Bananas and The Most Ripped Man In The World

"There's some strong climbers here," was the first thing Wolfgang said after scouting a new cliff. "I mean, like, REALLY strong!"

We were checking out a "secret" crag in Slovenia, back in 1993 or 4, the rumored training ground that had pushed the Slovenians to the label of world's strongest climbers. This was before internet, accessible video, and a world where new hard routes were presented to the public as soon as they were done. Sport climbing was still new and we were all looking for secrets. The Slovenians, who had a long track record in elite alpinism, had found a cliff that was supposed to be the best in the world, allowing them to churn out an entire generation that was supposedly wreaking havoc on the standards.

While all that turned out to be more-or-less true--we ran into a group of virtual unknowns who were all climbing at a higher standard than any American--it's not what this story is about. Wolfie had bumped into "The Banana Man", as we came to call him, who was, and still is, the most ripped person I've ever seen in my life.

The Banana Man wasn't Slovenian, or even that great a climber, but man did he look like it. Running into me, a person who searched out strange diets, seemed like fate. I spent the rest of the trip attempting to tap into his logic.

You see, this guy ate bananas. A lot of them. Like a gorilla, which he looked like. He had a massive bushel of bananas in his van that took up more space than a person. It was the craziest thing I'd ever seen. On my return to the US we began to eat far more bananas.

pic: leather is always in. wolfie and gernot with the grand dame of osp, slovenia. she would sell you climbing gear but only if you had a glass of wine with her first.

I never, however, got really into the full-on banana diet. The banana man didn't climb any harder than me. It's simple to deduct if you eat nothing but bananas you'll be ripped, since your diet lacks almost any fat or protein. But, still, he was performing at a high level on a diet that didn't seem possible to survive on, which was a great example that what we learned in school about nutrition wasn't set in stone.

I'm bringing this up because I stumbled on the above video and the site 30 Bananas a Day, which seems like it's run by the same friggn' guy (who also makes a great case for cycling your coffee for performance). Also, one of my older posts has an anecdote from a couple of utlra runners who live on mainly "expired" fruit they can buy from the grocery store for almost nothing. Their health is still fine, and they win a lot of races. Hard races.

The moral of today's story is the nutrition science still has a lot of unknowns. Take advice with skepticism and don't be afraid to experiment. As for me, I think I'll get back on the bananas and see how it plays out this time around.

3 Simple Steps To Weight Loss In 3 Weeks

We love to make dieting complicated but the reality is the 95% of the obesity epidemic can be blamed on one thing: we eat a lot of junk. You’d never figure this out looking at the diet section of your local bookstore, though, where it seems like everyone on the planet has a different opinion on why we’re fat and thinks you need to read 300 pages and redesign your beliefs and lifestyle in order to eat healthy. Truth is, eating ain’t that complicated. So today I present three steps that will lead to weight loss if you follow them with common sense.

First a little background. The three steps are presented in my latest article, Fit For Fall in 4 Weeks over at DPM Climbing, along with some training for climbing. The plan is a simplification to one of my early articles for Beachbody in 2001 that has been revamped many times and was also the basis for the nutrition plan for Yoga Booty Ballet. It’s essentially a less OCD version of all of Beachbody’s diet plans that leads you to the same outcome, eating natural foods and minimal junk.

This isn’t a knock on all those books or other nutrition plans. Most can be helpful. One might be exactly what you’re looking for, since there are as many ways to eat healthy as there are personalities. I’m all for reading about nutrition, especially since I write about it for a living. I’ve written thousands of pages about it. Reading them all will certainly help you learn (in the mood, start here). But since many of you have other interests in life my goal is always to keep things as simple. For those of you disinterred in become nutrition experts here are three simple steps to weight loss.

Step 1 – Drink water

Drink a gallon of water a day for a week. Plain water only. We spend most of our lives chronically dehydrated, which does two big things leading to us getting fat. First, it makes you hungry when you’re actually thirsty. Second, it causes your body to retain water, making you heavier. There are a lot of other unhealthy things associated with this condition but today we’re sticking to the basics so this is all you need to know. The best way to stop retaining water is to drink water. Lots of it. The obesity trend began with the rise of soda as our de facto beverage. Soda is the worst food in the world. Drink water, not soda, and you will be smaller.

Step 2 – Cut out junk food

Cut out junk for a week. Okay, here’s the rub. We eat junk—a lot of junk. Most restaurants are junk. Fast food is junk. Most of the aisles at your supermarket are filled with junk. “How do I even know what junk is?” is a common excuse. But you do know, don’t you? When you chose fries over a salad you chose junk. The cookies your friend brought to the office, junk. KFC on the way home because you were in a hurry, junk. Big Gulp to take the edge of the heat, et al. You know.

I wrote this dismissal of the USDA’s food pyramid because the pyramid-now-plate ignores what’s wrong with how we eat. We don’t really need to nitpick carbs and fats and proteins. We certainly don’t need to bicker over what kinds of fruits are healthy. We’re fat because the stuff we live on isn’t on the USDA’s pyramid, or plate, at all. Eat meat from animals and plants from the ground. Avoid foods with words you can’t pronounce, drive through restaurants, and shopping at the gas station.

Overeating real food is actually pretty hard because you’re getting fiber and nutrients and your body sends signals to your brain that it’s full. Junk, devoid of nutrients and stuffed with calories, does the opposite. You’re always hungry because you’re lacking nutrients even though you’re eating way more calories than your body can burn. Simply cutting out junk will fix your issues most of the time.

Step 3 – Have liquid breakfast and lunches

Finally we address habits. Not only do we eat junk but we eat too much. In the land of “all-you-can-eat” we’ve lost touch with reality. For one week have a juice or smoothie for breakfast and lunch and then eat a normal dinner. The catch is that the above rules are still in play. You’re drinking loads of water and you can’t have junk.

