deck Whitman said:
mjp1542 said:
I can't give you much advice, but I will tell you this: You'll find it pretty much impossible to add any muscle if you don't start eating about 500-1,000 (probably toward the higher end there) more calories per day. Proteins and good fats.
I've read other studies that say that's a myth - at least the degree to which protein is pushed. That if you eat too much, no matter what the nutrients are, you may gain fat.
But I definitely plan to work on nutrition after the New Year.
It's all trial-and-error, you know? Hopefully I hit upon the right formula eventually.
Nutrition shouldn't be anything anyone has to work on. For millions of years humans have been eating. And diverse cultures have accumulated a lot of inadvertant practices based on the foods available and never had the obesity problems we have today. Google Michael Polan or buy one of his books -- perhaps, "In Defense of Food." He argues that "nutritional science" and bureaucratic government guidelines crafted in ways to not offend the food marketing industry have screwed up our supermarket shelves and influenced how we eat. We eat a lot of editable substances, but we don't really eat food anymore.
Some basic rules anyone can follow that come from him (this is off the top of my head, so I may miss some things):
1) Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much. (in my case, all plant-based, but I won't preach about why).
2) Some interesting rules of thumb about how to do it he throws out there:
a) shop around the perimeters of the supermarket. That is where the real food is. The produce, fruits, veggies, dairy, eggs, etc. In fact, real food is perishable, and much of what the food industry has done is taken out nutrients from food to make it have a longer shelf life (without the nutrients, it doesn't spoil). You get lots of calories, but no nutrients. They also have designed a lot of their faux foods to be glucose delivery systems. To get you to crave the stuff. And buy more. They actually get you addicted and you eat too much.
b) Don't buy anything that your great grandmother wouldn't have recognized as food. This can be tricky. Your great grandmother might look at the bread aisle, and think it is bread, but when you look at the ingredients, many would make her head spin (bread, flour, water, yeast, salt is what she would have known).
c) If you can't pronounce an ingredient on the label, or have no clue what an ingredient is, don't buy it. Secondly, don't buy anything with more than 5 ingredients (a rule I bend, if I know that they are all food ingredients I recognize).
d) Don't listen to the nutritional "scientists" talking about wonder nutrients or vitamins or specific things you need to eat to be healthy. There are no salves. Just get a lot of variety. And eat REAL food.
If you basically follow guidelines like that, and don't fall into the trap of cheating, nutrition is really simple. You can eat lots of different foods, get to cook great meals (we cook most of our meals ourselves -- I carry my lunch to work every day. I make 5 days worth on Sunday night), and when we go out, it is restaurants that might guidelines in terms of how they prepare the food. This is how they ate just two or three generations ago. They didn't have any choice. And he argues it's those "choices" that have screwed us up. There are a host of reasons I won't get into. One thing is for sure. They didn't have the obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. problems we have brought upon ourselves today. Just because medical science has made up for it for our generation doesn't mean that is a way to go through life -- obese, diabetic and a host of other medical problems, but kept alive by pills and doctors. It's also costly and a big part of why health care inflation has outpaced our ability to pay for more universal coverage.
I'd really recommend reading some Pollan. And Marion Nestle. What they have to say just makes sense from a common-sense perspective.
