Saturday, August 3, 2013

When I first started ESE and calorie tracking, I discovered something: I was far more effective if I gave myself one day during which I did not track. There was a caveat, of course: I had to "watch myself" in terms of how much I ate. Most of the time, I felt like I did a pretty good job of monitoring myself. Sometimes, I knew I was glad that I didn't know what the total bill came to. So why do that? Well, hopefully anyone on a program has an end goal that reads something like this: get to a point at which I no longer have to monitor myself with a chart. I reasoned that if I waited until I was where I wanted to be to start practicing the "blind counting", I would probably have a relapse. And it worked. Way back in 2010, when I was 170, I stopped worrying and counting. Had I continued ESE and not gotten obsessed with "bulking" and trying to be part of the cutting edge, I would honestly probably have never topped 180 (and that would have been only after the holidays... if you haven't lived Thanksgiving through New Year's in the American South, you just don't know.)

So, on Saturdays, I do not track my calories. Again, I don't let that be a license to eat whatever I want to, although Saturdays are usually my "cheat days". Just as an example of what my day looked like:

• scrambled eggs with sliced mushrooms and peppers, skim milk (breakfast, 8 AM)
• spaghetti sauce... my wife makes homemade stuff, soooo good, not high calorie... without noodles (lunch, 1 PM)
• turkey sandwich (snack, 5 PM)
• homemade pizza (dinner, 9:30 PM)
• raw almonds, blueberries, half bar dark chocolate (dessert 11 PM)

If I did the math, what I ate MAY have accounted for 2000 calories. MAYBE. The pizza is lower calorie (think crust, less cheese, turkey pepperoni) than you think. On top of that, I was on my feet cleaning, scrubbing, vacuuming, etc. for six hours straight today. If I exceeded my TDEE, I will be shocked.

Things to Ponder

• Planning a Fast. When shall we three fast again? That's Me, Myself, and I. I started out with strict fasting schedules ("Honey, I'm fasting from noon this Wednesday until Thursday afternoon.") and that worked fine. It did cause problems when something unexpected came up. Of course, good ol' Brad had addressed this, but it wasn't until my read-through of his third edition that I realized what his advice was (there's a lot of information in that book...  you just have to read it to understand). I don't "plan" my fasts, now. I have some loose ideas (I'm thinking tomorrow after lunch until Monday night, but if we end up not having a family lunch, it may end up being tonight after dessert until Monday morning) but it doesn't stress me. I'm flexible as a limp noodle... and that's part of the beauty of this approach. If you've tried another diet program, you know of what I speak. 
• The Workout Program. I don't know if it's possible to give you a brief rundown of my workout history, but here goes:
• 96 - 98: high school, one muscle group per day (the pseudo-bodybuilder workout), probably poorly executed and inconsistent thanks to Cross Country, basketball and being young. I don't know that I understood the impact of food at the time. Probably 60-90 minutes in the gym, 30-45 minutes actual workout.
• 98-02: college, two muscle groups per day six days a week (true bodybuilder routines, each group twice a week), with creatine and protein and whatever-ine was said to work. Small meals mixed in with, uh, liquid calories. I was also running and swimming laps. Two hours a day working out, probably 80-110 minutes of actual exercise.
• 03-07: marriage, family, real career... between grad school and work and coaching, I was gone from 6 AM to 7 PM four nights a week, at a minimum. I went from 180 with abs to 215 with abs that you couldn't see... Sure, I tried diets (so many of them), but the bottom line is that they were too strict, acted as if I had a personal chef or lots of time to prepare and plan meals, and were just too vague for me. The worst was Men's Health, that beacon of false fitness. I'll do a page on why they suck for nutrition advice, but for now, suffice it to say they promote the doom-and-gloom of not eating (even though one of their editors promotes a 16/8 fasting diet he ripped off from Martin Berkhan).
• 07 - 10: resumed the mistaken belief that I needed to "eat more", somehow didn't think about the impact of, uh, liquid calories, and went through a maelstrom of workouts: P90X, Insanity, distance running (aka "steady-state" running), Crossfit, etc. Oh yeah I smoked from Spring 2001 until New Year's Day 2009 and quit and never went back. Don't do it kids... smoking bad. Lungs, good.
•  10 - 11: I decided it was time to put my brain to use to solve the problem with my body. I was exercising and in better shape than I had been since I had quit when I got married, but I was still fluctuating from 200-215 (side note: if you knew me then, you may be thinking this seems like an exaggeration, but truth: I carry my weight well- broad shoulders and chest can hide a lot.) I stumbled onto Turbulence Training by Craig Ballantyne via podcasts, and he interviewed this very friendly guy named Brad Pilon who wrote this book one time...
• 11 - July 13: having dropped to 170, uncovered the abs, read tons about training and nutrition, and won a weight loss contest, I made the mistake that seems pretty common the more I read message boards and talk to people... the mistake that sometimes (many times?) sends people back down into the pit from which they had only just climbed: I got fixed what wasn't broken, complicated what was working, and tried to improve on success. I don't blame LeanGains for the fluctuations bewteen 170 and 190 (God knows I knew what I was doing) and I added some considerable size to my frame. I also learned what kind of workouts I wanted to do (CB's TT workouts were great... I recommend them for anyone who just wants solid workouts, new each month, with years of older workouts to choose from... but I like the lift heavy, do compound movements). I also dabbled in Renegade Training, but it was tailored to the skinny guy who wants to gain (not me), as well as Starting Strength, the 20-squat protocol, and 5x5, all of which work.
• August 2013 - ??: I'm going back to my roots, sort of. I'm going to do one muscle group per day, once per week, with hill sprints whenever I can. I'm sticking to compound, heavy lifts, usually 9 - 12 sets (closer to 9), and I'm not supersetting for the first time in a long time. This is not to say that this method is "most" effective. I've been doing this and reading and listening for a long time now. And I've come to these conclusions:
• you can do pretty much any physical activity, it will shape your body in some way, but there isn't any magic that your normal guy (me, you, etc.) can tap into... run, sprint, lift, dance, whatever. It shouldn't be done to burn calories (that's a nice side effect) or to allow you to eat more. It should be done to promote health and make your body look the way you want to look.
• your calories over the course of the week matter, whether you shove them into a four hour window or do it over a 24-hour window, whether you low-carb yourself into a ketonic state or put yourself into carb heaven... just find a way to level those calories out in the simplest way possible and you'll drop weight.
• complexity is the enemy of success in fitness and nutrition (for the average person).

