A few q's for you.

joc_06

These are directed more at Logic and the few that know their stuff than the lads chancing their arm (like i was for a long time)

I bought a few books on sports nutrition recently because i was training harder than ever and found myself run down.
The best i found was Sports Nutrition Guidebook by Nancy Clarke.

She raises some key points that i actually couldnt believe when i read them. I havnt read it all yet but i have most of the food recovery and pre workout sections covered.

She says that carbohydrate's are the basis for building muscle and gaining weight without fat. Is this true? I was always under the impression that carbs are good before matches etc but ala atkins diet can be very fattening. Therefore i cut a lot of carbs from my diet. Was this blocking my performance gains?
Just last night i ate a banana and wholemeal bread sandwich an hour b4 training and guess what i easily ran a mile in 5m20s. My best time in 2005. Coincidence?
Also some carbs are good, others bad. white pastry type bread is poison almost whereas fruit, wholemeal bread, brown rice is excellent

She also says that you only need adequate amts of protein to build and recover and if you overdose on protein then it all just turns to fat!!
What i had been doing was taking a 50g protein drink with creatine soon after training thinking that it'd build lots of muscle but after reading this it seems that the majotiry of that protein was turning to fat. Hence the reason why i wasnt burning any fat at all really even though i was training like a demon and eating little.

Also its better to eat small meals frequently rather than 3 large meals which i wasnt eating anyway. I was eating 1 or 2 meals at most a day. This was slowing my metabolism down something awful i presume meaning i could only digest tiny amount and the rest goes to fat.

She says big steaks have no place in any diet not to mind an athletes. Is this true? I mean for years i've been hearing about all the muscle building power of steak and beef but it seems a palm sized portion is even too much as it contains loads of saturated fat and too much protein which all truns to fat. Turkey, chicken and fish are much better. She preaches about oily fish saying its excellent even sardines from a tin. I cant remember my last fish dinner and im sure it was deep fried in batter so f*ck all good anyway...


So are these points true? I presume they are because the bokk got rave reviews on amazon.

Im sure i'll come up with more points as i go along through the book.

dudara

She says that carbohydrate's are the basis for building muscle and gaining weight without fat. Is this true? I was always under the impression that carbs are good before matches etc but ala atkins diet can be very fattening. Therefore i cut a lot of carbs from my diet. Was this blocking my performance gains?

This I don't know about.

Just last night i ate a banana and wholemeal bread sandwich an hour b4 training and guess what i easily ran a mile in 5m20s. My best time in 2005. Coincidence?

here the carbs you ate were of the good kind. Read about GI foods.

Also some carbs are good, others bad. white pastry type bread is poison almost whereas fruit, wholemeal bread, brown rice is excellent

Refined carbs are definitely evil. this includes anything made of white flour. White flour these days is bleached, and baked with hydrogenated or fractionated fats in order to give it shape. There's nothing to be gained from it. Wholemeal is always better.

She also says that you only need adequate amts of protein to build and recover and if you overdose on protein then it all just turns to fat!!
What i had been doing was taking a 50g protein drink with creatine soon after training thinking that it'd build lots of muscle but after reading this it seems that the majotiry of that protein was turning to fat. Hence the reason why i wasnt burning any fat at all really even though i was training like a demon and eating little.

If you overdose on anything, it will turn to fat. Remember calories in equals calories out. Excess calories in get stored as fat. There is a recommended amout of protein to ingest after training to assist in muscle repair. I don't know the figure off the top of my head. So many grams per kilo of bodyweight anyway.

Also its better to eat small meals frequently rather than 3 large meals which i wasnt eating anyway. I was eating 1 or 2 meals at most a day. This was slowing my metabolism down something awful i presume meaning i could only digest tiny amount and the rest goes to fat.

This is true. Smaller and more frequent meals keep the metabolism rate going. Start the day with breakfast for maximum effect. Plus, if you only eat a few big meals in the day, you'll feel bloated afterwards. Smaller, frequent meals will eliminate this feeling.

She says big steaks have no place in any diet not to mind an athletes. Is this true? I mean for years i've been hearing about all the muscle building power of steak and beef but it seems a palm sized portion is even too much as it contains loads of saturated fat and too much protein which all truns to fat. Turkey, chicken and fish are much better. She preaches about oily fish saying its excellent even sardines from a tin. I cant remember my last fish dinner and im sure it was deep fried in batter so f*ck all good anyway...

there are many sources of protein, but the lean sources or the oily fish are probably best. Fish is so good for you, it's not even funny and I'm disgusted by the fact that most Irish people's knowledge of fish only extends to tinned tuna or fried cod. Get some mackarel and learn to cook it. It's so yummy.

