All posts tagged muscle

6-Pack Abs Are Expensive

…unless you’re a teenage boy, or a hard-gainer.

The guy on the cover of Men’s Health Magazine is a professional model.  His job is to look good, and he doesn’t look that good by cutting back on carbs and doing crunches.

That guy probably pays money to look that good.  A lot of money.

I work in a body building gym in San Francisco.  It also just so happens to be San Francisco’s “gay gym.”  Sure, straight people are allowed in, but the member base is predominantly male.  You’re either a body builder, gay, or both.

It seems to me that body image is as important to this particular member base as it is for women!  Everywhere you look, there are tight, hard bodies pumping iron.  There’s the core group: the members who arrive every day, without fail, and work out for 2-3 hours.  Lift-pause-lift-pause-lift-pause.

…and then some “cardio:” slow, deliberate steps on the stair mill–forever.

I don’t know enough about body building to give an in-depth analysis, but what I can tell you is that these guys have the most expensive bodies of anyone I’ve ever known in a neighborhood gym.

  • $200 a month for supplements: protein powder, meal replacement, BCAAS, and more.
  • $100 a month for extra food: shakes, smoothies, and chicken.  Lots of chicken.  Insane amounts of chicken.
  • $0-$400 a month for personal training and accountability.
  • $80-$200 a month for body work, including stretching, massage, hair removal, and tanning.
  • $$$ = Time.  Tons of time exercising and eating.  Time planning meals.  Time commuting to and from the gym.  Time waiting between sets.  Having a solid body is one of the most time-intensive exercise goals of them all.  It’s like playing a sport, only your “practice” is 2-3x longer every day, and you have to invest 2-3x more time fretting about your food, and 2-3x more time recovering (every workout aims to demolish muscles; every workout aims to leave them twitching, dying, and torn at a microscopic level, in order to repair and grow bigger and stronger).  What is an hour of your time worth?

Don’t get me wrong.  I have tremendous respect for body builders.  It is a sport that requires insane precision and dedication.

But I’m weary on their behalf.  I’m weary for the time they spend fretting about whether one shoulder looks bigger than the other, about whether their kidneys are okay, whether they are coping with their body dysmorphia constructively.

Hey!  That’s just for body builders!  I don’t want to be a big massive guy.  I just want that 6-pack!

Take a ticket.  You and everyone else who doesn’t want an ounce of fat on them.  And there are two ways to get rid of every ounce of fat:

1) Just don’t eat.  Ever.  Give up food.

2) Don’t eat carbs.  Hyper-dose yourself on protein.  Stick with natural, unprocessed fats when needed, and lean protein the rest of the time.  Oh, and when you’re ready for your photo shoot, dehydrate yourself.

The body is designed to have a healthy layer of fat on it.  Your brain is wired to seek out fat and sugar.  When it ingests fat, it thinks, “Awesome!  Let’s eat more of that!”  When it finds sugar, it says, “Whoa! Cheap, delicious energy!”  When the two are combined, “Holy shit!  The is the most amazing food stuff I’ve ever encountered!”  It’s fat and carbs that the body wants.

Fat keeps the body feeling full longer than anything else, and it keeps the body running slowly.  Carbs are the body’s preferred energy source, and they allow for fast, rapid movement; they also make you feel happy.

The body does not have the same hard-wiring for protein.  Of course, protein is an essential macro-nutrient, but after you eat a sufficient amount, the brain says, “Boy, I don’t want another bite of chicken.  I’ll throw up.  I’m warning you…  No more!”

Eating massive amounts of protein is hard work.  And it’s hard work to digest as well.  You’re net energy decreases, and your organs work over-time.  It also requires a lot of water to digest.  If you aren’t getting sufficient fiber and vegetable intake, you run the short-term risk of constipation (uncomfortable) and the long-term risk of colon cancer (life threatening) and other types of cancer (if your protein is predominantly animal-sourced).

On the plus side: you will have very healthy hair and nails, and big muscles.

If you have a good ethic of regular exercise, including a variety of exercise activities, and you are fretting about your abs, know that for most people, 6-pack abs take an extreme level of dedication that may not be lifestyle friendly.

1 Comment
by demogirl06 on June 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Fitness & Lifestyle, Nutrition
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Posted by demogirl06 on June 21, 2012

http://mariamaestevens.com/2012/06/21/6-pack-abs-are-expensive/

“Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” from Robert H. Lustig, MD: A Summary

Dr. Robert H. Lustig begins with the question, “What do the Atkins diet and the Japanese diet have in common?”  It’s an odd question, as the two diets seem diametrically opposed.  The Atkins diet is all fat, no carb.  And the Japanese diet is all carb, no fat.  They both work.  So, what do they have in common?