Friday, August 2, 2013

2200 calories, 100g protein

I broke the fast at 4 PM with a protein shake, which is technically a 27-hour fast. As I follow it, ESE is about returning to your normal eating habits after the fast, so in my mind, I would not eat just because it's been 24 hours. Life happened and I didn't get to work out after I drank the shake, so I could have skipped it, but c'est la vie.

Some Things to Ponder

• Protein Intake. Most plans will swear that you need 1g of protein per pound of bodyweight. Personally, I don't worry about protein intake. Brad (ESE's creator) wrote a book about it, if you want justification for not worrying about your protein intake. You can also find a ton more information ranging from the bodybuilder/broscience recommendation of 1 - 2g per pound of bodyweight to the "medical" (i.e.non-weightlifting) that advises 30-40% of your total intake. I know a lot of this site promotes Brad's work, but that's only because (a) it's the simplest thing I have found and (b) it has worked for me without fail.
• Why Simple? There are complex plans that require micromanaging what you eat, when you eat it, etc. You can check out The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook (it isn't safe to do it for very long and you'll understand what I mean by "complex") or Berkhan's LeanGains site for examples. Caveat: both Lyle and Martin (the respective authors) have some personality issues. Lyle has been a real jerk to people, to the point of misanthropy (though he'd say they were idiots and he was being honest, and if he finds me saying this, he'd probably go on some rant intended to hurt my feelings), and Martin, since about 2012, has just been weird. If I was in college or single, I could very easily follow these plans. I'm a details-oriented person, I work well with notes and flowcharts and spreadsheets, I can be happy with whatever I'm eating, etc. Most people just aren't that into this stuff, so they're not going to weigh out food and track it. If you have a family and a social life, sticking to ANY complex plan is going to be extremely difficult. ESE is so simple that it can work around anyone's life (except an alcoholic... if you HAVE to drink heavily every night, well, no diet plan is going to work for you and, as I'm sure you know, you're probably creating worries for yourself beyond looking good).
• Alcohol and Dieting. I know alcohol is taboo in our society. I don't know why that is since so many people actually drink more frequently than they let on. Personally, I've never been concerned with covering up the fact that I like dark beer and bourbon and red wine. I've always kind of laughed at people who came up with the "Well, I feel sorry for you if you need alcohol to have fun." It's such a stupid argument. If you want to drink, fine by me. If you don't, fine by me. It's like same-sex marriage and having kids: some people do it, some don't. But understand that alcohol will affect how you lose weight. I'm going to make a page about this, but for now, just count your alcohol calories.
• Diet Tracking. You should do it. I kept a diary similar to this one when I went from 215 to 170. I didn't share it with anyone except the people in the forum I was in, but it helped. I'm sharing this now because I'm confident in what I'm doing and where I'm going and how I'm putting it all together. You need to track your eating, at least in general, if you're not following Eat Stop Eat. And if you're totally new to this whole diet thing, I think you should track your calories anyway, until you have a sense for how many you're eating in a normal day. MyFitnessPal and LiveStrong are great sites.
• The 24-hour Fast. If you notice, I started my fast on Thursday at 1 PM and ended it Friday at 4 PM. This is technically 27 hours without food entering my stomach. However, it's probably closer to an actual 24-hour fast because the first few hours were spent on digestion. Now, ESE is not about getting a literal, exact 24-hour fast; in fact, such worrying would violate the spirit of ESE and derail you if you're just starting out (imagine your mind, 16 hours into your first full fast, trying to give you permission to eat: Oh, I won't actually be doing a 24-hour fast ANYWAY...) However, as I did ESE for two years and followed it off and on through my confused period, these are the sorts of things I think about. Brad wrote that you should "resume eating as you normally would." Well, I don't normally eat at 1 PM. My usual schedule is 6 AM breakfast, noon lunch, 4 PM protein shake and broccoli, late dinner (8 PM). That's why I didn't eat until 4 PM. I resumed my normal eating pattern. And in doing so, I gave my body 24 hours worth of its TDEE to burn from reserves, of which I have plenty!