This is a version of something we do at Beachbody called the Shakeology Cleanse, though I’m making it less strict. You can put anything you want into your smoothies (or juices if you have a juicer) as long as it isn’t junk. This means that you’ll likely start with a protein or meal replacement base and then add fruits, veggies, and maybe seeds. You can’t add sugar, or ice cream, or Skippy (read labels). Dinner isn’t regulated, so you can fill yourself up, but with the no junk rule in effect you’ll likely stop eating when you’re no longer hungry.

The trick in all of this-—if you want to call it that—-is to learn a lesson about your body’s relationship with food. Food is fuel. It’s there to help our bodies work better. Eating well improves your performance, which is something society has forgotten. Instead, we tend to eat because we’re bored, or depressed, or happy. We’ve turned it into a crutch instead of a tool. Yes, eating is fun. It can, and should be, rewarding. But the reward should be for a life well lived. And we live a lot better when our bodies function like they’re supposed to.

The Problem With “Calories In, Calories Out”

One of my themes this year at Summit was “TMI” or too much information when it came to how to best educate coaches. Clichés can be helpful but, when the root is not understood, can also lead to stagnations or regressions in your fitness. One of the worst offenders is the saying “calories in, calories out”.

This is not an untrue statement. The problem is that no watch made records the information you need to know. People are constantly rattling off numbers to me that they’ve used to assess their training that are not only wrong, but crippling their ability to evaluate the program.

In the name of the free market, you can now purchase all sorts of training apparatus that provide TMI when it comes to evaluating your training program. There are many important physiological responses at work that aren’t recorded by your Polar. To ignore them in the name of numbers will lead to an exercise plateau or worse. A deeper explanation will help you understand why we create fitness programs the way that we do.

In order to keep this short and simple I’m going to gloss over some science in the name of clarity. “Calories in, calories out” is correct in that it’s how you calculate weight loss or gain. The issue is that your monitor can’t see most of the factors involved. It cannot assess hormonal and nervous system responses to training or nutritional factors that affect recovery and all three things are arguably the most important aspect of your training.

Nutritional factors are the easiest to understand. Proper foods and nutrient timing, as you’ve heard in any spiel about Recovery Formula or Shakeology, enhance the body’s recovery process. The faster you recover the harder you can train. As those of you who are P90X Certified know results are based on adaptation to stimulus, and the only place you might be able to gauge this on a watch is with morning resting heart rate.

just some of the stuff your watch doesn't understand

Even more important are hormonal factors. If you’ve read the guidebook for Turbo Fire you’ll see something that we call the AfterBurn Effect, which is your body’s metabolic adaptations to high intensity training. As our training programs get more advanced one of the main factors we’re targeting is hormonal response. In a nutshell, as we age our body shuts down its hormone production (eventually leading to death). Intense exercise is one of the few things that force you to keep producing these. Intensity is relative, of course, which is why we progress from say, squats to squat jumps to X jumps as you move up the Beachbody food chain of programs. But what’s called a “hormonal cascade” in response to training is even more important than what your heart is doing during exercise, and it’s something else you can’t see on your monitor.

adaptive stress that leads to overtraining that only can be guessed at by close evaluation of morning resting heart rate

Hormonal cascades are triggered by your central nervous system, which is the hardest training factor to gauge (why most overtraining comes from breakdown at this level). When you dissect a program like P90X2 or Asylum, one of the main things we focus on is nervous system function. All of those “weird” things like Holmsen Screamer Lunges or Shoulder Tap Push-ups work on something we call proprioceptive awareness. And while it might seem hard to understand, since it doesn’t lead directly to more sweat, the neuromuscular action of these movements force deep adaptations by your body. These changes can take a long time to register but force a massive adaptive response that lead to long-term increased changes in movement patterns that trigger hormonal responses and, thus, metabolic change. Needless to say that stuff ain’t getting registered by a chest strap or pedometer.

Sure, the cumulative effect of all these can be calculated and the number at the end would equate to calories in, calories out. But since there’s no way to measure these numbers without doing a ton of fancy testing in a lab setting you can see why doing one of our diet and exercise programs and trusting us is a better option than scarfing an “Extra Value Meal” and then walking around the neighborhood until your heart rate monitor says you’ve burned 1,500 calories.

No Meat? No Problem.

In the wake of last week’s post on vegan boxing champion Timothy Bradley comes an article from the NY Times asking the question Can Athletes Perform Well On A Vegan Diet? While the champ offers an anecdotal yes there are further considerations, which is where Gretchen Reynolds’ piece begins by questioning three nutrition experts about what might be missing should one go meatless. This, of course, begins with protein.

You do have to be diligent about protein intake if you’re vegan. I have clients, especially women, who say, ‘Oh, I put a few chickpeas in my salad.’ But that’s not going to do it. Women need about 60 to 90 grams of protein a day, and athletes are on the high end of that. That means you have to eat cupfuls of chickpeas. And you can’t eat a quarter of that cake of tofu. You need to eat the whole thing. It’s not that there aren’t good sources of vegan protein. But it’s not as bioavailable as meat. So you need to have more.

Most of you are already aware of the protein issue but other things, such as B12 weight loss, and creatine are also evaluated. It’s a quick read, and not all that earth shattering, but weighs the issue with a healthy dose of common sense.

I like to tell people that if we got most Americans to eat one less serving of meat every day, there would be far greater impact from that, in terms of improving overall public health and the health of the planet, than convincing a tiny group of endurance athletes to go full vegan.

And while the article focused on endurance parameters only, leaving Bradley alone as the torch bearer for power athletes, all experts agree that it’s possible to get all of your nutritional needs without meat and dairy, something that heavily-lobbied USDA isn’t ready to admit yet.

SAD to MAD: The Non-Diet Diet

As many of you know I’m a dietary lab rat. I’ve tested almost every diet known to man in the name of research but, mainly, my go-to plan when I’ve got to get into peak shape is the non-diet. The non-diet is our Utopian version of the Standard American Diet (SAD) that we give away with every Beachbody fitness program. The overall goal being to create a new template for America: the Modern American Diet, that some might call MAD.