They both eliminate the sugar fructose.

Lustig continues into a 90-minute lecture, called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which can be viewed for free on Youtube.  Amazingly, this 90-minute talk on sugar and biochemistry was viewed by over 1.5 million people.  1.5 million people wanted to learn how fructose is basically the common denominator for virtually every aspect of Metabolic Syndrome.

Lustig begins with a basic law: if you eat it, you better burn it, or you’re going to store it.  This is the law of thermodynamics, pushed forward by fitness trainers and fad diets.  For many, it’s true.  Calories in vs. calories out will determine skinny or fat.

But it’s not true.  I’ve always said that if you eat 2,000 calories of protein vs. 2,000 calories of sugar, you will achieve a very different body shape.

Energy expenditure equals quality of life, Lustig continues.  The more energy you burn, the better you feel.  But we are not burning this energy, and America is suffering from an obesity epidemic.

There is a hormone in our body that tells us to stop eating.  It’s called leptin.  It’s supposed to tell us to stop eating, but Americans are eating more than ever, so clearly leptin isn’t working anymore.  There is something we are eating that is distorting our normal biochemical negative feedback system.

Is it the fat in our diet?

Nope, he says dismissively.  We’ve actually decreased our fat intake, as a country, from 40 to 30% over the past few decades.

It’s the carbs, Lustig declares.  There’s something in the carbohydrate we are eating that has shut down leptin.

Americans consume 65 lbs of high fructose corn syrup a year.  HFCS is much sweeter than most sugars.  The syrup is comprised of glucose and fructose (fructose will vary from 42-50%).  Sucrose (table sugar) is also a fructose and a glucose; table sugar is 50% glucose, 50% fructose.

Lustig declares, HFCS and sugar are the same.  They are both poison.  Sugar isn’t just about empty calories. Fructose is a poison, and it distorts your body’s chemistry.

Every single year, Americans not only eat more, but they eat more of their calories from sugar.

After summarizing how the Nixon administration would change the face of American food production and culture forever, and the tight correlation between soft drink consumption and obesity, Lustig asks his audience to hang on tight for a whirlwind tour of how glucose, fructose, and ethanol (alcohol) break down in the body.

Fructose is not glucose:

1. Fructose is 7 times more likely to form advanced glycation end products

2. Fructose does not suppress ghrelin (the hunger hormone) because it does not break down until it reaches the liver.

3. Fructose does not stimulate insulin or leptin.

4. Fructose is the only sugar metabolized by the liver.

5. It promotes metabolic syndrome.

Compare 2 slices of white bread (which is roughly 120 calories of glucose), to liquor (roughly 120 calories of ethanol), to a glass of a sugar-sweetened beverage (about 120 calories of sucrose, half of which is fructose).

The Bread (glucose) – 120 calories:

-80% of the glucose will be used by the body.

-About 20% of the glucose will hit the liver and get stored as glycogen (for future physical activity).

-A tiny fraction of the glucose will be made into ATP which, if not burned, will go through a number of biochemical processes, turning into citrate, and may be stored as fat.

-Perhaps 1/2 a calorie will end up as Pattern B Cholesterol (very low density lipoprotein), but it is negligible.  This is why you can live off white rice and not die of a heart attack.

The Alcohol (ethanol) – 120 calories:

- 24 calories will hit the kidneys, muscle, and brain.

-96 calories hit the liver.  This is four times the amount, compared to white bread (glucose).

-What hits the liver metabolizes into acetaldehyde (like formaldehyde), which is toxic.

- Like glucose, it breaks down into lots of citrate, and will be stored as fat (four times the amount!).

-The other by-product of this metabolic process is the production of Pattern B Cholesterol (VLDL), again, four times the amount.

The Sugary Beverage (sucrose) – 120 calories:

-60 calories from glucose will break down similarly to the white bread (48 calories to the body, 12 calories to the liver to be stored as glycogen).

-60 calories from fructose will all go to the liver.

-In total, 72 calories reaching the liver will need to be phosphoralated (turned into energy–ATP–adenosine tri phosphate).  That is a lot–three times the amount, when compared to white bread.

-You lose a lot of phosphate in this process, and so the body provides a rescue molecule, and the end waste product from the metabolism of these calories is uric acid (which causes gout and hypertension, among other things).

