You’ve just learned the biggest dietary “secrets” to building your best body ever. The material is dry, but so are most principles of most everything you could want to learn.
Remember that the value of information isn’t determined by how it makes you feel but by how well you understand it and how workable it is.
You’ve also learned that losing fat quickly and healthily without losing muscle isn’t complicated or even all that difficult, really.
It takes a bit of guidance and discipline, but once you know how to put everything you’ve just learned in this chapter into practice (and you will soon), you might be surprised at how smoothly it can go.
In fact, this “flexible” style of dieting will probably be the easiest you’ve ever tried, and the most effective and sustainable. Exciting, right?
Key Takeaways
When your body is digesting and absorbing food you’ve eaten, it’s in the postprandial state. This is also called the “fed” state.
Once your body has finished digesting, absorbing, and storing the food eaten, it enters the postabsorptive state. This is also called the “fasted” state.
Your body flips between fed and fasted states every day, storing small amounts of fat after meals, and then burning small amounts when there’s no food energy left.
Without an energy surplus, no amount of insulin or insulin-producing foods can significantly increase body fat levels.
When you restrict your calories to lose fat, especially when you restrict them aggressively, you tend to retain more water.
If all we’re talking about is body weight, then a calorie is very much a calorie, and “clean” calories count just as much as “dirty” ones.
“Clean” or “healthy” foods are more conducive to weight loss than “dirty” or “unhealthy” ones because they’re generally lower in calories and harder to overeat.
Getting the majority of your daily calories from “diet-friendly” foods when dieting for fat loss makes for a much easier, more enjoyable dieting experience.
Macronutrient balance refers to how the calories you eat break down into protein, carbohydrate, and dietary fat.
If you want to lose fat and not muscle, or gain muscle and not fat, then you need to pay close attention to both your energy and macronutrient balances.
People who eat more protein lose fat faster, gain more muscle, burn more calories, experience less hunger, have stronger bones, and generally enjoy better moods.
Protein intake is even more important when you exercise regularly because this increases your body’s demand for it.
Whether we’re talking about the natural sugars found in fruit, the processed ones found in a candy bar, or the “healthy” ones found in green vegetables, they’re all digested into glucose and shipped off to the brain, muscles, and organs for use.
There’s no difference in weight loss between people whose diets contain a large amount of high-glycemic foods versus those that focus on low-glycemic foods.
There’s an association between high sugar intake and several metabolic abnormalities and adverse health conditions, including obesity, as well as varying levels of nutritional deficiencies.
When dieting to lose fat, high-protein, high-carbohydrate dieting allows you to push harder in your workouts and maintain more muscle mass.
We should eat at least enough dietary fat to support our health and only raise intake beyond that based on our goals, fitness, and preferences.
Triglycerides make up the bulk of our daily fat intake and are found in a wide variety of foods ranging from dairy to nuts, seeds, meat, and more.
Saturated fat is a form of fat that’s solid at room temperature and found in foods like meat, dairy, and eggs.
There’s a strong association between high intake of saturated fat and heart disease, and we should follow the generally accepted dietary guidelines for saturated fat intake (less than 10 percent of daily calories) until we know more.
Monounsaturated fat can reduce the risk of heart disease, and it’s believed to be responsible for some of the health benefits associated with the Mediterranean diet, which involves eating a lot of olive oil.
The absolute amount of omega-3 fatty acids in the diet is more important than the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6 intakes.
If you’re like most people, you’re getting enough omega-6 fatty acids in your diet, but probably not enough omega-3s (EPA and DHA in particular).
Cholesterol is the other type of fat found in food. It’s a waxy substance present in all cells in the body, and it’s used to make hormones, vitamin D, and substances that help you digest your food.
Scientists used to believe that foods that contained cholesterol increased the risk of heart disease, but we now know that this isn’t the case.
When people talk of “bad” cholesterol, they’re referring to LDL. High levels of LDL in your blood can lead to an accumulation in your arteries and increase the risk of heart disease.
If you’re trying to lose weight but aren’t, you probably need to eat less or move more.
If you’re trying to gain weight but aren’t, you probably just need to eat more.
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012;107(3):374-380. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2012.08.004; Sacks FM, Bray GA, Carey VJ, et al. Comparison of Weight-Loss Diets with Different Compositions of Fat, Protein, and Carbohydrates. N Engl J Med. 2009;360(9):859-873. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa0804748.
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Campbell WW, Tang M. Protein intake, weight loss, and bone mineral density in postmenopausal women. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2010;65(10):1115-1122. doi:10.1093/gerona/glq083.