The SAD diet is what’s become of nutrition in this country under the watch of the USDA and Big Food, which is basically by-products of GMO corn and soy and meat and dairy so toxic it has to be rendered practically devoid of nutrients before it’s safe to eat. A while back I commented on the new USDA “food pyramid”, citing that the issue isn’t that it’s too complicated but that most of what American’s eat isn’t on the pyramid at all! The SAD diet, the primary contributor to the most expensive health epidemic in history, is made up almost entirely of stuff that wouldn’t be food in the natural world.

In contrast the MAD diet is, well, food. It’s plants, grains (sorry Cavemen), nuts, seeds, and the occasional animal product from something that wasn’t raised in a dark prison cell and fed toxic garbage. When you eat real food you don’t have to worry too much about calories and such because it’s somewhat self regulating since it’s fiber filled, nutrient dense, and hasn’t been laden with chemicals designed to make you crave more: the direct opposite of what you find in 95% of most supermarkets. You eat based on feel and performance and with a little experience (or guidance) you’ll learn what works best and when. When someone on the SAD diet commits to this transition it will feel magical—like alchemy when, in fact, it’s exactly the opposite.

At this point you might note that Beachbody offers a different nutrition plan with every program. And while you would be correct in a sense, all of these are variations on the same theme; trying to get our customers to swap junk for real food to the point where they don’t need any type of nutrition plan and can eat based on feel. The entry points are different, the strategies vary, but our end result is always the same; you know how to feed your body so that it performs its best.

In my day-to-day life I feel great almost all the time. I sleep well, exercise a ton, have plenty of energy and stay pretty darn healthy. I was joking during my last dietary foray that the only time that I don’t feel good is when I’m trying a new diet. But I’ve still got to do it. Not only does it greatly aid my job it’s been my MO since I was a teenager so why would I stop? If a diet or supplement hits the market that is truly going to alter the planet I’m damn well going to be one of the first to know about it. So a-testing I will go.

The catalyst for this post is my recent experimentations with a taper diet. I’ve re-shuffled this a couple of times, and it’s getting better, but each attempt ends up causing a regression in my own fitness (small but noticeable) because I tweak until it goes awry. If you don’t know the point where something goes off the rails you’re never sure how to standardize your recommendations. So after a month of offbeat eating its time to get back to what I know brings everything back to homeostasis; the MAD diet. Or , ya know, just eating.

On this blog I've cited examples where I use my regular diet, slightly streamlined, to go from everyday weight to competition weight (always slightly under optimal health weight, which should have some extra body fat for reserve). At the end of any Beachbody plan that should be your goal: to understand your body’s relationship with food well enough to eat based on how you feel and get maximum results. Which, when you think about it, shouldn’t seem all the MAD.

Integration Experiment

Today I begin experimentation with a 10-day integration program designed to lead to a short performance peak. I’ve spent most of the last couple of months training indoors and need to transition those strength gains into real world application. Of course it has some foundation because I do this sort of thing all the time but it merits recording because I’m experimenting with a type of taper diet as well.

A little over a week ago I began a 6-day diet designed to cut weight during a low volume period of training without sacrificing any fitness gains. It went okay but wasn’t perfect. I lost 8lbs in a week but performance was sacrificed a bit. This week running a similar template, diet-wise, but beefing it up to accommodate harder training with hopes of nailing what went wrong last time. It didn’t really go wrong. It worked very well in some respects. But my goal is to cut weight and sacrifice no performance so I’m attempting the template under more duress (training load) where nutritional parameters are easier to assess and try and figure how to tweak the original idea.

I begin the week 3lb downs from my high point two weeks ago, so I gained 5 of the 8 I lost back meaning the last attempting promoted too much dehydration or I was indulgent this weekend (it’s a bit of both). Goals are to lose weight while increasing performance comfort outside in three disciplines, running, biking, and climbing.

The details

I chose a 10 day period because the ultimate goal is a perfect tapering diet and you generally taper between one and two weeks for an event. This also coincides with a work trip where I’m supposed to shoot some climbing footage for the P90X2 show and I need to be able to climb whatever routes look good to the production crew.

I will be climbing, running, and riding and training everyday (not doing each daily) as well as doing easy yoga and foam rolling. I’ll be doing three full body postactivation potentiation (PAP) workout per week. These are like a combo of P90X2 Upper and Lower and I’ll post that workout tomorrow.

The diet is low carb for days, around 50% protein with very little fat. While doing this I’ll drink 2 gallons of water a day (yep!) and eat a lot of salt. This, btw, is very difficult for someone who is mainly vegetarian (likely impossible for a vegan) so I’m adding a little bit of meat and fish so that I don’t have to live on protein powder and Shakeology. Hardest thing for me is giving up all the nuts, seeds, and legumes that generally make up most of my diet.

Next I drop the water to one gallon, stop adding salt to food, and add low-glycemic carbs back into the diet. Protein consumption stays high and fat stays low. I normally eat a pretty fatty diet (all healthy plant-based fats from the aforementioned nuts and seeds as well as olives and avocados). This flushes sodium from your body but since I’m not cutting sodium completely it should help cell hydration normalize.

That is only the base template I’m working off of. It’s what I did last time and it’s getting tweaked but I see no reason to post my alterations until I know they work.

The target is increased fat mobilization (as stored glycogen is compromised) and hydration homeostasis. These two things will happen for sure but the trick here is how to do this without a loss in performance. There are many theories on this, of course, but until they’ve been applied with a positive outcome there’s no reason to consider them. My goal is to understand all the subtleties so that I can better advise people on how to do this based on their personal parameters.

yesterday's training; spring conditions on stansbury island.

