Behavior & Lifestyle - Putting it all together Flashcards
What are the different phases?
Contest Prep, fat loss, maintenance, lean gain phase.
An analogy I often use to describe the di erent nutritional needs of an o season bodybuilder or powerlifter compared to a bodybuilder during contest prep or a powerlifter dieting to a lighter weight class is that the former is walking a wide path while the latter is walking an ever narrowing path slowly becoming a tight rope.
What can happen to individuals when in a caloric deficit? What about lean individuals in a caloric deficit?
When one is lean and calorically restricted, they have less leeway in their nutrition before it has the potential to negatively impact them. A greater amount of energy is created by metabolizing body protein in lean individuals compared to those overweight, and when lean individuals are calorie restricted they experience a reduction in testosterone while those who are overweight likely will not. For these and other reasons, the leaner you are the more likely you are to lose lean body mass during weight loss.
Additionally, resistance training depletes glycogen to a degree and when glycogen depleted (which is more likely to occur while dieting), muscular performance can degrade. Resistance training is also partially fueled by intra-muscular triglyceride which is depleted to a degree alongside glycogen during resistance training and a diet low in fat may not completely replenish intra-muscular triglyceride levels. Since both carbohydrate and fat will likely be restricted while dieting to reach the requisite caloric deficit, performance is more likely to be negatively a ected while dieting. Logically, the magnitude of the caloric deficit has a direct impact on how much dietary fat and carbohydrate is consumed and thus it is no wonder that faster rates of weight loss (achieved through larger caloric deficits) can result in poorer strength performance and muscle maintenance compared to slower rates.
In addition to these physiological impacts, the psychological stress associated with intensive weight loss can be much higher than the stress experienced during a non- energy restricted period.
What are the 3 basic nutritional tiers?
- Good: You hit your target calorie goal within a certain + or - range. Typically I recommend using + or -100 kcals for your calorie goal.
- Better: You hit your protein within a certain + or - range and also hit a target calorie goal within a certain + or - range. Use the same ranges for protein above, and use + or -100 kcals for your calorie goal.
- Best: You hit your macros within a certain + or - range. For contest prep I would recommend + or -5 g, for other types of cuts I would recommend + or -10 g, and for the o season I’d recommend + or -20 g on carbs and protein and + or -10 g on fat.
What is the concept of 20% borrowing and how can you implement it?
You can take up to 20% of the macros/calories on any one day, and give it to another day. That way, if a planned event is coming up or if you simply are very hungry on one day or not hungry at all on another day, you can shift your calories around. A 20% reduction on any isolated day in a non-dieted and depleted body is going to have very little impact on anything of import, and it allows one to mix and match to account of the occurrences of real life.
Another way to institute borrowing is to set up an excel sheet that calculates a 7-day average of your calories for the week. You can simply have the goal of hitting the target calories on average by the end of the week. When doing so, by the end of the 7-day period, if your daily goal was 2500 kcals for example, so long as you averaged that over the 7-day period, you’ve met your goal for the week. This way, you can have a day at 3000 calories, a day at 2000 calories, a day at 2700, a day at 2300 and then the remaining three days at 2500 calories and that’s absolutely fine, rather than having to rigidly consume 2500 calories every day.
How do you train to listen to your body?
If you spent months weighing and tracking your food and bodyweight, looking at nutritional labels, learning where calories come from, and changing your eating habits to reach nutritional targets, you are better equipped than you once were. But, at the same time you’ve gotten so used to following a relatively rigid plan that doing so can become second nature and can even replace what normal humans use to regulate their energy intake: hunger and satiety.
The goal of integrating the awareness of your hunger and satiety levels with your newfound nutritional knowledge and experience is to eventually develop an approach that requires minimal day to day effort. The first step in checking if you are ready for this would be to stop following your nutritional plan for a day. Don’t try to hit your targets, just simply eat, but write down the foods you consume and rough portion sizes (but not the macros or calories).
At the end of the day, without looking at what you wrote down, estimate in your mind your macros and calories for the day. Then use the notes you took on what you actually ate to determine your true intake and compare the two. If your recollection and estimation was pretty close to what you actually consumed, and you didn’t go hog wild and over eat, or drastically under eat, you are most-likely ready for this approach of listening to your hunger signals a bit more.
What are some recommendations for tracking diets by habits and bodyweight?
This approach should only be taken after you have a lot of experience with tracking, measuring, weighing and manipulating your body composition.
- If your goal is to slowly gain weight and you slowly lose or maintain weight when following your habitual eating patterns, strive to be a little full at most meals or during most days of the week. Check your weigh-ins to make sure you are successful in achieving slow weight gain and also not overdoing it and gaining weight too quickly. This approach is not appropriate for extended cuts to get very lean as you will very quickly not be able to trust your hunger and satiety signals.
- If your goal is to slowly gain weight or maintain weight and you gain weight too quickly, try to consciously decrease portion sizes and stop just when satisfied at meals. Also try eating slower to allow time for your satiety to catch up. Once again, double check this strategy with your scale.
- Don’t stress your carbohydrate and fat intake. Unless you are really low on one or the other (which typically takes conscious avoidance and e ort), just eat. If you consumed 20% of your calories from fat on one day and 40% on another day, it likely doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things when you aren’t dieting. So, just focus on calories and protein.
- If you are an o season strength athlete, you want to make sure you aren’t too low in protein. While there is good reason to eat high protein diets while dieting [13], you are just fine in the range of 0.8-1.0 g/lb when you aren’t lean and calorically restricted [14]. If you find you habitually undershoot your protein, try adding a protein shake or two per day to get up to this range. If you are over this protein range, that’s fine there’s no harm in it so long as you aren’t eating a very low fat or very low carbohydrate intake because of it.
- Remember the micronutrient level and the recommendation to try to consume at least one serving of fruits and vegetables for every 1000 kcals you eat. If you find you don’t do this habitually, buy fruit and leave it easily accessible and make a point to pack a couple pieces of fruit to take to work or school. For vegetables, try to have a salad each day and that will most likely cover your servings of vegetables. If you can hit these targets, you’re most certainly going to be consuming enough fiber as well.
What is the nutritional tracking tier composed of?
