Newton's Nutrition: The Basic Fundamentals

Everyone wants the magic bullet diet. And given the choice of doing things the easy way or doing things the hard way, most everyone will choose doing things the easy way. Work smarter, not harder, right? Unfortunately this leads people down paths that won’t work in the long run, or that would never work in the first place. Sometimes it’s a quick temporary fix that gets results the first week or two but is complete unsustainable. To be blunt, there is a lot of money in industry, be it weight loss, athletic performance or body building. Health and performance supplements, fad diets, special exercise routines and equipment and energy boosters are everywhere, and there are plenty of wolves in sheep’s clothing that are eager to cash in. Snake oil has been sold for longer than any of us have been around. And one thing that people always seem to lose sight of is the old adage “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”. But people have a tendency of believing in magic, it’s potentially hardwired into our brains¹. We all want to believe there is a magic drink that can make better faster stronger… and thinner smarter and richer. But the reality is that there is no simple solution. It does take hard work- so it’s not really a matter of working smarter, not harder; it’s a matter of working smart and hard, or working way to hard and hindering your results. So how do you prepare yourself for this battle? Everybody is different, and specifics can be adjusted to the individual, but a general guide still stands. If you have a specific question pertaining to yourself, please contact me. I present the basic fundamentals.

Goals

To have the best chance of hitting a target, you have to aim for it. If you don’t have a target, you will need the best luck in the universe to hit it. So figure out what you want to do and plan accordingly. There are a few general categories that are the main focus, although people typically will have overlap, or want to do a variety of things at once. Unfortunately, that will complicate things and perhaps hamper efforts, particularly if you want to bulk muscle and lose fat at the same time. It’s much simpler to pick one or the other, reach your goal, and then switch. So what is your goal? If you want to lose weight, just stop reading now, I have a simple solution- amputation (if you think you want weight loss, you probably mean you want to lose some fat). For goals were nutrition would be related, I would break the possible goals down into four categories:.

1. Look good naked (fat loss)

2. Athletic Training/ Performance related

3. Muscle building/ Bulk

4. Health

There is some overlap between all these groups, but generally speaking, an ideal diet and regiment will probably differ between each goal. The optimum diet for athletic performance might be healthy, but not as healthy if you were only concerned with health. As mentioned before, it’s rather difficult to lose fat and add muscle simultaneously, and the structure of those regiments would typically be different. Additionally, the most optimal way to add muscle might not be the healthiest way of eating. I’ll address this more at a later time. Of course there will be some variation and tailoring that needs to be done depending on where you start as well.

Tracking

You can’t adjust variables if you don’t track them. So where are you starting? You should know where you’re going, and how to get there will depend on where you are at. And the path isn’t always a straight line. There is variation and chaos in life- things happen, unforeseen winds will blow and cause a shift. You need to track your journey so you at least have an idea of the direction you’re going, if you are still going towards your goal, or if you got turned around. It can help you compare small incremental tweaks to help you optimize getting to your goal in the fastest way for YOU, based on your results. Depending on your goals, and perhaps level of OCD, you should at least write down your starting weight and measurements (percent body fat, body dimensions like waist, chest, arms etc), pictures are great, a rough dietary guideline of what you ate before your diet, your plan for dieting, and perhaps your athletic measures (number of pushups you can do, 5 rep max on squat, or 100 m time). An exercise log is very important, to track everything at every workout. At most you should have a food log documenting calories, macronutrient break downs, and the time of the meals. How much sleep are you getting and how much water are you drinking. Are you stressed from whatever reason? Make a note. Some people don’t have the time, energy, or can get themselves overly stressed worrying about counting calories and meeting their targets. Still right down an outline and stick adamantly to it and watch for results- adjust as necessary. You can’t adjust variables if you don’t track them.

DIET

To keep this from blowing up into a huge post, I will summarize some general guidelines- I don’t think these are exactly set in stone, and again, if you have a specific question pertaining to yourself, please contact me.

The best diet is one that you can adhere to² that meets your goals. And if you haven’t figured it out (take a deep breath) it’s going to take some work and dedication to get results. There are two main ways to go for fat loss. Both will work, and sometimes a combination works best. The two options are elimination and caloric restriction. If you are trying to look good naked, pick either one of the options. If you are trying to go healthy, go for the elimination and check out my previous posthere. If you are training or bulking, you really need to count calories.

Elimination:

If you don’t like to obsess over every calorie and don’t want to have to log all your food, do an elimination diet. For the elimination flavor go paleo. Eat nothing but meat and veggies, some fruit, nuts and seeds and that is it. No grains (including corn) legumes or dairy, and definitely NO sugar. Don’t gorge yourself, but eat reasonably when you are hungry.

