Eat to Incinerate Fat and Fuel Your Workouts
BY MICHAEL ROUSSELL, PhD
Mike Roussell holds a doctorate in nutrition from Pennsylvania State University. He is an author, a speaker, a weight-loss coach, and the founder of Naked Nutrition consulting. Dr. Roussell is also a nutritionist on Men’s Health magazine’s board of advisors.
Ahigh-performance vehicle filled with regular gasoline will hesitate and sputter and won’t deliver the high performance you expect when you step on the gas. Your body is similar. You need to fuel it right to make it work optimally. That’s even more critical when you are making the kind of demands of it that you find in the extreme bodyweight exercise programs in this book. To reap all the benefits of BJ’s metabolism-scorching workouts, you need to create the proper metabolic environment that allows your body to access stored body fat and rebuild muscle bigger and stronger, while also providing the nutrients it needs for lifelong health.
You might expect that the nutrition prescription to achieve all this would be complicated and full of overly detailed caloric calculations—but it isn’t! It’s actually quite simple. There are just eight keys that’ll give your body its best fighting chance to shed fat and develop a lean and muscular physique.
KEY 1 Eat Four Times per Day
The first thing I want you to do is eat more often. Don’t worry about calories right now. It’s more important to establish the habit before you start fine-tuning. Let your hunger level determine how much you eat. To illustrate this for clients, I use a rule called Eat and Eat Again.
“You can eat as much as you want at any given meal, but you need to be able to eat that exact same amount of food 2 to 3 hours later.”
The rule works because it curbs how much you consume at any one meal. For example, devouring an entire pizza may seem like a good idea at 2:00 p.m. on the day you skipped breakfast and forgot to have lunch. But what if you knew you had to eat another entire pizza just 2 to 3 hours later? Not quite as appealing, is it? Following the Eat and Eat Again rule will curb your calorie intake automatically, without requiring much thought. Eating more frequently keeps cravings at bay by avoiding the swings from high to low blood sugar that cause cravings.
ACTION STEP: The best way to start is ensuring that you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What to eat? Take your cues from “Eight Power Foods.” Once you have that down, just add in a midmorning or midafternoon protein-rich snack. On the days you work out, replace that snack with your workout nutrition.
KEY 2 Limit Consumption of Sugars and Processed Foods
If I could have you make just one change to your diet with the greatest potential to impact your weight and health, this would be it. Foods are processed to increase their shelf life and improve taste. To accomplish those goals, the manufacturers remove nutrients and replace them with less-expensive, longer-lasting fillers. Refined flours and sugars are cheap, easy fillers to use. But in exchange for cheap, tasty, and convenient food, you end up with weight gain and worsened health. Nutrition research consistently shows that people who eat the most vegetables and fresh fruit have the best health outcomes, while those who consume the most processed food have the highest risk for heart disease, obesity, certain cancers, diabetes, and even premature death. The goal of Key 2 is to get you away from the things that make you fat and unhealthy.
Dietary displacement is the key to making this work. What you don’t eat is just as important as what you do. A diet that’s loaded with highly processed food prevents you from eating fruit, vegetables, and lean protein. Conversely, when you make the move from bar codes to bags, a diet rich in fruits and vegetables (foods that you have to put into bags) means eating less of the refined convenience food (things that come in boxes and packages with bar codes).
ACTION STEP: It’s a two-part strategy: Start by identifying processed and sugar-sweetened foods that you are currently eating. Then make a list of fresh, or at least minimally processed, foods to replace them. For example, instead of grabbing yogurt with fruit on the bottom (that fruit comes with added sugars), choose plain yogurt with fresh berries. Putting Key 2 into action isn’t easy, but it’s the most important adjustment you can make.
KEY 3 Eat Fresh Stuff throughout the Day
As a world-renowned expert in obesity and eating behavior, Barbara Rolls, PhD, of Pennsylvania State University has shown repeatedly in her research that the energy density of your food is the single most important predictor of how many total calories you’ll consume. An example of an energy-dense food is a bowl of pasta with a cream-based sauce: high density, low volume, tons of calories. By contrast, vegetables, because of their high fiber and water content, offer a high volume of food that can fill your plate and your stomach yet provide a low-calorie punch. Including them reduces the energy density of your meal, meaning you can eat a lot of vegetables at one sitting but still end up with a very low-calorie meal.