The James Bond Diet: An Athlete’s Cleanse

Last night Romney mentioned cleansing until her birthday (15th), which reminded me that it’s annually the time where I start to get more serious about diet. The Shakeology Cleanse, which is really more of a lean, clean-eating plan, has been the cornerstone of the last two February’s “rid-myself-of-winter-indulgence diets”. Prior to Shakeology I’d do variations of different cleanse methodologies. This year I’ll combine a few of those, along with some elements of a new product we’ll be bringing to market, with a goal of detoxing while still training. It’s something I call the James Bond diet.

The Bond diet goes way back for me. To college, specifically, when life was living was hard, fast and decidedly unhealthy. When it got too bad I’d take a week away, usually alone, to revitalize myself by eating well, resting, and exercising. You probably don’t know this side of Bond unless you’ve read the old Ian Fleming novels but this is what he’d do after a bout of assignments, drinking, womanizing, and thwarting sinister bad guys’ ridiculous plans for kaos. Usually he’d be on an island in the Caribbean, so I always tried to get away, but that’s not practical at the moment so I’ll be doing this version mainly at home.

I’m sure Fleming knew nothing of actual cleansing but his Bond plan wasn’t bad. 007 would eschew all his favorite vices, (smoking, drinking, woman) and spend his days swimming, running, lounging on the beach and eating fresh fruit until he felt revitalized or, at least, until someone bent on world domination tried to kill him. Anyway, it was always inspiring to me. I figured if a guy like Bond could go cold turkey so could I. And even though it’s a made up scenario for a fictional character, with no scientific underpinnings whatsoever, it always worked like a charm.

bond befuddles an evil temptress

This version, Bond 2.0 if you will, consists of a traditional week and a modern week. The first consists of simple elimination of processed foods (except Shakeology which I don't consider to be part of this category), animal products (except the whey in Shakeology unless I can procure an early bag of the vegan version), coffee and alcohol. Week 2 will be more strict, adding supplements and specializing the diet.

I’ll specify on week two later. Week one has no caloric restrictions at all. I’m training and need to recover. The goal is only eliminating toxins and revamping mindset and lifestyle. I’ll take my Shakeology shaken, not stirred.

Saturated Fats, Diet Trends, & How You Should Eat

We’ve been writing diet guides for a long time, always have great results, yet nothing we publish gets much press because, frankly, it’s boring. The diets we write need to be a: short, b: simple, and c: easily followed by people with limited means in both grocery choice and money. But just because we produce what you could call “common sense” diets doesn’t mean we aren’t constantly scrutinizing the latest science. We’re always testing the latest research ourselves (particularly me on moi) and evaluating its place in our diet plans. Today I present Denis Faye’s exhaustively un-conclusive analysis of saturated fat.

Sat fat is one of the latest trends in dieting. Held hostage by the medical community for years as the harbinger of heart disease modern research seems to indicate it’s been falsely accused. And this, of course (given the “it’s either good or evil” mentality of our public) means we now have legions of people sallying forth on a sat fat craze wielding sticks of butter and tubs of lard like they’re light sabers against the dark side that is heart disease. So Faye went to the source, the actual science along with popular books on the subject, and found that this group might be arming themselves with faulty weapons.

My second source is the most authoritative (read: not lame or poorly researched) pro-sat-fat book I could find: Dr. Mary Enig’s Know Your Fats. (Enig was the first real whistle blower on the dangers of trans fat, decades before the rest of the world figured it out.)

To my shock, Enig gave only two instances where she felt saturated fats were of particular benefit. First, she suggests, “research has shown that saturated fat in the diet is needed by the body to enable it to adequately convert the essential omega-3 fatty acid (ALA) to the elongated omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA.” I found the study she cited and it turns out that she got it wrong(ish). According to Gerster, sat fats are marginally better than PUFAs for helping ALA convert, but not “needed.” Furthermore, this advice only really applies to vegans and vegetarians, given a healthy, more omnivorous diet should include EPA and DHA-rich foods such as fatty fish.

What’s Faye has done is exhaustively analyze the actual data and show that their enthusiasm might be better placed elsewhere, like doing some exercise or, “no don’t say it” perhaps just eating a balanced diet. Just because saturated fat may not be something that we should avoid doesn’t mean it’s should be the cornerstone of every meal. He concludes:

At the end of the day, I think the answer is to focus on your own biochemical needs. Even Enig admits, “there isn’t any real evidence that everyone needs to consume exactly the same balance of fatty acids.” She also points out that it’s naïve to categorize most foods as sat fats or PUFAs, given both animal and plant-based fat sources tend to be a mix of both. With that in mind, the answer might be as simple as a little self-analysis. Is your current diet working for you? How do you feel? How’s your blood work? Are you having any issues such as inflammation or high LDL cholesterol? If all this looks good, your sat fat levels are probably pretty right for you. If not, it might be time to start experimenting a little, no matter what your Crossfit trainer tells you.


And this gets back to the philosophy behind the Beachbody diet guides. Eat with restraint and common science. If you’re performance increases your body composition will improve. If it’s not working, re-assess and tinker until it does. And this works, oh, about 100% of the time. We have millions of success stories. Among them we have vegans, pesactarians, Paleoers, Atkins-ers, calorie-stricters, Zone-o-philes and probably even some Pritikiners. Because our plans work with you, and your lifestyle, no matter what that happens to be. Nutrition is simply not that tricky. In closing I’d like to say I’m paraphrasing Michael Pollan but I’ve been touting this since long before he wrote it. Eat mostly whole foods, lots of plants, drink plenty of water, and do some exercise and things will get better. Everything else is nitpicking.

The Turbo Transition Diet

I wrote a simple-to-follow transition diet a long time ago that I often use at the beginning of serious training periods. I’ve been tweaking for a couple of decades and the latest version was just published here (the weird Star Trek transport-like photoshop oddity was not my concoction).