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Phillips SM, Van Loon LJC. Dietary protein for athletes: From requirements to optimum adaptation. J Sports Sci. 2011;29(sup1):S29-S38. doi:10.1080/02640414.2011.619204.
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Metter EJ, Talbot LA, Schrager M, Conwit R. Skeletal muscle strength as a predictor of all-cause mortality in healthy men. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2002;57(10):B359-65.
Johnson RK, Appel LJ, Brands M, et al. Dietary Sugars Intake and Cardiovascular Health: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2009;120(11):1011-1020. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.192627; Brownell KD, Farley T, Willett WC, et al. The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages. N Engl J Med. 2009;361(16):1599-1605. doi:10.1056/NEJMhpr0905723.
Siri-Tarino PW, Sun Q, Hu FB, Krauss RM. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010;91(3):535-546. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2009.27725.
Pedersen JI, James PT, Brouwer IA, et al. The importance of reducing SFA to limit CHD. Br J Nutr. 2011;106(07):961-963. doi:10.1017/S000711451100506X; Kromhout D, Geleijnse JM, Menotti A, Jacobs DR. The confusion about dietary fatty acids recommendations for CHD prevention. Br J Nutr. 2011;106(05):627-632. doi:10.1017/S0007114511002236.
Schwingshackl L, Hoffmann G. Monounsaturated fatty acids, olive oil and health status: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. Lipids Health Dis. 2014;13(1):154. doi:10.1186/1476-511X-13-154; Sofi F, Abbate R, Gensini GF, Casini A. Accruing evidence on benefits of adherence to the Mediterranean diet on health: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010;92(5):1189-1196. doi:10.3945/ajcn.2010.29673.
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10
The 3 Little Big Things about Building Lean Muscle
Never cease chiseling your own statue.
—PLOTINUS
If you’ve spent any amount of time in the fitness space, you’ve heard a lot of things about muscle building.
Things like:
Muscles respond differently to different types of training.
Muscles don’t know weight. They only know tension.
There are different types of muscle growth.
Training with lighter weights and higher reps is best for muscle gain.
Training with heavier weights and lower reps is best for muscle gain.
Muscle building is mostly genetic, and how you train doesn’t much matter.
And you’ve also probably heard that most of that is pseudoscientific nonsense, and that some other theory or model altogether is the real “secret” to gaining muscle quickly and effectively.
If this has left you confused and frustrated, unsure of what to believe (and do in the gym) and what to ignore, I understand. I’ve been there.
Fortunately, while the physiology of muscle growth is tremendously complex, the science of gaining muscle is far simpler. In fact, at least 80 percent of effective muscle building comes down to understanding and applying a handful of laws that are as certain, observable, and irrefutable as those of physics.
When you throw a ball in the air, it comes down. When you apply the three principles you’re going to learn in this chapter, your muscles grow bigger and stronger.
It’s that simple.
Law #1
There Are Three Ways to Stimulate Muscle Growth
The first thing you need to understand about the physiology of muscle building is there are three primary “triggers” or “pathways” for muscle growth:1
Mechanical tension
Muscle damage
Cellular fatigue
Mechanical tension refers to the amount of force produced in muscle fibers.
When you lift weights, you produce two types of mechanical tension in your muscles: “passive” and “active” tension. Passive tension occurs when your muscles are stretching, and active tension occurs when they’re contracting.
Muscle damage refers to microscopic damage caused to the muscle fibers by high levels of tension.
This damage requires repair, and if the body is provided with proper nutrition and rest, it’ll make the muscle fibers larger and stronger to better deal with future bouts of tension.
(It’s still not entirely clear whether muscle damage directly stimulates muscle growth or whether it’s just a side effect of mechanical tension, but as of now, it deserves a place on the list.)
Cellular fatigue refers to a host of chemical changes that occur inside and outside muscle fibers when they contract repeatedly.
When you repeat the same movement over and over again to the point of near failure, this causes high amounts of cellular fatigue.
Research conducted by scientists at Harvard Medical School shows that mechanical tension is the most important of these three pathways for muscle growth.2 This has been confirmed in a number of other studies as well.3
In other words, mechanical tension produces a stronger muscle-building stimulus than muscle damage and cellular fatigue.
These three factors also relate to what scientists call the “strength-endurance continuum,” which works like this:4
Heavy, lower-rep weightlifting primarily increases muscle strength and results in higher amounts of mechanical tension and muscle damage, but less cellular fatigue.
Lighter, higher-rep weightlifting primarily increases muscle endurance and results in lower amounts of mechanical tension and muscle damage, but more cellular fatigue.
Given what you just learned, which style of training do you think is more effective for gaining muscle over time time? That’s right—heavy, lower-rep work, because it produces more mechanical tension than lighter, higher-rep work.
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