-Uric acid blocks the your body’s chemical–endothelial nitric oxide synthase–for maintaining low blood pressure.

-Citrate, again, arises from the metabolism of all these calories, which promotes fat retention, dyslipidemia, VLDL, and high blood triglycerides.

-In short, from any fructose load, 30% of it will end up as fat.

-An excess of body fat changes the way your body responds to leptin.  Leptin is a hormone produced by adipocytes (fat cells).  The more fat you have, the more leptin is produced to act on your brain’s hypothalamus.  But when there is too much, you develop leptin insensitivity; your brain can no longer recognize it and thinks you’re starving.  So you eat more.

A final comparison between soda and beer:

COKE BEER
Calories 150 150
Calories from fructose 75 (4.1 kcal/g) 0
Calories from other carbs 75 (glucose) 60 (maltose)
Calories from alcohol 0 90 (7kcal/g)
1st pass G.I. metabolism 0% 0%
Calories reaching the liver 90 92

Lustig says fructose is ethanol without the buzz.

Fructose is like drinking fat.  30% goes to fat storage.  It is metabolized like fat.

A high sugar diet is essentially a high fat diet.

2 Comments
by demogirl06 on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Biochemistry, Nutrition, Weight Management: Chemistry
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Posted by demogirl06 on January 2, 2012

http://mariamaestevens.com/2012/01/02/sugar-the-bitter-truth-from-robert-h-lustig-md-a-summary/

How To Lose Fat

I had a good laugh reading about muscle gain and fat burning.

Will More Muscle Rev Up Your Metabolism?  The answer, from Marticia Heaner in “Triggering Your Body To Burn Fat”, was short and sweet.  “Probably not.”

Most personal trainers, including myself, tell others that building muscle is one of the best uses of time at the gym.  It is metabolically more active tissue, it is denser.  When you build muscle, you tend to lower your body fat percentage…

…but in terms of losing fat, objectively.  Well, building muscle guarantees nothing.

Why?  Because to build muscle, you have to eat.  And you tend to eat a lot.  You will likely overeat, as muscle is hungry, and building it makes you tired.  That marginal metabolic edge conferred through muscle gain is often eclipsed by an over-compensation in eating.

I know this first hand.  If you’re like me, and exercise is easy, but fat is stubborn, your problem is probably food.  Plain and simple.

Sure, a lot can be said (by me, especially) about efficiency in exercise.  If you have a small amount of time, you’re aim should be to burn the most energy possible, get the highest afterburn, and build the most muscle.  Easy, right?  Yeah… not really.  But that’s content for a different article.

I can tell my readers first hand that putting on lots of muscle will not necessarily make you lose body fat.  What often happens is you become a larger, stronger version of your fat self! What to do?

Fat loss, according to every credible article, is not scientific.  It is an annoying, objective numbers game.  Move more, eat less.  Burn more than you eat.  Period.  It does not matter what type of energy you burn.  If you write down every calorie honestly and prove you are creating a deficit of 3,500 calories, but fail to lose a pound of fat… then maybe, just maybe you have a thyroid problem.  But I’d wager that 99% of thyroid problems are simply denial.

Eat less.  Bottom line.  Eat less. Front load your calories in the beginning of the day, taper toward the evening, and if you go to bed a little bit hungry (a little, not a lot!), you’re probably on the path to body fat loss.

Increase your total movement, not necessarily your exercise.  Lift too many weights, and you might get too hungry to stick to your lower calorie diet.  Take trips by foot, park the car far away, clean things by hand, pace around, whatever you have to do.

Here we go again: move more, eat less.

3 Comments
by demogirl06 on September 13, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Exercise Physiology, Fitness & Lifestyle
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Posted by demogirl06 on September 13, 2010

http://mariamaestevens.com/2010/09/13/how-to-lose-fat/

Training Your Metabolic Pathways (part 1)

Here’s a crash course in exercise physiology.

Whatever you eat, and however you exercise, your body ultimately gets its energy from a molecule called ATP, which stands for adenosine tri-phosphate. Imagine a little three-leaf clover; each leaf is a phosphate.  Your body pops one of these leaves and energy is released, rendering that clover a di-phosphate (only two phosphates are left).  Your metabolism looks around for something to replace that third leaf.

You may think that you get energy from calories–”fuel”–and that you burn whatever goes in when you’re exercising.  While this is true in a broad sense, it is far more complicated than that.  The metabolism (the rate/way in which you burn energy) is a very sophisticated and complex thing.  It is dynamic, and it has different strengths and weaknesses, depending on who you are; it can also be trained and adapted, just like your body.

