Cutting diet - carb backloading with AM training

This is a quick post I made for someone that is finding that they are stalling out on their lifts while cutting their fat levels. They train in the AM with fairly low volume. Because of the low volume the amount of carbs is not really that high and is timed so that they do not have a full stomach before they train which many people struggle with especially with eating in the morning which many people can not do or have the time to do so.

The other thing is the post-workout is completely carbless. Post workout it's mainly protein only and then fats are introduced at least 5 hours post workout. The reason for this is that  if no carbohydrates are given post-exercise the muscle will maintain a capacity to achieve an eventual full glygogen compensation or super compensation until carbohydrates are either ingested from the diet or by glycogenesis sufficient to fill the glycogen stores. The muscle will wait in a highly insulin sensitive state for at least 36 hours until it receives the glycogen necessary to fill back up and at that time insulin sensitivity will drop back to baseline. If you're in a deficit and then do some fasted cardio in this state the body will be burning mostly fat and very little muscle glycogen for energy as it will be wanting to preserve any muscle glycogen.

Carbs are given the night/lunch before as you should never train in a glycogen-depleted state if training intensity is your goal. Timing your carbs like this will result in a slightly higher amount of fat loss, improved insulin sensitivity and also improved training intensity (the main benefit - not fat loss)

Carbs: 0.75g/lb/day (1.5g/lb every other day)
Protein: 1.5g/lb/day
Fats: the rest of the calories

Monday:
Breakfast: 25g protein, 50g fast acting carbs (low fat chocolate milk, cocopops, breakfast cereal etc. Protein shake with dextrose. Keep the fats LOW and the glycemic index HIGH
Train
Post workout: Protein only meal, chicken breast, thighs, any meat, fish etc that is less than 5% fat. Might not be a lot of food if you're in a rush so a shake is OK. No carbs! Chicken breast in a tupperware taken to the gym is fine.
Lunch: same as above but probably a lot more food.
Dinner: The rest of the calories for the day. No carbs still! So mostly fats, meat, avocado, nuts etc. Vegetables is fine but obviously nothing like pumpkin or potato and I wouldn't eat like 5 onions either. Cooking with half an onion is fine but really keep the carbs low here.

Tuesday:
Large breakfast. Bacon, eggs, sausages etc is ideal here. Higher fat and again no carbs!
Lunch: More "paleo" type high protein, medium carb meal. Lean meats (5% or less) and then plenty of things like potato, yam, pumpkin and so on. I'd avoid bread / rice pasta for now. Dinner will be higher carb again so in this meal I'd also add in any fats for caloric balance as you'll want to eat low fat for dinner. If you're restricting carbs and fats and can't eat a big breakfast or get hungry at lunch then this can be an issue so just get the calories in for lunch.
Dinner: Low fat, high protein and the majority of your carbs for the day.

Wednesday/Friday - as Monday
Thursday/Sunday - as Tuesday
Saturday: I'd have this more of a mixed meal, it's not going to matter so much as you won't be training until Monday so there will be no advantage to timing the carbohydrate as you're going to be refilling your glycogen in plenty of time regardless. Some fasted cardio then some carbs would be great.

As for splitting the carbs up, you want 1.5g/lb on every other day and this will be split overnight most often. You're eating 50g of fast glycemic carbs the day of training so the rest of the carbs need to be the night before and to a lesser extent that lunchtime too. For example if you're 200lb:

Rest day:
Lunch: 100g carbs from potato/yams/pumpkin/vegetables
Dinner: 150g carbs from oats/rice/bread/pasta

Training day:
50g 1h pre-workout from sugars

Macronutrients - How to structure your diet optimally

I have no idea why but apparently picking what macronutrient amounts you should eat confuses the shit out of people while this is always something that was pretty obvious to me after I sat down and applied some thought into it.

This article is primarily about how you should plan out which amounts of macronutrients you need to eat and I'll touch on maintenance calories as well- because a website that gives a rough figure is bullshit, everyone's particular metabolic needs are different and hilariously most people have no clue how to work out their maintenance calories and unequivocally fuck things up- usually by eating far too many carbs and weirdly too little protein

The roles of each macronutrient

Carbohydrate

I'll touch on carbohydrate first, the role of carbohydrate in your diet is to refill glycogen stores and to provide Calories. That's pretty much it. It's benefits are that it can give very available energy when you need it (around the training window usually). It's downsides are they get stored if you don't burn them off, make you resistant to insulin when eaten in excess and they get converted into fat if your glycogen stores are full.