Thursday, August 1, 2013

450 calories, 75g Protein

Normally, I would take in more calories in a day. However, today was my first day returning to the ESE method. Simple breakfast (I have never been a big breakfast eater) of scrambled eggs and turkey bacon, and leftover pork for lunch.

I've had someone ask me what some terms mean, so here's a quick list:

TDEE - Total Daily Energy Expenditure - quantity of calories burned (i.e. how many I can eat before I gain weight)
TEF - Thermic Effect of Food - an overhyped occurrence in the body, during which some portion of calories ingested are burned off during digestion (no, celery doesn't burn more than it contains; and this is where some genius got the "revved metabolism" myth that has plagued us ever since).
Maintenance - The number of calories I can eat while neither losing nor gaining weight. You can find all kinds of calorie calculators online. Mine would probably be right around 2300 (I usually subtract ~10% from whatever number I'm given) at 190 pounds.
Deficit - eating below maintenance, which can be bad for you if done for extended periods of time... however, I have never personally known anyone to do this. Eventually, we all splurge.
Refeed - Popularized in diet lore as a "cheat day" or "cheat meal"... but I am doing it to mainly keep myself happy and allow myself some fun.
Low Carb - some number of carbs below 100g
Keto - You can look this one up for yourself, but I refer to it when I take in below 20g (which I did on Thursday, today)

About This Blog

About This Blog

This is nothing more than an amateur blog recounting my experiences with Eat Stop Eat (the 24-hour, 2x per week fasting protocol), which was created by Brad Pilon.

5'9" tall
190 pounds (start)
Experienced lifter
Using Eat Stop Eat and ~1500 calorie restriction (lower-than-usual carb) with one refeed day (yay, carbs!).

The only guarantee I can give you is that I won't be miserable doing this, if that's what you're thinking. Trust me. I have seen misery in dieting. It ain't pretty.


Brief Background

I have lifted weights since I was 15-years old, although fitness and nutrition have always interested me (growing up overweight will do that to you). In my time, I have tried a lot of different workouts and a lot of different diets/nutrition plans. A simple rundown would look like this (no particular order):

Workout Plans
Turbulence Training (~two years) by Craig Ballantyne
1000-calorie workout (~two months) by I've Forgotten
Renegade Fitness plans (~6 months) by Jason Ferrugia
5x5 and Starting Strength (~6 months) by Not Sure
LeanGains-inspired workouts (~1 year) by Martin Berkhan
5-3-1 (~1 year) by Jim Wendler

I've also followed my own workout plans that included high volume, low rep, reverse pyramid, 20-rep squats, bodybuilder-style, and Arnold Schwarzenegger-inspired plans (the two muscle groups per day, twice per week from his encyclopedia).