ACTION STEP: Only 6 percent of us meet the recommended daily minimums for fruit and vegetable consumption. The average American eats just over 1 cup of fruit and ½ cup of vegetables each day. Make a deal with yourself: Every time you eat, have a piece of fruit or a vegetable; it is even better if you make them the foundation of your plate. If you’ve put Key 2 into action, then you should already have a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables around your house to include.
KEY 4 Drink More Water and Eliminate Calorie-Containing Beverages
Just about everyone can benefit from drinking more water. By properly hydrating your body, you’ll be less fatigued and more alert, perform better, think straighter, and just feel better in general. Water is the very best performance-enhancing substance there is. A proper level of hydration before, during, and after exercise has been shown to help maintain performance, lower exercise heart rate, and reduce heat stress.
Many of us take in plenty of fluids, but we do it in the worst possible way. If you currently drink nondiet soda, lattes (or any other coffee-type drink that costs more than $5), or fruit juice throughout the day, you should stop. Replacing these calorie-containing drinks with water and/or unsweetened tea (especially green tea, which is high in antioxidants and has been shown to elevate fat burn) will make a huge difference in your health and body composition. If you drink two 20-ounce bottles of Coke or Pepsi each day, that’s an extra 500 calories in your diet from which you get no nutritional benefit whatsoever. Think of it as a direct deposit into your lower abdomen. But by simply replacing those two sodas each day with water or another calorie-free beverage, you could lose a pound a week initially. Remember: Drinking empty calories is wasting calories.
ACTION STEP: This is the easiest key to put into action. Just stop drinking calories! The major sources are coffee drinks with added sugar and/or cream (not the packet of sugar in your coffee but the 400-calorie Frappuccino-type drinks), soda, sweetened or flavored water (such as Vitaminwater), sports drinks, and fruit juice. I’m not asking you to cut out sugar-sweetened beverages cold turkey. For starters, switch from Coke to Coke Zero, Gatorade to low-calorie Gatorade, and sweetened iced tea to artificially sweetened tea. Once you’ve made and adjusted to those switches, start replacing them with water or unsweetened tea.
KEY 5 Consume Lean Protein throughout the Day
Eating protein every time you have a meal is a strategy that is misunderstood by most involved in health and fitness. Bodybuilders will have you constantly eating boatloads of protein, while many dietitians and health professionals warn against high protein by using scare tactics born out of misinterpretation of scientific literature.
How much protein do you need? “Need” is an interesting concept. It sounds concrete, but what kind of need are we describing? To survive? To prevent a protein deficiency? To lose weight? To perform as an athlete at an elite level? To maximize the results of training? To live a long, active life?
The US Department of Agriculture has an RDA, or Recommended Dietary Allowance, for all nutrients, including protein. Here’s how RDA is defined: the average daily dietary nutrient intake level sufficient to meet the nutrient requirement of nearly all (97 to 98 percent) healthy individuals in a particular life stage and gender group.
The RDA for protein for the average man is 60 to 65 grams per day. So if you eat 60 grams of protein a day—the equivalent of a 12-ounce sirloin steak or a couple chicken breasts—you won’t die from not having enough protein (97 to 98 percent of the time). Essential amino acid deficiency is rarely an issue, so I’m less concerned about that and more interested in what the optimal protein intake is to help you reach your goals the fastest. When it comes to building muscle and losing fat, research consistently shows that doubling the RDA spaced out throughout the day is the path you want to take to get the best results the fastest.
PROTEIN TIMING AND PROTEIN SYNTHESIS
Our traditional view of protein has proved to be rather archaic. In addition to focusing on eating the minimum amount of protein required to prevent deficiencies, we have paid little attention to how we go about getting protein in our diet. Most Americans eat a large portion of protein at dinner, with smaller amounts of protein (if any) at breakfast and lunch. As you probably know, protein, and the amino acids that make it up, is required for building muscle. Your body, however, doesn’t just use amino acids as the building blocks to construct your muscle. Your body uses amino acids to signal that it’s time to start up the muscle-building machinery. The most important is an amino acid called leucine, which is found in just about every protein-containing food you eat.