Protein

The role of protein, like carbs, is to provide calories. The amino acids are also used for cell repair. You need enough of it to build muscle and repair cells, this is about 2g for every kilogram you weigh if you're training. That's all you need for building muscle, it's advantages and disadvantages are it's thermic effect (your body can't process it for energy efficiently so a lot is "wasted") and its very satiating (it keeps you full).

Fats

Fats act as a calorie buffer. That is their role within a nutritional plan. They do PLENTY of other things as well but for the sake of this blog post- this is their role. They are fairly satiating but they can also trigger massive amounts of overeating! Peanuts for example are a real killer for me. It's REALLY easy to accidentally blow out 1000 Calories with peanuts. However I never noticed my body weight increase that much when I added them in as a way to gain weight for some reason. They are a weird combination of protein, fat and fibre and I'm not sure how much of the calories are actually processed for energy.

Finding out your maintenance calories

Finding your maintenance calories is actually really simple when you put some thought into it. Logically when dieting you'll want your maintenance as high as possible, so you can drop calories into a deficit while still eating a large amount of food. So the key to finding your true maintenance calories is finding which macro nutrient ratios allow you to push your calories the highest, without increase in fat. I have to bold that, because apparently something as simple as gaining water or glycogen will completely blow people's minds and they think they are getting fatter.

That's the first step right there- finding out how many carbohydrates you can eat without gaining or losing glycogen. In your diet, I'd put protein at 1g/lb initially to keep things simple. It's best to track how many calories you're eating before you try this also- otherwise you're just guessing and that will take forever to get right. I'd start at 1g/lb in carbohydrate as well and get the rest of your calories from fats. Keep sodium and water the same as usual and there won't be much change in water. Monitor your weight for a week and see if it goes up and down. Tinker with the number of carbs each week based on the scale and when a week goes by without a change- you have the number of carbohydrate you can eat without gaining or losing glycogen. Congratulations. You should also keep your training roughly the same volume as well, because a higher volume will burn more glycogen and skew your results and yes- you will need to eat more carbs to maintain glycogen if you train with a higher volume.

Now that is sorted, increase fats each week. I'd recommend doing this with some sort of unsalted nut like almonds. If you eat chicken as your main source of protein and you increase fats with gammon- the salt and creatine packed cured pork will increase your body weight! That's not the point here. You'll find that you can probably put your fats really quite high before you start to gain weight.

After you've done that, there is one last little trick. Protein has a great thermic effect in the body and the chances are you can push protein quite high without gaining weight as well. Add calories from protein each week but also lower the fats. For instance if you're eating 2000 Calories a day from 150g of protein & carbs and 90g of fats, you could try 2200 Calories of 150/330/80 carbs/protein/fats and you may be surprised to see that your body weight does not increase further.

All this talk on how to eat as much as possible without gaining weight, how do I gain weight?

Find the glycogen maintenance carbs, add 30-50g of carbs on top of that, keep protein on the lower side (protein is very satiating and you really don't need more than 1g/lb) and push fats to add calories. Increase your volume and workload in the gym periodically and raise carbs at the same time.

After finding how much food I can eat without gaining weight, how do I then alter it to lose fat? 

Good question, especially as for many there will be a big swing in calories to their "true" maintenance. Start by decreasing total calories by 20%. Remove these calories from fats initially. Over the weeks you may find you can diet successfully on this amount of fats while increasing protein further to increase calories. If you stall, you can reduce the calories back down to the initial level and start carb cycling and fat loss will randomly unstall. I have no idea why this happens but with many of my clients rotating macronutrients from day to day gives better fat loss than just the same thing each day.

Following on from that, how can I manipulate macronutrients further to give fat loss?

I recommend picking just one of these methods and sticking with it. Whenever you stall you can add another method or rotate around methods while staying at roughly the same calories and still get fat loss. 