Overall she has a lot of good points. Personally, I'm not a great believer in carbs, and when I do eat them, I try to keep them as wholegrain and unrefined as possible.

joc_06

TBH i believe almost everything she says and i will try to stick to it. But she recommends that 60-70% od your daily calorie intake be from carbs. I do think this figure is a bit high but if its good carbs then it shouldnt really matter.

Another that really shocked me was this - Pizza can be better for you than a steak dinner. Of course the pizza must have a wholemeal base, you must make the tomato sauce yourself from a recipe with little or no fat, use fresh veg and grilled chicken and low fat cheese. Now there's one for you fast food addicts!!

Now what i need to find out is my daily calorie needs and protein needs and start to tailor my diet accordingly.

Do ye know what i used to eat before? A cuisine de france large baggete (the 3 foot long ones) with loads of cheese butter and washed down with a litre of milk before training. How bad was that? I was also a huge fan of upto 6 slices of whte toast with butter dripping off it and id regularly drink 3-4 litres milk a day and no water! No wonder i was seeing no results from my training...

Mr E

I bought that book a few months ago, and it really opened my eyes. I like the sections that debunk popular food myths....

dudara

How could anyone ever think take-away pizza is healthy? (tasty though it is).

big thick stodgy base, melted cheese sitting in a puddle of it's own grease etc.

I make my own pizzas regularly. I do use strong white flour as I like the base this way, but I roll them out very thin. Homemade ragu sauce, lots of cheese (generally feta, or sometimes blue cheese), parma or serrano ham, pinenuts, onions, peppers, the list is endless...

joc_06

dudara wrote:

How could anyone ever think take-away pizza is healthy? (tasty though it is).

Exactly thats my point. No one thinks pizza is healthy but it can be and thats where i realise i've been going wrong for so long.
I'd eat very little and think grand im not putting on any fat which was true but what i was eating was crap like bfast rolls and wedges and nothing else all day and get really really hungry whereas i could have eaten a tonne of healthy stuff that would've put on no more fat but actively help me build muscle and keep me active.

I think it was the old "no pain no gain" story. If i wasnt famished every day then id think i was after gorging myslef. I'd never be happy unless i was starved and the next day then id eat a huge meal of fatty stuff but my idea was it doesnt matter as long as i eat nothing for the rest of the day and go to bed starving. Then i had to be losing fat i thought.

But i wasnt what i was doing was overloading on bad carbs and fat which was turned straight into fat instead of being burned off. It didnt matter how little i ate because all iwas eating was faty stuff so it couldnt magically just disappear.

The way isee it is because of my so called "diet" i had to work twice as hard at least as a healty eater to burn off the same amount of fat.

Now dont get me wrong im not fat but i am trying to lose a bit. Sur isnt everyone?
Anyway a great book. Hopefully i can stick to it...

Jak

In work so I will keep this short.

I take a fairly dim view of diet guru's and diet books. The reason being nothing particularly new has emerged in recent times. Healthy food and sensible eating is not rocket science, and while monitoring GI levels and other things make a difference on the margins, there is no magic bullet in any of these systems for anyone with even a modicum of dieting sense. Authors grind out books this time ever year to capture a weak market in need of an excuse.

Get any half decent dietician's book and scan it for good basic advice ... these will be things most of us know such as ..

1. More smaller meals
2. Fresh foods and fruits
3. Non processed and unrefined foods
4. A balanced diet - variety
5. Lots of water
6. A good source of protein to the proportion of 1-2gms per pound (not Kilo) of bodyweight.

These things are all sound advice, however how well all this works is directly related to what you are putting out in the gym. The bottom line is, if you generally eat reasonably well and roughly supplement yourself in a way fitting to your training, then you are fine.

I have met a number of people who go to extreme lengths to analyse diet and so on, and have on a couple of occasions explained that they figured out what was holding them back in their diet and training ... they are wrong. It's the frequency, intelligence and intensity of their training which holds them back and that is why they never develop to the same level as some of us.

JAK.

logic1

joc_06 wrote:

These are directed more at Logic and the few that know their stuff than the lads chancing their arm (like i was for a long time)

I bought a few books on sports nutrition recently because i was training harder than ever and found myself run down.
The best i found was Sports Nutrition Guidebook by Nancy Clarke.

I haven't read it personally but have heard a few people recommend it. Also anytime you step up your training level you will find yourself run down mainly due to the body shuttling resources from normal bodily functions like defense against attack to other things such as muscle repair leaving you open to fatigue, irritability, infection etc etc..

She says that carbohydrate's are the basis for building muscle and gaining weight without fat. Is this true? I was always under the impression that carbs are good before matches etc but ala atkins diet can be very fattening. Therefore i cut a lot of carbs from my diet. Was this blocking my performance gains?