For leucine to flip on the muscle-building switch, there needs to be a certain amount of protein present; this protein threshold must be reached to maximize protein synthesis. Scientists estimate that this threshold is about 30 grams of protein. Eat much more than 30 grams and you don’t get extra protein synthesis. Now we can begin to see the tragic flaw of eating a steak dinner while ignoring protein earlier. Research from the University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston shows us that by spreading our protein intake throughout the day (30 grams at breakfast, lunch, and dinner versus 90 grams at dinner), we end up with 25 percent more protein synthesis.
ACTION STEP: Eating more protein at lunch and dinner is easy for most of us. The tricky part is finding protein-rich snacks and breakfast ideas. For breakfast, go with eggs, lean breakfast meats, Greek yogurt, and smoothies with protein powder. For snacks, good options are Greek yogurt, nuts and seeds, roasted edamame beans, protein bars (with at least 10 grams of protein and no more than 30 grams of carbs), and protein shakes.
EXERCISE AND CARBS
A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN
After exercise, your muscles are in an energetic void, and they want nothing more than to restock their supplies. Your muscles store energy primarily as carbohydrates in the form of glycogen. Starches and simple sugars are key components for filling this void because of their fast-acting capabilities. At other times of the day, fast-acting carbohydrates can trigger excessive insulin release, which could favor the storage of carbohydrates in fat cells. Following exercise, however, fat storage isn’t a priority for your body, and your muscle cells are primed to take in the carbohydrates that you eat. This is one of the few times that carbohydrates are preferentially shuttled to your muscle and away from cells. It is the perfect scenario for eating a carb-rich meal or snack. Unfortunately, we’re accustomed to having sandwiches at lunch and building our dinners around starchy carbs like pasta and rice. When your goal is weight loss, a bread-heavy sandwich only works if it follows a midday workout. A pasta- or rice-based dinner is only a good idea on the days when you work out directly before you eat it. Most of us work out three or four times a week, and sometimes it can be difficult to adjust our meal plans to accommodate our postworkout needs. Soon enough, though, you’ll plan to have carbs after workouts and establish a “new normal” eating pattern. And you’ll get more pleasure from cinching your belt two notches tighter than you ever got from your lunchtime hoagie.
KEY 6 Use Starchy Foods for Postworkout Meals
Key 6 harnesses the power of what scientists call nutrient timing, which is the concept that certain foods benefit your body more at specific times of the day than at others. This makes innate sense to many of us. Others struggle with the idea, especially those folks who are still stuck on the idea that a calorie is a calorie. That old mantra about calories just isn’t the case, especially during and after exercise. After exercise, your muscles want carbohydrates. This is why we want to preferentially eat starch-containing foods, or foods with a higher density of carbohydrates, after workouts. What foods are in the starch category? Foods like rice, bread, pasta, oatmeal, cereal grains, quinoa, barley, corn, potatoes, and yams.
After exercise, your muscles are in an energy void, and they want nothing more than to restock their supply of carbohydrates in the form of glycogen. Starches and simple sugars are key components for filling this void because of their fast-acting capabilities. At most times of the day, an influx of fast-absorbing carbs will trigger excessive insulin release, which could favor the storage of carbohydrates in fat cells. Following exercise, however, your muscle cells are primed to take in the carbohydrates that you eat. This is one of the few times that carbs are preferentially shuttled to your muscle and away from fat cells. It is the perfect scenario.
ACTION STEP: Break the cultural habit of having sandwiches at lunch and building dinners around starchy carbs like pasta and rice. Plan to eat most of your fast-absorbing carbs soon after your workouts, and focus on proteins and high-fiber vegetables during other mealtimes.
KEY 7 Fuel Your Workouts
We talked about nutrient timing in our discussion of Keys 5 and 6. Now it is time to wrap up our discussion of nutrient timing with workout nutrition, the ultimate execution of nutrient timing. Exercise is a biochemical symphony involving the liberation of stored fat, the ridding of fatigue-signaling molecules from our muscles, and the breaking down of muscle so that it can be rebuilt stronger and more resilient for the next training session.
Properly executed workout nutrition can allow you to work harder for longer while also accelerating your recovery so that you come back bigger and stronger sooner. To accomplish this efficiently, we will segment workout nutrition into two phases. Phase 1 is performance and Phase 2 is recovery. Phase 1 occurs before and during your workouts, while Phase 2 occurs immediately after your workout ends.
