the calorie expenditure per day as a pound of non-muscle mass.
What most "dieters" don't realize is that all calories are not created equal. A calorie from fat is converted to fat stores much more easily than a calorie from carbohydrates. At the same time, carbohydrates calories are, in turn, converted to fat more readily than those from protein. Fat calories are easily converted to fat because c9 well, in lay terms, they're already fat. Fat also contains more than twice the calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein, so a diet high in fat is almost certain to contain more calories than you should be consuming.
Protein calories, on the other hand, are not easily converted to fat. The thermic effect of protein is high, which is a complicated way of saying that your body is very inefficient at getting energy out of protein. Your body would rather use protein for other purposes (like building muscle).
Carbohydrates are your body's first choice for its energy needs. Carbs are easily converted into glycogen, which provides your body's short-term energy needs. A steady intake of quality complex carbohydrates spaced evenly throughout the day will provide you with a constant supply of energy to perform your exercise or just your daily tasks.
Remember that for the last two million years or so, the human body's biggest concern has been starvation, not getting fit. So since you can't fight your evolutionary heritage, why not work with it? Consume your nutrients over five or six small meals (rather than the one or two huge meals that most Hopkins students ingest). Space two to three hours between meals. Wait longer than that, and a whole plethora of bad things start happening. Wait less than that and you'll be overloading your body on nutrients, meaning the excess will either pass through you undigested (bad) or get stored as fat (worse).
I'm sure the guys who hit the gym regularly know about the importance of protein to their diet. But what most guys looking to pack on mass don't realize is the importance of carbohydrates. To maximize muscle gains, you need to be consuming 30-40 percent of your calories from protein, 40-50 percent from carbs, and 10-20 percent from fat. Yes, the fat is important too; to pack on massive pounds, you need the fat in your diet.
And for people looking to trim down their waistline? Protein is even more important for you! That's because of the thermic effect I mentioned earlier. Counterintuitive as it may sound, you should be consuming even more protein than the guys hitting the weights. Your numbers should come to 40-50 percent calories from protein, 30-40 percent from carbohydrates and 10-20 percent from fat. Try not to dip below 10 percent calories from fat. That shouldn't be a problem, seeing how the average American consumes about 40-50 percent of his or her calories from fat, and the average college student has even more of it in his diet. But it's something of which to be aware.
That is nutrition in a nutshell. So next time you're hitting up the fridge, just remember that what you snack on has just as much impact on your physique as how much you bench. Happy eating.