I find this diet is easy for a lot of people because you eliminate certain things from your diet each week but can otherwise eat however you like. It starts simple, with only the deletion of junk at your discretion. My theory is that junk is most people’s dietary white whale. Once it’s gone they find that diet is pretty easy to control. Most diets sabotage this by trying to do everything at once. The broccoli for M&Ms swap is an awfully big step that I find, more-often-than-not, leads to excuses for giving up. But when you just eliminate junk, but can eat absolutely anything else, it’s pretty hard to come up with an excuse to quit.

But I eat pretty well these days so I don’t need as gradual a transition. So for the next 50 day period of my winter training program I’m going to start a turbo-charged version, where I lump the first 5 weeks into one, spend most of time on week 6, and transition to a full raw food cleanse for the final push. It’s no coincidence that week 6 is the “if man makes it, don’t eat it” phase, coined by my buddy Jack.

Admittedly this was inspired by Romney and family unity, as her birthday challenge this year is to go raw for 34 days. Since I don’t want to go raw—or copy her—but also do something that makes it simple for us to eat together I’m allowing myself the modern invention of fire and the pretense that I’ve got a lot of training to do outside and it’s winter. So she can eat her soup to 116 degrees and I can leave mine on the stove to warm-up while I’m riding or running in a blizzard.

pic: beam me up or wtf?

The Shake Zag Diet

At the Beachbody Leadership conference this past weekend I got a lot of questions about the Shakeology cleanse as well as a lot of “how can I figure out how many calories I need?” Here is the answer to both: a version of the Shakeology Cleanse that you can do as often as you want and in almost any situation without risk of any performance loss.

Straight Dope followers have heard it’s my new preferred weight loss (or gain) plan. It’s not really new but just perfected (thanks to Shakeology) and is the easiest way to figure out how many calories you should be eating for performance. It’s a simple diet to follow and can be done in any situation, whether you’re sedentary or training like a White Buddhist Nun (sorry, inside joke—“your nuns into leather, Dante?”).

It’s essentially a combination of three things I’ve done in the past: the egg diet, the zig zag diet, and the Shakeology Cleanse, mainly focusing on the latter two. Here’s how it works.

It follows the principles of zig zagging: low calories two or three (sometimes four) days per week and normal calories on the others. Reverse this is you want to gain weight or suspect you’re not eating enough. The days can be consecutive or back and forth but I find that stringing them together works best.

For me, when trying to lose weight, dieting early in the week and eating what I want later and on the weekends works best, which is especially true because my weekends tend to be very active to the point where overeating is virtually impossible. This means that I get three days of zig (low cals), two days of zag (high cal), followed by two days of what works out to be zagging with a ton of exercise so that it’s still undereating.

When you zig zag your body tells you what it needs, what’s working and what isn’t, and fairly quickly you’ll know both the number of calories you should be eating for optimum performance and even how the macronutrients of those calories should be structured. By adding the Shakeology cleanse component you’ll pinpoint these things even quicker.

Zig days consist of eggs for breakfast, usually three for me with some added veggies. This is my only homage to the egg diet, which was an old school high protein diet where you eat an absurd amount of eggs. I find eggs in the AM is a good way to boost your metabolism, especially if they are not eaten with many carbs. The rest of the day consists of Shakeology. Sometimes plain and sometimes with fruit (berries, banana, whatever) and some chia seeds. An average day has one plain and one more robust shake. Dinner is a salad or veggie dish. Starches are off but I do allow legumes, quinoa (a veggie). Dinner is modest , but not small, so that the daily calorie totals are low. This varies but should be over 1000 for sure. I generally go 1200 – 1500.

I get a lot of caffeine questions and in this scenario it’s totally fine: coffee or tea. I drop caffeine when I’m cleansing because of its heightened effects when you aren’t eating much food. But this is a lifestyle and caffeine is good for exercise and coffee and tea and quite healthy if they don’t have junk added to them. I also allow wine and or beer with dinner, though I try and stick with wine because it fits the theme better. I drink plenty of water and don’t alter my supplement plan. Again, it’s a lifestyle and not a cleanse.

Zag days aren’t extravagant. I just eat normal, which generally means bread, cereal, rice etc will come back on. Portions might get bigger, but things are similar. I eat a lot of salad, veggies, legumes, nuts and seeds. I don’t eat much meat of any kind. Most days I drink Shakeology and if it’s more convenient I’ll sometimes drink it twice. I eat for what I’m doing and this varies massively over the year. If it’s a easy day, which say includes an hour or so of training, I might only eat 2500 cals or so. If it’s a big day out I might eat 5 or 6 thousand calories. On average I’d say I’m in the 3000 ballpark on a work day that includes a couple hours of training and an easier hour or so dog hike.

I do this until I’m at the weight that I desire. While it can be done indefinitely you’ll probably grow bored of it in time. I do a version of it somewhat regularly just to get a check on where I’m at and how I’m functioning. There never seems to be a wrong time (except any holiday where culinary experience it vital) to follow this plan.

Of course when you do this it should be set up for you personally. Caloric calculators are always wrong. All they provide you with is a ballpark figure: a starting place. No matter what you will need take this figure and tweak it because almost any two people, even who are physiologically identical, will have different metabolisms. And even compared to yourself you need to consistently alter and tweak because your metabolism changes throughout your life, depending on many factors.

When zig zagging you’ll want to pay close attention to what you are eating. My casual attitude comes with years of experience. Your body will tell you, in time, what is working and what isn’t. Performance is your gauge. When you’re killing your workouts you’ll know you’ve got it dialed. Body composition change will then, by extension, be forced to follow.

pics: shakes and coffee, the cornerstone of any comeback.

Lab Rat Redux

We have a new supplement guy here at Beachbody. His name is Dr. Bill Wheeler and he’s got a lengthy and impressive resume and will take our game to a new level. We’re working on improving most of our current supplements and adding a ton of new ones, as well as obtaining state-of-the-art certifications for everything we make. But we’ve got to keep our work conversations focused because when we get together we seem to drift off into what the latest research is showing and then theorizing about how this could lead to breakthroughs in diet and supplementation. This is often way beyond the scope of what we’re going to provide our customers in the near future but for me, as a human lab rat, it gets my brain spinning over possibilities.