PHASE 1-PERFORMANCE: Never work out in a fasted state. The small increased potential of burning more calories from fat while training fasted is outweighed by the greater intensity with which you will be able to perform if you have properly fueled. For BJ’s short, intense workouts, you don’t need to consume carbohydrate drinks and gels as if you were running a marathon. Instead, you only need to have eaten within the last 2 hours. This will ensure that your blood sugar levels are primed to fuel an intense workout, but the meal is far enough away from your training session that you won’t “lose it” while training. If you are training first thing in the morning, then drinking 16 to 20 ounces of a sports beverage shortly after waking will be sufficient to prime your body, due to the drink’s ability to accelerate digestion.
PHASE 2-RECOVERY: The combination of strategic nutrition and exercise offers the unique opportunity to boost your body’s muscle-building capacity by 100 percent followed by an additional and sustained increase for the next 24 to 36 hours. Here’s why: Right after exercise, your body switches from performance mode to recovery mode. We need to address your body’s recovery needs in two different ways: refilling drained energy stores and rebuilding broken-down muscle. In Key 6 we talked about corralling carbohydrate-dense foods (breads, pastas, etc.) into the several hours following exercise. In addition to your muscles having a greater affinity for carbohydrates during this time, they are more adept at refilling their glycogen/sugar stores (which you use during your training sessions). This is another reason why it is a good idea to have carbohydrate-dense foods following exercise.
When you finish your workout and your body switches over to recovery mode, it starts rebuilding muscle so that it can come back stronger and bigger for your next training session. Research shows that the act of exercise itself increases protein synthesis. You can supercharge the effect by consuming protein right after you exercise. Leading muscle protein synthesis researchers say it is important to wait until after you have finished exercise to have protein so that the amino acid spike in your bloodstream matches up with your body’s exercise-induced increase in protein synthesis. It is a perfect storm of muscle building.
ACTION STEPS: To enhance your performance during BJ’s short, intense workouts, ensure that you have eaten within the last 1½ to 2 hours but no less than ½ hour before your workout. Your blood sugar levels will be primed to fuel an intense workout, but you won’t feel full while training. To enhance recovery, have 20 to 30 grams of whey protein right after exercise. That will add gasoline to the protein-synthesis fire sparked by your training session. Whey protein is a rapidly digested protein source loaded with leucine that will help maximize protein synthesis quickly. Then, within 2 hours of your training, have a solid food meal that contains carbohydrate-dense foods like breads, grains, or pasta.
KEY 8 Rely on Habits, Not Brute Force Willpower
Research regarding the power of the human will and self-control yields remarkable findings about how much we can accomplish through sheer willpower alone. However, our willpower reserves are still finite and readily depleted by stress, distraction, and concentrated effort in other areas of life. This is why willing yourself to stick to your diet is a shortsighted strategy that rarely leads to long-term leanness and weight-loss success.
Dietary approaches that yield long-term success are those that allow you to never have to lose the same 10 pounds a second (or third!) time. These approaches are rooted in habit, like the habit of brushing your teeth. You never have to think about brushing; you just do it. Imagine if healthy eating was like that. Well, you can make the seven previous nutrition keys nearly automatic.
ACTION STEPS: Focus on one or two of the keys in this chapter at a time. For example, put all your effort into eating protein at each meal, nothing else. Spend 2 to 3 weeks drilling that into your daily routine. Once protein-rich meals and snacks become second nature, then it is time to move to another key, like cutting out sugar-sweetened drinks. Continue this methodical approach to nutrition habit mastery and you will be amazed at how a once-daunting concept like fat loss becomes easy.
EIGHT POWER FOODS
Make sure these nutrition-packed ingredients show up in your regular meal rotation.
KEFIR
This cross between milk and yogurt is an excellent multipurpose food. Not only does kefir contain almost a 1:1 ratio of protein to carbohydrates, it also is an excellent source of healthy bacteria for your gut. These bacteria improve digestion and boost immune function.
TEA
The combination of caffeine and antioxidants found in green tea is famous for its fat-burning effects. Plus, research in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that a unique amino acid in tea called the anine can work in concert with caffeine to enhance focus, creativity, and your ability to multitask.