Diets
Low fat
Low carb
Mediterranean
South Beach
Anything Goes
LeanGains
Carb Cycling
16/8
Eat Stop Eat
Rapid Fat Loss

Some of these I tried for about a month, with varying degrees of adherence and success. The one thing I learned was that complexity and rules are a definite sign that I won't be able to follow the diet. If you have a family or if you're planning on eating out a lot, you just cannot follow most plans because, eventually, you'll get bored or you'll come to a place that doesn't accommodate your little snowflake nutrition plan, and you'll take your first step off the diet and into a spiral backward.

Intermittent Fasting (IF) and Me and What I'm Doing Now

Eat Stop Eat was the first program that I was able to stick to (with 100% adherence, actually) and that didn't make me miserable. It actually changed my entire perspective on food, health, etc. I won a Get-in-Shape contest with ESE and Turbulence Training (TT) a few years ago, going from 215 to 170. I have followed some form of IF since then, and have even managed to sway a few people into trying it. I have given up talking to anyone about it though... too many people believe in "starvation mode", don't understand how the body works, and (this is the kicker) they truly believe eating more food causes your metabolism to "rev up" to a point at which they burn more calories. Sigh.

I swapped out TT for Renegade because I was lean but small. I did well with Renegade, but it was a pay-site and I was tired of paying. Also, Renegade is geared more for small guys who are naturally lean. The opposite of me. I went to 5-3-1 and that really worked well, but I have old injuries from my cheerleading days- right wrist and left knee- and I eventually reached a weight that my muscles could support, but my joints could not. I switched over  to LeanGains, which is when I dropped Eat Stop Eat, and used the Reverse Pyramid Training protocol. It was a little kinder to me in terms of volume, and I made more progress.

Then I got sloppy. Maybe it was the 16 hours of fasting and not really thinking I could be overdoing it on the eating. Maybe it was the Warcraft playing. Maybe it was the "extra calories" that I forgot to log. It got complex, though, whatever it was... charts, graphs, lots of thinking and planning. I swapped to the Rapid Fat Loss right before the beach and it works if you follow it perfectly (which isn't that hard if you're already used to controlling what you eat). I came back from the beach in July of 2013 and I didn't feel right.  And everything else I'd ever read. I also had to stop working out to get over some injuries and I just stopped caring for a month or so about being in shape. Brad Pilon sent out the latest edition of Eat Stop Eat. I read it. A quote at the end (his reworking of a Zen phrase) struck me and reset my perspective:

“Before you study Nutrition, food is food and drink is drink; while you
are studying Nutrition, food is no longer food and drink is no longer
drink; but once you have had enlightenment, food is once again food
and drink is again drink.” (pg.175, 2013 Expanded Edition)

(How can you not like Brad, right? I'm all up in Zen, so I'm down with his perspective.) Anyway, I realized that I was there. I knew everything I could possibly know (without being an expert, without going back and learning physiology and nutrition and... UGH... SCIENCE STUFF) about weight loss and weight gain and lean muscle mass. I could tell you that most of your fears about "losing muscle" are silly. I could even show you the studies that supported it. So why was I so messed up?

I remembered this line from the Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell, trans.):

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

I was caught in desire (that's really my only point... nothing mystical or insane), so much so that I had lost sight of my original goal from years before. I didn't want to compete in any powerlifting contests. I didn't even care if I could lift more than someone else or as much as someone thought I should be able to lift. All I wanted was to be healthy, be able to eat what I wanted, not complicate everything, and look good when I took my shirt off. Once I was free from those desires that I cared nothing for, I saw the answer: the thing that had gotten me there in the first place, before I broke in with complexity and strategy and a messed-up perspective, Eat Stop Eat.

My Plan Now
I started August 1, 2013. I'll log (in general) what I eat every day. I'm not about to get specific, for several reasons. I'm a private person, for one, and for another, why does anyone care? I'll list calorie totals, lift totals, etc. I may add a few notes about my day. Here's how it will look:

1) Lift Heavy Stuff (8-10 reps) in Compound Movements (3x week)
2) 24-hour fasting (2x week)
3) 1500/day calorie total (low carb, but more as a result of personal preference... I luvz the meat)
4) One refeed day
5) I'll post my weight again in a few weeks.

I have a picture from the beach that I thought about using. I look okay. You can still see the ol' abs, but they're... soft. I decided to not post it because I'm a teacher and that could get tricky. So, no pictures.