The first good method and a personal favourite of mine is the feast/famine days. As simple as it sounds you pick one day (this will be a Friday or a Saturday for most people for social reasons) where you have a 1-4h cheat window in which you eat whatever you like. The time frame depends on how lean you are. Now, I've seen some fat people do some pretty fucked up things with food I have to specify here- if you're fat you have no business cheating. So I'd change these cheats for you to simply a controlled refeed as such. If you have the self control then by all means have a pizza with some fries and a slice of cake for dessert. You also have the option of just going crazy but keeping it paleo- a personal favourite of mine. I have no desire for sweet things personally so this suits me well. If you can undo a weeks worth of hard dieting eating granola and rice then congratulations I guess because that's a fucking huge effort and some serious eating. I've managed 300g of granola with 2 cups of medium grain rice (dry weight) before for 3000 Calories in an hour and that was pretty much constant eating. You simply can't undo the diet doing this and you give yourself a chance to feel full so that's great. Potato is another good option. A kilo of potato is 800 Calories give or take and that is really a lot of potato. 

After this cheat window you eat lean meats such as egg whites, chicken breast, white fish, kangaroo or protein shakes. I'd keep the fat content under 3g/100g. You can basically eat as much as you like as you'll already be stuffed from your cheat. Then the next day, you'll eat 1g/lb in protein and get it from the lean meat list above only. You can eat salad and I'd limit carbs to something like an onion and a tomato but no more than two pieces. Broccoli, cabbage, mushrooms, cauliflower and kale can essentially be eaten in unlimited quantities. This method of feast than famine really kicks up the fat loss and keeps you training very hard. I like to do conditioning work on the starve day by the way- it's the only day I feel up to it because I'm not lethargic from dieting and don't have a full stomach from eating.

The next method is waving your macronutrients. I covered this a bit above but continuing on from that I find that you can make pretty radical waves in macros for further fat loss. This is made easier by most people liking a one day on, one off or two on, one off approach to training. On training days you can try high carb, medium protein and low fats and on rest days you can try low carb, moderate/high protein and high fats. Carb cycling like this works great for fat loss as your leptin and ghrelin levels are constantly changing. I'm sure I have a citation for that somewhere but I read a lot and can't be bothered to dig it out. I think it's from either Wiley or Faigen though. Feel free to look it up and post it in the comments if you find it.

Furthering on from waving macros, you can wave calories. I recommend taking your maintenance and increasing/decreasing it by 10% and alternating between the two. Again, I recommend adding or removing the calories from fats. You can also throw in a middle day at maintenance if you wish as well going low/medium/high/low. I really liked low/medium/low/high/medium/cheat/ultra-low. This shifts the week into half low, half high. You can also do a daily rotation if you wish and also swap between rotations. Again, changing things around like this often gives extra fat loss and lower calories is sometimes not needed.

Eventually you will hit a point where you will need to lower calories.

I had to just put that as a heading. When this happens lower calories, keep the diet simple again and then start tinkering with shit again after a few weeks. Pick the same macro ratios of your maintenance calories, just with lower fats. I'd lower carbs a little as well as you won't be able to hold as much glycogen now you're dieted down.

Optimal macros for weight gain

This really depends on the situation. I listed a basic rule above at the top of the blog post. If you've ever had to diet down before- your bulking days are over, son. You're going to have to be very careful so that you don't get fat again. Protein should be on the lower side so that you don't get full if that is an issue for you. You'll want no more than 0.5g/lb in carbohydrate a day on your rest days and between 1.5-2g per pound on training days. There is really no need for more than 2.5g/lb unless you're a marathon runner or some other glycogen dependant sport. The rest of the calories should come from fats. This will ensure you stay resistant to insulin. I also recommend massively increasing your volume during this time as well as your training frequency, as this will keep protein synthesis high, lipogenesis low and allow you to utilise much higher carbohydrate intake.

Some people though just need to put away the food. There is no optimal macronutrient ratio for these people they just need to find a way to cram as much food in as possible. I recommend 3-4 meals a day for this and lots of milk and cereal. Olive oil adds heaps of calories and should be added to any liquid meals. A tablespoon is something stupid like 120 Calories. I used to put coco pops and milk in a shaker and drink that 5 or 6 times a day. Dairy is generally great for these people especially the fatter cheeses. They can be added as a condiment (so can bacon) and add a great amount of calories without really trying.

Further Reading

If my horribly uncited ramblings are not enough and you'd like to read further into this, I'd recommend the following books:

Natural Hormonal Enhancement: Rob Faigin

Better Than Steroids: Warren Willey

Issuance of Insanity 3 - Nutritional Psycho: Jamie Lewis

The Renaissance Diet: Mike Israetel

Reversing out of a diet Part 2: More evidence on short term overfeeding

Last weeks article was on reversing out of a diet correctly (click here to read) and the take home point was that high carbohydrate with low fat was the way to go and that short term overfeeding would not get you fat again provided you trained hard and were actually lean before engaging in overfeeding.

