Macronutrient breakdown

jester77

Just looking for some peoples opinions on keeping carbs and fats totally apart during meals. I was recommened this by a trainer last year and took his advice for a cut last year. I either had protein/carb meals or protein/fat meals and the protein/carb meals were just for PWO. It worked well, steadily lost 1-2 lbs every week, even gained some mass. But what are the merits of this diet as opposed to say a 40/40/20 diet?

g'em

There's no evidence to say that macro-partitioning really works, and to a large extent it all comes down to individual tolerances. John Berardi has talked a fair bit about it, just tried to do a quick search on t-nation but couldn't come up with anything. But for a cut I wouldn't be going with the general 40/40/20 anyway, carbs are too high.

t-ha

I follow it a little - my very basic reasoning ('cause this stuff is super-complicated if you really start to look into it) is that if you eat a meal that has a fair amount of fat but not much carbs, then alot of that fat will be used for energy since your blood sugar won't rise that much (hardly any carbs) and the insulin response to the meal will probably be fairly dull.

If you eat alot of fats AND alot of carbs then the carbs you ate will be used preferentially for energy (will cause a blood-sugar rise sooner) and the accompanying insulin rise will promote storage of the ingested fat as bodyfat. This is including the dulling effect of the fats on insulin secretion.

The worst combo would be a food that is high in simple carbs (sugars) and high in total fat & saturated fat.

Other factors are;
1] If I'm eating alot of carbs it's usually for a reason, i.e. going training, just back from training, just up, etc., so I don't want too much fats slowing down my digestion of it.
2] It's good to keep the total calorie content of a meal down and that's one way of doing it, i.e. if I need a load of carbs then the calorie content of the meal is already high, adding fat will just make it really high.

HOWEVER, I'm not completely stringent about it and I don't think it's neccessary to be. Total calories in v's out is still the key to weight gain/loss, and I certaintly don't avoid all foods that happen to have a little of both in them (like seeds & nuts for example) or avoid putting sauce on rice just because there is a little fat in it or anything. I just try to make sure that meals that are quite high in carbs are kept quite low in fat. Unfortunately this means that lasagne and most pizzas can have a pretty hard time trying to get into my diet!