Currently, however, I’m doing sort of the opposite. Along with the WFH I’ve begun a retro supplementation regime. Over time “de rigueur” supps come and go but, occasionally, things that work well fall off the radar for no good reason. Back in 1990 I was experimenting with a line of supps from the company in the pic. These guys had some fringe stuff and ended up getting closed down when some of their biggest sellers went onto the banned list. I’d become a test pilot for them during a period where I made tremendous fitness gains. I didn’t associate much of this to these supps but I’ve decided, given I’m in the business and all, that I should give these another run around the block.

The only supplement I’d used from these guys that got banned with GhB, which became a popular party drug and ended up killing a few celebrities who OD’d on it. I used it for recovery as well as to help me get to sleep. In 1990 I was trying to revamp me body from one of a lower body power athlete to an upper body endurance athlete. I was simultaneously catabolizing leg muscle while building up climbing muscle (back, shoulders, arms) which meant I was doing some wild training and eating a very low calorie diet. When you’re doing this it’s hard to sleep because you’re amped at night like Louden Swain in the 80s film Vision Quest, but that’s another chapter in the Workout From Hell saga.

Today I’m just announcing that I’m experimenting with Arginine/Pyroglutamate/Lysine and what they called Mesobolin. There's probably a reason they've never gotten popular but I’ll let you know how it goes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some studies to read on the difference between "fast" and "slow" proteinsm something on the fringe I just learned about from Dr. Bill.

When Not To Diet

Over the past month or so Romney and I have been fighting a bug we picked up in Europe. While we’ve been able to perform through it—meaning we’ve been able to work and exercise—it hasn’t allowed us to train and diet with our usual vigor. I’ve written a lot about not training when you’re sick and other times when it’s best to back off of your training, but I don’t think I’ve written much on when you shouldn’t diet. Fighting illness is one of those times.

It probably seems obvious that your need nutrients when you’re sick. Illness is both the opposite and the same thing that exercise is to your body. It’s physical breakdown. So in the same way that your nutrient needs change while you’re training they change while you’re sick.

There is one big difference. Training is—-or should be—-planned and self induced. Illness obviously is not. This means that you can attempt to match your diet to your training. For example, you can both lose weight and gain targeted muscle mass if you eat well and target your nutrient intake properly. When you’re sick, however, you can’t guess exactly what is wrong and, therefore, you can’t be as precise with your diet. Attempting to reduce caloric intake when you’re sick could deprive your body of nutrients needed to fight your illness and end up prolonging it. So during times of illness I always err on the side of eating more.

Of course this is dependant on your daily lifestyle. If you’re over indulgent in general than you may end up eating less when you’re sick. You’re body doesn’t need a six pack, bag of chips, or pint of ice cream when it’s sick. It needs nutrients. If those are part of your daily regimen you can eat healthy foods all day long and still probably be reducing your caloric intake. But if, say, you’re doing Insanity and it’s lean diet plan you’ll, for sure, want to start eating more until you feel better.

Professional athletes during the height of their seasons, especially those in weight dependant sports, are always on the verge of getting sick. This is because they fine tune their bodies to the upmost; watching every calorie and training full bore. When you’re training hard and eating clean, especially if you’re trying to lose weight, you’re body is similar to one of an athlete. The more finely tuned a machine is the easier it is for something to go wrong. When you throw illness into the fray it’s time to stop redlining, throttle back your RPMs, and cruise for a while.

It’s always tough to shed germs picked up on a different continent. Adding a lot of air traveling into the mix makes it harder to shake. We’ve both been on the move since we got home and finally, a month later, we’re ready get our training and diet back on the rivet; eschewing extra calories and burning off the stored body fat we no longer need for protection with some hard training.

Is Cleansing Real Weight Loss?

I just did a three day cleanse and lost 10 pounds. By the new American standard I’m hardly fat, so how can this happen? And since it did, is it real weight loss?

I’m currently working on substantiating the science behind P90X so it can air in the UK. Not only is their science criteria more stringent than in the US, they also won’t accept our testimonials who have lost more than two pounds per week because they’ve deemed this unsafe. As the guy who always champions stricter controls about what can be claimed on food and supplement packaging, it’s funny to stand up cry at a regulatory agency that we’re the ones getting hosed.

Two pounds per week is a perfectly acceptable outside limit for body composition change. I would even argue that it’s unlikely you could sustain this for very long. But over the course of a short-term exercise program, especially one that’s combined with diet, you can lose far in excess of this. It happens in our test groups all the time. The reason is the cleansing effect you get, which is real. It’s a one-time effect but we should not discount its importance.

Since I’m the de facto Raton Blanco (white mouse) around here let’s use my week on the Shakeology cleanse as an example:
As noted in the other post, I began my cleanse after a weekend of debauchery. Sure, I ran a ton but I also ate a lot of bad food and drank a lot of beer. Since I’m not used to eating and drinking that much my body was hanging onto a lot of excess food and my cells retaining too much water (also because of the long runs in a drier climate causing an emergency storage response). The flushing effects of the cleanse got rid of this and brought my body back into homeostasis. But now I’m lighter than I was prior to the weekend, and that is true weight loss.

It’s worth noting that my cleanse would be considered high calorie compared to most. I was probably eating 1500 calories a day. I was just eating nutrient dense foods with a lot of fiber (low density food with high density nutrients). Essentially, it was just good clean eating with a lot of water and no junk—the same thing our test groups do. I feel great and everything is again running properly.

Many people rarely feel this state of being. If fact, they walk around most of the time in my pre-cleanse state. It’s sad when you think about it, but if you rarely exercise, eat bad food, poison yourself daily with drugs (legal or otherwise—soda, a drug when you consider what it’s made of, makes up more calories world wide than any food) you won’t even know what feeling good means. Unfortunately, the average US citizen likely never functions properly.