There are four metabolic pathways for energy production:  aerobic liposis, aerobic glycosis, anaerobic glycosis, and ATP-CP. Depending on your demand for energy, your metabolism will select one or two metabolic pathways.

When your body is looking for ATP, it can derive it from different complex chemical processes (pathways).  The first and most basic of these is aerobic liposis.  (Liposis>lipid>”fat”).  Your metabolism finds free fatty acids circulating in your blood, combines it with oxygen, and can convert it into energy. This process, however, is complicated and time-consuming, and will not suffice when the body has a high energy demand.  Hence, aerobic liposis is used during non-exercise (that is, day-to-day life and activities), and very low intensity exercise (your heart rate can be elevated only a little bit).

The next pathway is aerobic glycocsis.  (Glycosis>glycogen>glucose>”sugar”).  Glycogen is sugar stored in your muscles and a few of your organs, and the average person can store about 1,500-2,000 calories of glycogen.  Glycogen is combined with oxygen to derive ATP.  You can think of glycogen as your fuel; and your muscles and organs, as your fuel tank. When exercising, your body depletes this fuel.  After exercising, you must eat (carbohydrates) to re-fill the tank.

The third pathway, anaerobic glycosis, generates ATP without the use of oxygen.  You can imagine red-lining your car, ripping through your fuel reserves, and smelling something hot and dirty from your vehicle’s effort.  The amount of glycogen needed for this effort is significantly higher, but because oxygen cannot be utilized, you get a nasty, burning by-product called lactic acid.  Lactic acid is what makes exercise burn; the effort from this kind of exercise can significantly wear down muscle tissue (this is not necessarily a bad thing).  At home, you’re exhausted, your body is humming, and you are hungry.  This “afterburn” from exercise is when weight loss and body re-composition happy. Your body scrambles around, looking for something to convert into glycogen (whatever carbohydrates you eat), and also goes around building and re-arranging proteins, to make your lean tissues bigger and stronger–more prepared, in case it ever has to do that exercise again!

The final pathway, ATP-CP, provides the most explosive energy to your body.  ATP stands for adenosine tri-phosphate. CP stands for creatine phosphagen. Basically, when that third leaf on the clover pops (ATP turns into ADP), the body goes immediately to rob that “P” from CP, to rebuild ADP to ATP.  Unfortunately, the body has extremely limited amounts of CP.  Energy from this system is provided for seconds only.

So, how can you train these systems?

Aerobic glycosis is any sustainable activity lasting anywhere from 20-90 minutes.  Even longer, if you are a seasoned endurance athlete. This system is trained by exercise like running, rowing, swimming, or general bodyweight and resistance exercises with high repetitions.

Anaerobic glycosis is a much less sustainable activity, that can last minutes only.  This can be anything from strength training (8,10, 12 repetitions) to intervals, to Fartlek training, Tabata intervals, to sprinting, to jumping.  Each effort is full tilt,and recovery time between efforts is ample.

The ATP-CP system provides energy for merely seconds.  Explosive and full-body recruitment exercises train this system.  Examples include some plyometrics, max-out lifting, 10 second sprints/intervals, throwing, etc.

**Note: seldom is the body ever exclusively in one pathway or another.  In fact, the body has a tendency to blend them.  For example, at rest, the body taps into its aerobic lipolitic (fat burning system), but might rely on the aerobic glycolitic system for up to 30% of its energy needs as well.  A multi-step full out effort, such as a Turkish get-up, might switch between ATP-CP and anaerobic glycosis.  Endurance lifting will certainly spread over aerobic and anaerobic glycosis.

Each system can be trained and adapted.  The more endurance activities you do, for example, the more you will be able to do later.  By keeping your body on a bobble between aerobic and anaerobic intensities, you eventually condition your body to accept more work (hence, you become more fit).

How?  One way is by increasing the number of mitochondria in your muscles.  Mitochondria are basically the “lungs” of your cells, and accept more oxygen.  The more oxygen your muscles can accept, the more energy they can deliver towards an effort.  This is one reason why it is important not to do the same exercise all the time, as your body becomes more and more efficient.  To make gains in fitness, you must always seek new ways to challenge yourself.

To be continued…

1 Comment
by demogirl06 on July 12, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Exercise Physiology
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Posted by demogirl06 on July 12, 2010

http://mariamaestevens.com/2010/07/12/training-your-metabolic-pathways-part-1/

What’s The Scoop On Protein?