LEAN BEEF
Beef is known for its protein, but almost 50 percent of the fat in beef is the coveted monounsaturated fat. Unlike poultry, lean beef is a gold mine of nutrients: zinc, vitamin B12, selenium, phosphorus, iron, vitamin B6, and niacin. The leanest cuts are those described as loin or roast.
SPROUTED GRAIN BREAD
Bread is never considered a power food, but sprouted grain bread is the exception. The sprouting process makes many of the grain’s nutrients more accessible to your body and converts some of the carbohydrates to protein. Sprouted grain bread products are a minimally processed, high-fiber way to get your bread fix and feel good about it.
ALMONDS
A unifying habit of lean and healthy people is that they snack on nuts. Almonds have a unique nutrient package, containing fiber, magnesium, and a truckload of vitamin E. Don’t shy away from nuts due to their high fat content. Research from Purdue University shows that snacking on 1½ ounces of almonds each day decreases hunger.
EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL
This oil is more than just high in monounsaturated fat. It contains high levels of powerful antioxidants called polyphenols. These polyphenols are considered by some scientists to be one of the main reasons why the Mediterranean diet is so heart healthy. To get the maximum antioxidant punch from your olive oil, look for first-pressed extra virgin olive oil sold in a dark glass bottle, and never cook with it at high temperatures.
BROCCOLI
Broccoli is a nutritional powerhouse of low-impact carbohydrates, fiber, and anticancer and antiestrogen antioxidants. Three cups of raw broccoli contain fewer than 100 calories but are still satiating when eaten raw, sautéed, or roasted. Just never boil it, as this leaches out the nutrients. Also, pass on frozen broccoli. Research from the University of Illinois shows that the blanching process used on broccoli before it is frozen prevents the activation of some of broccoli’s anticancer antioxidants.
EGGS
Initially banished to the “do not eat” list due to their cholesterol content, eggs are now a “must eat” food. Recent research shows very little relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the levels of cholesterol in your blood. Eggs are the gold standard for high-quality protein and amino acids. Plus, the yolks are also rich in choline, which is a key nutrient for brain function
EIGHT KEY SUPPLEMENTS FISH OIL
FISH OIL
These concentrated long-chain omega-3 fatty acids impact multiple areas of your body, from improving heart health and joint function to hindering fat cell growth. What to do: Take 1 to 2 grams of EPA and DHA per day with a meal.
CAFFEINE
The source of your morning coffee’s power is also a highly researched performance booster with benefits ranging from increased endurance and improved reaction time to decreased perception of muscle pain during exercise. You can get a boost from the caffeine in your coffee, but the caffeine levels in coffee are very variable. What to do: Pop 200 milligrams of caffeine in tablet form and increase the dose based on your individual tolerance. It takes around 45 minutes for caffeine levels to peak in your blood, so plan accordingly based on when you are going to exercise.
VITAMIN D
This vitamin actually acts more like a hormone. Vitamin D is needed for proper bone and immune health. Low levels of vitamin D have been associated with obesity and poor blood sugar control. What to do: Take 2,000 IU per day with a meal. Have your doctor run a vitamin D blood test to further optimize your daily dose.
MAGNESIUM
This mineral is generally underdosed in multivitamins. It is needed for more than 300 reactions in the body, and it promotes relaxation. What to do: Take 400 milligrams of chelated magnesium before bed.
CREATINE
It’s one of the most-vetted sports supplements on the market. In addition to making you more powerful, creatine impacts brain function and helps you get better results with your training during periods of high stress. What to do: Take 5 grams of creatine monohydrate in your carbohydrate-based preworkout performance shake.
MULTIVITAMIN
This is the cheapest nutritional insurance policy you can take out on your body to ensure that it has all the vitamin and mineral cofactors it needs. What to do: Take one multivitamin per day with a meal.
WHEY PROTEIN POWDER
This king of protein powders is not just loaded with muscle-building leucine but is also rapidly digested, giving your body key amino acids fast when it needs them. What to do: Have a protein shake containing 20 to 30 grams of whey protein directly after exercise.
ZINC
Intense exercise can deplete this key mineral, yielding decreases in thyroid function and testosterone. What to do: Take 30 milligrams of zinc anytime during the day.
Previous Page ----- Next Page ----- ----- INDEX