When we begin a good diet and exercise regimen we will always flush undigested gunk out of our system and bring our hydration levels into homeostasis (most people retain way too much water due to excessive sodium in our diets). Then we lose weight. And if it’s weight that you’re always carrying around with you, it has to be considered real weight. No matter what those Limeys say.

pic: earning my cleanse at milt's, one of the west's best diners.

Shakeology Cleanse

Here’s a little inside information for the Straight Dope faithful. It’s a three day cleanse (I’m doing this week) that’s becoming a standard part of our diet guides. It came from Mike Karpenko (Beachbody coach who once worked for me in the office and still runs our test groups with me) as an evolution of a cleanse I’d done using Shakeology as a substitute for our current fasting formula. Mike spruced it up a bit, we turned it loose on our test groups, and voila!

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Moab for Romney’s birthday (and birthday challenge, report coming soon). Along with a fair amount of exercise we did a fair amount of reveling. I mean, it’s the off-season and pints are two bucks around town and what else are you going to do on a birthday weekend? Therefore, even though I spent four to six hours each day running around I feel like pig that’s been fattened for slaughter, making this a perfect time to flush my system and bring everything back into homeostasis.

This is a performance-oriented system designed to support hard training. It’s not the Master Cleanse. The goal is to promote flushing junk from your system and regulating hydration levels. It’s calorically restricted to be sure. But in its 1500 or so calories will be more nutrients than most people get by eating well over twice that amount. The key is caloric efficiency; getting the most nutrients possible out of the fewest number of calories.

It’s too fat restrictive for a lifestyle plan. I’m on a low cal cycle of the ABCDE diet so it’s the kick start to that. After three days I’ll roll this into a 1600 calorie a day plan with additional calories added for sports performance only—this means targeted calories consumed during and immediately after workouts don’t count in the daily total.
The plan consists of three Shakeology shakes* a day with a salad in the evening. If the shakes are plain (Shakeology and water only) I can add three pieces of fruit. The salad is unrestricted as far as veggies go, with 4 ounces of a protein source (if it’s meat or fish and slightly more if it’s a veggie source like legumes), and two tablespoons of an olive oil/vinegar dressing. For fatty acids, each salad will also contain a tablespoon of chia seeds (or flaxseed or hempseed). Plenty of water washes it all down. Coffee, tea, and herb teas are fine as long as they are sans additives, as all are performance enhancing. In three days I plan feel recovered from the weekend and ready to roll into my final prep phase for the Copper Canyons.

* Any meal replacement or protein shake could be substituted but I’d recommend adding at least a greens formulation to this to try and equate Shakeology’s 70 ingredients.

pics: romney's run looking less than the promised "red hot" conditions, rare postholing conditions on castleton, celebrating romney's "never say never" birthday challenge.

ABCDE Diet

During this cycle of training I’ll be experimenting with something called the ABCDE diet. The only additions will be that I won’t be trying to gain mass, only some targeted muscle gains along with fat loss, and it will be vegetarian. For those of you interested in mass, Bryan Carney at Beachbody will be our guinea pig in that arena.

The diet was conceptualized over a decade ago by Torbjorn Akerfeldt, who tested it on himself while studying medicine in Sweden. The acronym stands for anabolic burst cycling of diet and exercise. It’s basically a periodizational diet plan that’s a bit of a hybrid of the two dietary strategies that I use to get results with clients: structured periodization (like the P90X diet plan) and zig-zag dieting (short periods of alternate low and high cal days, using for either gaining or losing).

My diet plans work. I had decades of anecdotal testing prior to Beachbody, followed by our message board community, “the largest test group ever assembled”. I didn’t invent my diet strategies, but have tweaked them over the years. I almost always get success but there are still a few gray areas. Akerfeldt’s theories could fill in these gaps.

In essence, his plan is a giant zig zag platform; two week cycles of both undereating and overeating. He claims this helps you gain mass without the common mass achiever’s side effect of associated fat gain that must be lost later. Whether or not this plan works as well as he states is still up for debate. After all, it hasn’t become a best seller and isn’t widely practiced.

What intrigues me are a couple of points of science that seem to be the missing link in my observations.

Basically, our genes control the expression of enzymes. These enzymes control every aspect of our metabolisms, including the activation of different pathways and the rate at which chemical reactions take place in our bodies. [Outside biochemical system enzymes are often referred to as catalysts.] Evolution has given our genes the ability to control the production of these enzymes as well as their activity level. Due to this fact, the body will be able to adapt to different food intakes as well as become prepared or "primed" for a future, sudden change in the diet.

This explains why periodizational dieting works (something that I knew from experience but didn’t have the science figured out.) And Akerfeldt has taken it a step further by noting that, in the same way we adapt to exercise, our bodies adapt to dietary change—specifically in about two weeks time. So by altering how you eat every two weeks you can, if done correctly, improve the efficiency of how your muscles cells utilize nutrients.

While Akerfeldt is interested in mass this theory should be applicable for anything you’d like to do when it comes to re-designing your body because a body in an adaptive phase is far more open to suggested changes. Since he is targeting mass, he combines the diet with something called “bag theory”:

The "bag theory" is not mine--it was developed by a scientist named D.J. Millward, a well-known researcher who has extensively studied the muscle-building process. His immense knowledge and research could help a lot of bodybuilders. Basically, Millward has observed three things: 1) the almost unlimited extent to which increased food intake can promote protein deposition during "catch-up growth" in malnourished patients, 2) both active and passive stretch will mediate anabolic and anti-catabolic influences, and 3) the cessation of normal muscle growth coincides with the cessation of bone growth.

There are "connective sheets" surrounding the individual muscle fiber [endomysium], bundles of muscle cells [perimysium], and the entire muscle [epimysium]. These sheets can be thought of as a series of "bags" acting to conduct the contractile force generated by actin and myosin in muscle fibers to the bone by the tendon.