Today I made aware of this article which covers several studies on overfeeding and also covers what happens when you overfeed with an emphasis on each particular macronutrient. I highly recommend reading through the entire article but to sum it up:

• How much weight you gain from overfeeding depends on your genetics & lifestyle factors (upbringing, activity levels and body fat set points)
• High carb and high fat diets increase weight by the same amount when overfeeding- although high carb causes a more rapid initial increase and the water weight takes longer to come back off again
• There was also no increase in de novo lipogenesis (fat gain), at all, when the when obese subjects were overfed with a high carbohydrate diet for one day (and by extension no difference between lean and obese people)
• High carb diet caused less relative fat gain than the high fat diet- presumably because 4g/kg of these carbohydrates would have been stored as glycogen. This will increase in periods of hard dieting
• Absolute fat gain was higher in the high carb group however. The fatter you are the less dietary shenanigans you can get away with is the key point here. The leaner you are- the more carbs you should eat on your refeeds or when coming out of a diet
• As an aside- the fatter you are the less you should be eating full stop! Going back to my original blog post and the points made earlier- fatter people should refeed for 1-3 days on a high carb diet.
• High carb gave more lean mass gains than high fat- although this is likely attributed to glycogen storage. As a personal addition- the more glycogen you have the more brutal your caloric deficit can be so this is again ideal for refeeds. The biggest caloric deficit should be the day after this refeed
• High carb increased thyroid output- yet high fat did not
• High carb also increased leptin but not high fat. So prepare to feel hungry after a high carb refeed, especially if you're fatter. If you feel that you just need an influx of calories a high fat refeed such as ribs or wings may be in order if you're not lean or have enough glycogen retention that you can't really warrant a carb meal. Combining high fat with high carb increases leptin the most and should be avoided. I'm not a fan of spiking my insulin and then eat fat but if you want to have a cheat meal of fast food and the rest of your diet is on track then just be prepared for the hunger crash afterwards
• It takes 500g of carbohydrate before even a single gram is converted to fat. Refeeds of up to 96h showed no difference in lipogenesis when this was exceeded, so keep it under 4 days (preferably 2). I still think a 3-4h cheat window is better though because you'll simply be unable to eat enough to have a catastrophic effect on your diet and I personally find less bloat / water weight is added compared to spreading the same amount out over a single day
• With the exception of ketogenic diets, where corresponding data is still missing (no hypercaloric ketogenic diet studies), the rule of thumb is: The more fat in the diet, the more rapid the body fat, but not necessarily the body weight gain

The main take away point here? In the short term- high protein and carb is the way to go. In the long run however it is ultimately caloric balance that matters. Eat like a hippo and you'll turn into one no matter what it is you're eating.

Note, that many of these recommendations are in the short term. In the long term is showed that high carb or high fat didn't matter for overall weight gain- it was the caloric surplus. I was asked how a former obese person should then eat to gain muscle after dieting down? Given that their insulin sensitivity will not be too great and they will have a psychological aversion to eating huge amounts of carbohydrate (a valid concern). Let's give an example of a 90kg guy that wants to eat 3,000kcal a day to gain muscle who wants a good long term diet and doesn't care about the short term refeeding benefits (they want to keep it simple).

Protein: 200g per day
Carbohydrate: 200g per day
Fat: 155g per day

Protein is at roughly 1g/lb, carbohydrate matches that as there is really no need for any more. Eaten mainly post training with the rest in the small pre-training meal this is enough for glycogen replenishment.
Fats make up the rest of the calories. Cook in canola, use olive oil as a dressing, minimize animal fats unless grass fed. Nuts are a great source of fats. There are a number of moderate carb & high fat foods that are ideal like granola for instance, where 100g will give you 64g of carbohydrate, 20g of fats and 10g of protein for 470 Calories. Ideal to eat 30 minutes before you train. It also has a great amount of potassium, sodium and magnesium replacing electrolytes as you sweat during training.

A sample day may look like this, macros listed as carbs/proteins/fats:

Breakfast: 6 eggs cooked in 15g canola (0/36/45)
Lunch: 350g chicken breast "stuffed" with 50g ricotta cheese and wrapped in two slices of bacon (105/61)
Pre-workout: 100g of granola (64/10/20)

Dinner: 300g of ground turkey with just under a cup of rice (175g) (135/50/30)