More on Nutrient Timing and Muscle Building

 A.K.A.: The Pork Chop Diet vs the Steak and Beer Diet!

Or

How to Eat What You Want and STILL Build Muscle and Stay Lean (or Get Lean) and Some Other (Possibly) Slightly More Nonsensical Stuff

Mariusz Pudzianowski was a strongman that ate TONS of highly processed food, and was still jacked. (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

     Last month, I wrote a piece on nutrient timing/combining, and how this is a possible route to building muscle, burning body fat, and just staying in all-around good shape.  This is essentially just more of the same, with some of the thoughts flowing through my incessant mind stream—sometimes it seems more like a river—of different ideas and views on the subject, or similar subjects, as that post a month ago, most of it precipitated by a clip I saw from a Joe Rogan podcast.  (That’s one of the problems with being a writer.  Some people might think that being a writer is “nice” or something that they might want to do, but if you’re really a writer one of the main problems is that the thoughts, ideas, and just generally creative stuff never stops.  Like ever.  And so I forget way more than I ever write down; plus my mind just never gets much of a break, unless I’m lifting, practicing budo, or sitting in zazen—the reason I love all three of those things so much.  But I digress…)

     So the other night, and this is the reason that I began to ponder nutrient-timing again, I saw a clip from Rogan’s podcast where he was discussing a study on an “ultra-processed” diet with some YouTube guy—I think that’s how you would describe him—named Shawn Baker.  Oh, excuse me, Dr. Shawn Baker; I don’t want to get emails from disgruntled readers who might be fans of this dude.  I think Baker is a proponent of the Carnivore Diet, or something of a similar bent.  Anyway, I didn’t pay attention to a whole lot that was being said after that—yeah, yeah, I know; that’s not a very good way to “research” what was being discussed—but I didn’t really care about the rest of the conversation once Baker mentioned this study, which seemed nothing more than an attempt to find if it was possible to be “healthy” on an ultra-processed diet.  Most of the people in the Deep South where I live (Alabama, by the way) seem to eat an ultra-processed diet and are incredibly fat, so I would have thought the answer was obvious: uh… hell, no, it’s not healthy!  (You can also add “duh” to the end of that last sentence if you want.)  And, of course, unless you’re actually clueless, any answer that the study gave other than “no” would mean that the “study” was biased from the beginning (you have to put the word in quotes by that point, since it wouldn’t be a non-biased, you know, actual study).

     And yet…

     This morning, I thought about some of the, how should I say, off-the-wall ways of eating that I have done over the years that have actually yielded good results.  These included diets such as (what was originally called) the “Pork Chop Diet,” only to later be re-named as the much more appealing “Anabolic Diet.”  Or what I once referred to, while practicing a form of intermittent fasting, as my “steak and beer diet.”  But that particular label to how I practiced intermittent fasting was a bit of a misnomer.  Some nights I practiced the “hamburger and beer diet,” other nights the “chicken-fried steak and beer diet,” and on other nights it might have been the “beer and beer diet.”  And while I don’t recommend such diets to men my current age—I was in my late 20s and early 30s while following my “and beer” approach—there can be no doubt that it actually worked for me.  And by “worked” I mean that I often fasted during the day, and then ate whatever-the-hell I wanted to at night (typically meat of some sort and beer, if you hadn’t figured it out) and still got lean while staying really strong, or even getting stronger.

     With both intermittent fasting and the Anabolic Diet, I was able to get big and/or strong, while also losing body fat (or, at the very least, not gaining any) despite often eating some copious amounts of—what would at least be considered by some people to be—very “unhealthy” things, and, yes, even highly processed foods.  With the Anabolic Diet, for instance, I would be extremely strict during the week, eating a heaping amount of protein and fat with little carbs (a “typical” keto or even carnivore-style diet), but on the weekends I ate a wide variety of whatever crappy carbohydrates I wanted to partake in.  In fact, I would often spend Saturday and Sunday eating little other than ring dings, crullers, donuts, pizza, plus plenty of chocolate milk, and, of course, more than just a small number of cold beers.  And on Monday morning after that weekend of ultra-processed carbohydrate debauchery, I would still be lean, but I would also be “swole,” as if my muscles seemed to just suck up all that profuse glycogen it had just been inundated with for two days—which, of course, it did.  Why?  The timing of the “crappy” carbs.

     All of that is to say that there is a way to sort of “cheat the system,” when it comes to eating ultra-processed foods.  And, of course, the more and harder that you train, the more you can get away with additional processed crap.  Here I think of (possibly) the greatest of the World’s Strongest Men, Mariusz Pudzianowski, who, during this heyday, regularly ate 5 to 6 “typical” bodybuilding meals of “meat and potatoes,” but also loved to eat a lot of hard candy and candy bars in between those meals.  And Pudzianowski was one of the leanest, hardest—if not the leanest and hardest—elite strongmen this world has ever seen.

     This is not to say, if you haven’t figured it out, that you should go out and start eating whatever your favorite ultra-processed food happens to be.  That would be stupid, and deleterious to your bodybuilding/strength-gaining progress.  But if you’re the kind of guy (or gal) that likes to partake in Little Debbie snack cakes, or enjoys a weekend breakfast of pancakes covered in chocolate sprinkles, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce, there is a way to possibly  fit those foods into your diet, assuming you follow a program based on some sort of nutrient timing.

     Before we wrap this thing up, let me add this caveat: I am NOT recommending that you ever eat highly processed foods if they’re not something that you crave.  I think the healthiest route, even if you follow the Anabolic Diet, is to get your protein, fat, and your carbs from as close to their natural source as you can.  This means for carbohydrates, you’re always going to be better off eating things such as potatoes, rice, and oats; all of those are starches that can be purchased just the way nature intended them to be eaten, right out of the ground.  I rarely eat any “junk” food, for instance, but just like to keep my macros at around 50% fat, 30% protein, and 20% of carbs from non-processed foods.  I think that is the sane, sensible approach that most should take whatever some stupid “study” says to the contrary.