Again, this has a practical application beyond mass. It’s essentially helps you get more nutrients inside of your muscle cells. Sure, that means growth, but it also means performance. In theory, this should enable you to truly spot train, or sports train, because you can choose to stretch areas where you’d like more muscular efficiency.

The vegetarian angle is simply to test my own theories about anabolic dieting and meat.

That’s enough for today. There will be plenty more in the New Year.

Express Diets

When it comes to improving strength to weight ratio, no training strategy is as effective as weight loss. I wrote a series of express diet plans that we offer with our programs. Today I start one of my own. It’s an extension of the Bob Diet that I did last month. Instead of focusing on alkalinity, this time I’ll focus on caloric intake.

These diets came about when Jon Congdon, our president, asked me to write out what “seven days of perfect eating” would look like. Since this is different for each person, I wrote a bunch of versions of what a perfect week would look like for someone trying to kick-start a new exercise program. I worked with one of our trainers, Debbie Siebers, and created the 6 Day Express Diet Plan. It was so successful in our test groups that I then created a version for all of our trainers.

These are essentially a just week of ultra clean eating. They are also devoid of all but subsistence calories. Glorified fasts, if you will. They are about the minimum amount you should eat if you’re trying to exercise. Even then, they shouldn’t be done for long, hence the six-day moniker. We’ve extended them for up to two weeks, though it’s almost always with added calories during the second week.

I don’t have a lot of weight to lose, but if I can lose 8 pound, that’s nearly 5 percent of my body weight. It’s feasible that I could do this over the next month or so. There’s no way to gain that much strength in a month. So as long as I can maintain fitness my strength to weight ratio will improve nearly 5%. Massive.

This type of diet is the wheelhouse for supplements. With minimized caloric intake you want to eat nutrient rich foods. Supplements are condensed nutrients, so a strategic supplementation strategy is essential. If done correctly, you will get maximum nutrients out of minimum calories.

This morning’s weight is 177.4. Body fat is 14.8%. I’m using an in-accurate scale, as most are, and the highest readings. According to the scale, my body fat percentage went up 3% last night. But I’ll take my measurements under similar conditions each day. I don’t really care what the figures say as long as they read consistently. And drop, of course.

The Bob Diet

With phase one of the program being just starting, phase II will ramp it up a little with the Bob diet. My friend Bob went on an “anti-acid” diet and lost 10 pounds in the last 30 days. And he was lean to begin with.

It started because he was having some digestive issues. His doc asked if he consumed much coffee, alcohol, and spicy food to which he replied “it’s pretty much my entire diet.” After 30 days of a high alkaline diet he says he doesn’t feel a lot better, though the acid-reflux symptoms are gone so he’ll probably stay on a modified version. But he did lose a lot of weight, so I’m down.

Essentially, our diets tend to be overly acidic, which is primarily because we eat too much junk and not enough fruits and veggies. You don’t want a high alkaline diet all the time. You want a balanced diet. Your body regulates your blood pH levels so that they’re neutral, but when you consume too much acid this process does a lot of tissue damage. This was something that we never had to worry about before fast and convenience foods became a way of life because everyone ate some fruits and veggies, or at least live foods where the enzymes and bacteria weren’t all destroyed, out of necessity. Kudos to Bob’s doctor for recommending a dietary change instead of a medication.

Of note, Bob’s climbing has improved because he’s lost weight. His endurance sports, not so much. He did a paddleboard race on got slaughtered, as he hit the bonk pretty much out of the gate. As I pointed out in my post on the Diet Switcharoo, you’ve got to eat to fuel your endeavors.

Given my training will ramp again at the start of the Giro, this is essentially going to be a five day cleanse for me. Monday through Friday of this week I’ll eighty-six alcohol, coffee, sugar, meat, dairy, nuts except almonds, tomatoes and chilis, legumes, processed grains and breads from my diet.

Since I don’t have acid reflux this is all in the name of self-experimentation. Science is a cruel mistress.

pic: bob and his trademark oly.

Periodizational Dieting

Answering a question on the boards this morning I realized that I haven't talked about the P90X diet yet. This is because I haven't addressed my own diet yet at all either. I eat okay most of the time but my diet varies drastically over the year as I train for different sports and events. The bottom line is that you should always eat for what you are doing. Since most of us don't do the same things every day it doesn't make sense to eat the same foods every day.

Periodizational training has been around for a long time and most people are sold on the fact that it's the most effective way to train. You can periodize different ways but the objective is the same: to train one energy system at a time until it plateaus and then move to the next one in a way the reduces the plateau and keeps the perfromance curve moving skyward. The schedule generaly depends upon your goals. A periodized training program can be a few weeks or an entire year. Most fall somewhere in between.

"Training" your diet works the same way. The most famous phase-oriented dieters are bodybuilders but most athletes do some form of it, either planned or serendipitious. The 90X diet is just one plan that was written with our clients and this program in mind. It's not perfect for everyone but every one can use its aspects to suit their needs. Because we don't all have the same level of fitness, goals, or agenda it's impossible to write one diet that works for every single person. With X we used the most generally effective system that had worked for the largest group of our client population. There is leaniency written in, especially in regards to how long to stay in each phase.

A periodized diet, like an training program, targets different areas in each phase. With new clients I generally follow the same path. First reduce carbs until your energy stalls out, then add carbs back in until your energy peaks, and then adjust the amounts of carbs you eat based on exercise. Within the simple plans there are many variables, from obvious ones like reducing junk foods and ensuring you are getting enough nutrients from proper foods to the more subtle, like balancing weight gain/loss with performance goals. No matter what the end goal the phases attempt to work towards that goal an efficient manner. The general path is to establish a good nutrient base, target this towards a desired weight, then get the most performance out of the body at the given weight for the desired goal.

I'll talk more specifically about the X diet, and about my own diet for my upcoming goals, as the program moves along. It will all follow the above principles.