“Protein, protein, protein!  Protein is so important!  Don’t get protein deficient.  If you exercise, you probably aren’t getting enough.”  I once heard a guy at the gym exclaim, “Oh my god, I’m going catabolic!” and proceeded to chug a protein shake.

Wisdom comes from experience.  People who are at the top of their field generally have the most experience.  It isn’t a stretch to say that the best health professionals have experience.  If they don’t currently walk-the-walk, at least they’ve done it at one time or another, and can appropriately guide others to do so.

Over the years, I’ve dappled in a lot of things–particularly, in a lot of diets.  I grew up a fat, meat-eating, milk-chugging American.  If a person didn’t eat meat, I didn’t trust him.  It was downright blasphemy.

Years later, my coaches told me to lose 40lbs of fat if I wanted to be a serious athlete.  Suddenly everything in my diet fell under scrutiny.  Whole milk was fattening.  Chicken fingers were fattening.  Steak, hamburgers, hot dogs, egg yolks… fattening.  I hit the salad bar, hard.

I dropped the weight, but it wasn’t easy.  I turned my diet inside out.  The pounds came off, my performance improved, and suddenly I was curious.  Why did my diet have such an impact on my performance?  I started reading.  I read everything I could find.  One thing I continued to encounter was this: there exists a disproportionately high number of Olympic metal-winning athletes who are vegetarian.

Bottom line.  Protein doesn’t equal meat.

Protein is made up of amino acids. Your body can make certain amino acids, but not others.  The ones it can’t make, it has to get from food.  Once in the body, those amino acids are shuffled around with the others and placed in nifty little chains to make protein for the human body: cells, tissues, hair, nails, etc.  The only thing more abundant than protein in the human body is water.

That’s it.  Amino acids come from food.  You eat a balanced diet with a sufficient number of calories, and you will get enough protein…

…that is, unless you’re doing something extreme, and many of us are.

I hate supplementing, but out of curiosity, I’ve tried upping my protein intake on several occasions.  During periods of my life, I’ve needed to eat 4,000+ calories daily to maintain my weight and performance.  At other times, I have subsisted off 2,000 calories per day, and wasted away.  By wasting away, I mean that I lost weight, and a lot of it was muscle mass.

Why is that?  Muscle is hungry.  It needs more calories to support itself than fat does. Way more.  If you are on a restricted-calorie diet, and your body thinks it is going into a period of lean times, it is going to try to get rid of anything that wastes its energy, particularly if it isn’t being used. Bye-bye muscle mass.

Bottom line, if you want to gain muscle, you have to eat enough food.  If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less food.  If you want to gain muscle and lose fat, then you’re in for something tricky.  The body doesn’t like trying to do two things at once; be in a catabolic (break-down) and anabolic (build-up) state.

This is where protein supplementation is key.  We’ve figured out ways to extract protein from whole foods so that you don’t have to ingest fat and carbohydrates (things that might retard your efforts to lose fat).  If you eat a ton of protein and limit your fat and carb intake, you have plenty of building blocks (for muscle gain) and little to burn (fat and carbs are your body’s energy sources for movement)–at the same time.  Tricky.

If you don’t have fat and carbs from food for energy, the body has to make it, so it begins to make a fundamental shift in favor of fat metabolism. Now you can burn fat and build muscle.

How much protein would you need to eat to achieve this?  Opinions vary.  In my opinion, a lot.  When I eat like a normal person, I only eat 50-70 grams per day.  At 6’0″ and 190lbs, I have no problem maintaining muscle and increasing my strength.  I just don’t think about it.  Maybe because I insist on eating nutritious and organic whole foods (protein isn’t the only thing that matters).  I also get plenty of sleep.

When I’m experimenting, my protein intake is supposed to jack up to over 200 grams per day–or 35% of my daily intake on  a 2,500 calorie diet.  That’s three times the amount I used to eat.  The difference?  It’s easier for me to shed body fat in a jiffy, but I’m not going to continue to spend $70 every couple weeks to buy those 5-lb protein powder tubs.

It all depends on your goals.  Many people are not satisfied with their naturally occurring body shape.  If your goal is an unnatural body, then unnatural means (protein supplementation) is a logical route. For the rest of us who aren’t competitive body builders, who want healthy levels of body fat, proportionate figures, and a glorious range of motion, just eat a wide variety of whole foods.

Leave a Comment
by demogirl06 on June 17, 2010  •  Permalink
Posted in Nutrition
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Posted by demogirl06 on June 17, 2010

http://mariamaestevens.com/2010/06/17/whats-the-scoop-on-protein/

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