C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  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 ...

If you read this blog regularly, then you know that I haven't posted anything in quite some time. There are a few reasons for this.  I've been extremely busy with work, training, and  writing some totally non-strength related material.  The lack of material here, however, is about to change. First, you'll notice that the blog has a new "look"—assuming enough readers like the new look, we'll keep it as is. I'm also proud to say that I've hooked up with a couple of people who are very important to me—my dear friend Jared Smith and my oldest son Matthew Sloan—who are going to do some regularly contributing to the blog.  Hopefully it will be enough so that, between the three of us, we can have two to three posts each week. Jared Smith Jared is a former workout partner of mine, and a man who I'm proud to have called my friend for the past decade or so.  He's also one incredibly massive S.O.B.  But don't take my word for it.  Here's...

            One of the more popular forms of “dieting” these days is “intermittent fasting.”  The term refers – rather loosely, I might add – to a wide range of different eating plans.  The premise, however, is rather simple:  You go for an extended period of time with little or no calories (the “fasting” period) and then you follow this up with a “feeding” period, which comprise either one meal, multiple meals, or possibly even an entire day of eating.      Opinions surrounding intermittent fasting are vast and, well, quite opinionated as to whether it’s good or bad.  The opinions run the gamut from “the best friggin’ diet on the planet” to “absolutely sucks, and has to be the worst diet ever; you’ll be starving all the time, and you’ll probably lose all of your muscle to boot!”      But I think the truth is somewhere in between.      Intermittent fasting ...