It all depends on the carbs. Basically proteins are the building blocks of muscle. Proteins and amino acids (essential, branched chain - constituents of proteins themselves) - BUT without carbs you usually won't have enough calories to allow the proteins to build any muscle. For example if your BMR (basal metabolic rate) is 2000 calories, this is the amount of calories you need just to maintain your current bodyweight. Now if you take in 2000 calories a day in proteins alone (which is alot of protein) you'll never get any bigger. You'll simply maintain your current weight (simplified analogy as you may increase muscle density and drop fat but remain the same physical weight)

What alot of Associations recommend (including American dietician association and American sports council) is that you first meet or at least come close to your daily calorific intake with a mixture of complex carbs and healthy EFA's (essential fatty acids) just to maintain your current lean body mass then on top of that increase your protein intake for pure muscle building.

Personally I'd go with a 40/40/20 macronutrient ratio of proteins, carbs and fats. This seems to be the most popular and most effective method of muscle building for lean gains.

Just last night i ate a banana and wholemeal bread sandwich an hour b4 training and guess what i easily ran a mile in 5m20s. My best time in 2005. Coincidence?
Also some carbs are good, others bad. white pastry type bread is poison almost whereas fruit, wholemeal bread, brown rice is excellent

Overripe bananas are very high on the GI scale as the banana degenerates it creates alot of fructose, essentially fruit sugars which may have been an influence in your training. It'd be a fast release sugar and an immediate insulin spike. The wholemeal bread would have been a slow release and kept your stamina up after the fructose rush had subsided. There's no doubt about it sugars/carbs play a very important role in nutrition and performance.

She also says that you only need adequate amts of protein to build and recover and if you overdose on protein then it all just turns to fat!!

This is true to an extent. If you take in a surplus of any macronutrient and your body doesn't immediately need it for energy then it will be stored as fat. However different foods can be stored as different fat types and some are quick access reserves and some are slower.

What i had been doing was taking a 50g protein drink with creatine soon after training thinking that it'd build lots of muscle but after reading this it seems that the majotiry of that protein was turning to fat. Hence the reason why i wasnt burning any fat at all really even though i was training like a demon and eating little.

This probably isn't true. 50gms of protein at one serving isn't all that much and after a hard training session I doubt any of it was being stored as fat. It's recommended after training to take your protein shake with a fast release sugar such as maltodextrin which replaces the glucose lost from your liver during the training session, provides an insulin spike and facilitates the shuttling of creatine and protein to your muscles for repair.

Also its better to eat small meals frequently rather than 3 large meals which i wasnt eating anyway. I was eating 1 or 2 meals at most a day. This was slowing my metabolism down something awful i presume meaning i could only digest tiny amount and the rest goes to fat.

Eating 1 or 2 meals will actually have a detrimental effect on your weight loss. Missing meals is probably the main reason people don't loose weight. You have to eat small and eat frequently. Even if it's just 2 pieces of fruit in between meals it's essential to stop your body getting use to a cycle of long breaks between food. These long breaks can condition the body to turn even more food into fat for storage as it becomes accustomed to long breaks before it's fuelled again. Obviously detrimental to weight loss.

She says big steaks have no place in any diet not to mind an athletes. Is this true? I mean for years i've been hearing about all the muscle building power of steak and beef but it seems a palm sized portion is even too much as it contains loads of saturated fat and too much protein which all truns to fat. Turkey, chicken and fish are much better. She preaches about oily fish saying its excellent even sardines from a tin. I cant remember my last fish dinner and im sure it was deep fried in batter so f*ck all good anyway...

Alot of people will admonish red meat as it is high in satuarted fat but every serious trainer I know enjoys a steak every so often. I wouldn't use steak as the mainstay of my diet but I won't go without it either.

Lean chicken, lean mince, lean turkey, oily fish (salmon mainly) and tuna form the mainstay of my diet along with brown rice, grannary bread, wholewheat pasta and sweet potatoes for my carbs (not including porridge for breakfast).

She recommends oily fish as they're full of essential fatty acids such as Omega-3 and Omega-6. It's come to light over the last number of years that not all fats are bad and some such as the EFA's mentioned above are infact essential as Mammals do not produce enough of these fats needed in our own bodies so we have to externally supplement to get our RDA. I usually keep a stock of flax seed oil and take some daily but eating fish regularly is good or any of the cod liver oil etc.. supplements are also good.

So are these points true? I presume they are because the bokk got rave reviews on amazon.

Im sure i'll come up with more points as i go along through the book.

Any more Q's just post, seems the board has a good few members who are quite knowledgeable at the moment including some of the newer members. Excellant resource all in all

.logic.