Caloric Counting:

If you want to look good naked and want more flexibility in what type of foods you eat, go with caloric restriction. Start off with figuring how many calories you currently eat or need, and then cut them by about 20-25%. You could use Google to find an online calculator that will guess your total daily energy expenditure, but know this; there is a large amount of variation in people’s basal metabolic rate³, which is by far the largest component of daily calories (unless you are training for the Olympics). Due to the variation, the equations don’t mean too much and you can estimate just as well, and make adjustments based on your personal results (gasp). The conventional wisdom is that your maintenance caloric intake is about 14-16 calories per pound, and a decent caloric deficit is about 20-25% less than that, or around 10-12 calories per pound. Start there and give it a few weeks- if you have a lot to lose, and you are losing more than 2 pounds a week, bump the number up a bit. If you are losing too slow, bump it down. There are some caveats here, it’s not a free pass to eat all your calories from ice cream, which would result in metabolic derangement, and other issues I’ll go into in later posts. Ideally you should be eating as much whole food as possible, lots of meat and veggies, in fact, mostly meat and veggies. It will help with feeling full when under a caloric defficit⁴ among many other benefits of protein I’ll be continually addressing on the site. Try to get a gram of protein per pound of body weight. No, it’s not bad for your heart⁵ or kidneys⁶. Try to split the remaining calories between carbs and fat, about equal number of grams of carbs and fat. Limit carbs unless you are working out, and try to plan for a day of higher carbs and calories on the days that you will be working out hard, maybe once a week. It will help with cravings mentally, and physically with your recovery. Again, adjust based on how you feel.

Figure out what you think would work best for you and pick the flavor you like. Stick with it for at least three weeks before you try to make any changes so you can judge how it has been working. If you need help, ask me.

If you are training or bulking follow the same above advice but adjust your caloric intake target. Go for maintenance, 14-16 calories per pound, plus a bit for athletic training and add a little. It gets a little fuzzy about how much to add, it will all depend on how much and what type of training you do. If it’s non-body building, you are probably going to need a fair amount of carbohydrates to replenish muscle glycogen stores to have enough energy to keep them firing. Get a good dose before and after your workouts, probably around the same ratio of protein to carbs. Adjust based on your performance and physical changes.

For bulking or muscle gain, the best way is to do it slow and steady, so you avoid gaining to much fat with the muscle. Go for maintenance, 14-16 calories per pound, plus about 20% on workout days. Eat about 1.3-1.5 g of both carbs and protein, with the bulk of your calories coming close to your completion of weight training. Make sure that you give yourself at least 50 g of carbs and protein before the work out too, so you have energy for the workout. On rest days try for about maintenance, and keep the carbs low, maybe about 100 grams. Again, guess what- you should adjust based on your physical changes, making sure the gains are mostly muscle and not at such a rapid rate that there is significant fat gain as well. You should also be putting weight on the bar on a regular basis- if you’re not, eat more.

Exercise

Yea, you should exercise. This section will be predominantly aimed at the look good naked dieter, as the athletic trainer and muscle gainer probably already have signed onto the concept (but they should pay close attention to the comments about meal timing). Again, the best exercise is the one that you will consistently do, but I recommend weight training, three days a week for an hour were you really push yourself. Of course, adjust as needed. If you feel you are not recovering, dial back to maybe fourty-five minutes, or cut a day, but for initial stages of weight loss, just three hours a week should be perfect. More might risk burnout or over training. Under a caloric deficit too much exercise will be counter productive.

Before I get to deep into the reasons why I’d recommend weight training, and weight training over aerobic activity, I’d like to mention that getting some protein before and after your workout is very, very important, specifically metabolicly⁷. Additionally, there are benefits of ingesting carbohydrates post exercise as muscle glycogen (muscle energy) uptake is increased without any negative effects of insulin ^8,⁹.

So why weight training? Well for one, muscular strength seems to be reversely correlated with obesity¹⁰. Not only that, increased muscle from resistance training increases beneficial metabolic parameters¹¹ and can increase testosterone, growth hormone, IGF-1 in men creating benefits in later life¹². These health benefits (also including the cardiovascular benefits¹³ superior to that of aerobic exercise) will also aid in weight loss, but one of the dominate reasons is the increase in metabolic rate (the calories your body burns) after the exercise. This effect is known as excess post exercise oxygen consumption, or “EPOC”, what many people refer to as the “after burn”, the calories you burn from exercise after you are done exercising. Intense resistance exercise for less than an hour has been shown to burn significant calories over the next fourteen hours, increasing the energy expenditure by 37% over the initial resistance exercise¹⁴. This could add up to an additional 250 cals burned after the workout. Just sitting around doing nothing, the weight training will continue to burn that many more calories! This is more advantageous for anaerobic (resistance) workouts compared to aerobic workouts. Comparing anaerobic and aerobic workouts of equal work, anaerobic exercise used nearly twice as many calories¹⁵. Not only does the anaerobic workout use more calories, the EPOC is significantly higher, one study showing an anaerobic workout to have over five times the EPOC than an aerobic workout¹⁵. My final argument for resistance training over aerobic training comes from a large study data showing that there is little to no difference in weight loss by adding aerobic exercise to a diet for weight loss (additionally, diet alone was far superior than attempts to lose weight by exercise alone)¹⁶.

Ok, that’s it. More details to come in smaller, more specific chunks.