OK, the title of this post is a bit misleading.  But, it seems as though many people believe that “Diet vs Exercise” is a valid question with an obvious answer: Diet. 

They may not believe it consciously.  But, in their actions this is what happens.  In truth, of course, there is not an exclusive “or” separating diet and exercise – you need both.  If you want to change your body composition; if you want to increase performance; if you want to live healthier; then you have to pay attention to both.

That said, there is an ordering of the two. 

I can sum up my entire fitness-philosophy with two phrases:

1. Exercise before Diet.
2. Weightlifting before Cardio

These two phrases imply an ordering of the list {diet, weightlifting, cardio}.  My ordering is

1. Weightlifting
2. Cardio
3. Diet

What is amazing is that my ordering is precisely to opposite of the order in which most people go about getting “in shape”.  When someone first decides they want to make a change, the first thing they do is go on a diet.  After they’ve gotten that down, they add in some cardio.  And if by some miracle they haven’t given up yet, they finally throw in some half-ass weightlifting. 

I’m here to tell you to do the opposite. 

If you want to get any benefit at all related to fitness (fat loss, muscle gain, strength gain, etc) then you must begin with weightlifting.  Slowly add in cardio (but not the kind most people think).  And finally get a diet plan that makes sense.

Why? You ask.

Dieting by itself doesn’t work long term.  If you’re goal has anything to do with performance or muscle gaining, then you know this. But, people looking to lose fat seem to delude themselves into thinking that they can solve their physical problems with a “magic” diet.   I’m not even talking strictly of “fad” diets.  Even a well-designed diet is worthless in the long run without exercise.

When you go an a calorie restricted diet you put your body in a catabolic state.  This lowers many of your bodies “good” hormones, and increases many of the “bad” ones like cortisol. (OK, strictly speaking there are no good or bad hormones, but some are better for your fitness goals than others.)  The negative hormones will decrease muscle mass, lower metabolism, and make it harder for you to lose fat. (Ironic, ain’t it!)

This hormone change is a negative byproduct of dieting that you have to deal with. However you need to mitigate it.  Exercise increases the positive hormones and decreases the negative ones.  It helps preserve muscle mass, and increases both metabolism and fat loss. 

Yes, if you want to make fitness progress you have to have a diet in place. But, you can’t rely on it by itself.

OK, so exercise first, diet second. Got it. But, why not start with cardio?  There are 2 reasons.

One, even when we’re talking about interval training (like sprinting) we’re only hitting part of your body. 

Let’s be honest, however.  When most people start their programs with cardio, they are not doing hard sprints (or metabolic circuits which involve weights), they are using steady-state cardio (jogging and its ilk).  Steady-state forms of cardio just don’t confer the same metabolic effects that interval training or weight training do.  While both intervals and weight training (done with intensity) raise your metabolism for up to 36 hours after exercise (called the EPOC effect), steady-state doesn’t.

In addition, steady-state cardio will cause your body to become more efficient at fat burning.  While that may sound good, it is very bad.  A more efficient car uses less gas to go the same distance.  You want your body to be a gas-hog.  You want it to burn tons of fat with little time – not tiny amounts of fat with massive time!  Weightlifting makes you the Hummer of fat-loss.

Two, starting with cardio can increase injury rates.  Weight training is very controlled.  You only lift the amount of weight you can safely in a controlled pattern of movement.  Cardio is not as controlled – even on a treadmill or other machine.  Think about how many “repetitions” your legs do every time you go jogging, or when on on the stair stepper.  It’s in the hundreds to thousands.  That is a lot of potential damage.  Each impact is worth many multiples of your bodyweight, slamming down on your joints. 

Conclusion

When you start with weightlifting, you increase the positive hormones you body needs to reach its goals, you increase metabolism, you lose fat, you gain muscle, and you decrease injury rates.  No other one thing can do all of that.

Once you are comfortable in your weight training routine, you can add in some cardio work.  I strongly suggest some kind of intervals over steady-state (the only exceptions are distance athletes – like marathon runners, tri-athletes – and strength athletes, as odd as that sounds).

And finally, when you have a solid weightlifting routine and a cardio routine, THEN you can start worrying about your diet. 

When I was in High School there were 90 year old women who were bigger, stronger, and taller than I was.   I’ve since gained 60 pounds of muscle–though, I haven’t gotten any taller.  I’ve helped a lot of other skinny kids (and adults) pack on pounds of muscle over the years, and I’m here to tell you that it’s not as impossible as you’d think to gain upwards of 20 pounds of muscle a year throughout your High School and College career (until you start butting up against your genetic limit, of course).  If you’re determined to be as big and muscular as you can possibly be, read on.

[WARNING!  If you are NOT a skinny high school kid with a blazing fast metabolism, then for God's sake don't eat like I'm about to tell you to.  You'll just get fat.  If you ARE a skinny kid with a crazy fast metabolism who works out hard but can't gain weight, then read on.]

You’re in High School.  So, right now, your metabolism is fast–blindingly fast.  You’re constantly busy with a lot of home  and school work (you may even have a job).  And, up till now, you’ve let your parents do all the thinking for you regarding your diet.  I can’t do anything about the first two problems.  But, I can help you with the third.

I’m going to take a (not so) wild guess that you are making one (or more) of the following diet mistakes right now:

1. You don’t eat breakfast
2. You don’t eat right after your workouts
3. You don’t eat right before bed
4. You don’t eat more than 2 meals a day
5. You do eat at these time, but you are following the diet of your favorite Bodybuilder.

The first 4 of these are cardinal sins if you ever want to get big.  You can have the perfect weight training routine, but you’ll still be skinny if you don’t eat a lot. You have to eat a ton of food.  Period.  There is no breaking of that rule–ever.  Eat breakfast, eat post-workout, eat before bed. Those are the 3 most important meals of the day.

The last mistake (number 5) is more of a problem than you might think.  The trouble with bodybuilding diets is that they are too healthy.  I’ll repeat that.  They are TOO HEALTHY.

While bodybuilders are a frequent source of laughter among us strength coaches because of their ridiculous training programs that only work if you’re on steroids, they HAVE figured out diets that are great at getting you leaner and more ripped.  Bodybuilders are very good at that.  But, that is not your goal!!  You have to get big before you can diet down and show off your muscles.  I don’t mean you should get fat, of course, but you have to give up on your abs for at least a  year.

You need massive amounts of calories if you are going to put on 20 to 50 pounds of muscle.  You CAN do this.  I was a skinny kid too, and I did it.  And the way to do it is actually quite simple and enjoyable.

The Trick?  Eat crap all the time–yes, crap.  Mac and Cheese, ice cream, burgers and fries, fried chicken, pizza, etc.  Fun, right?  Get only as much protein as you need to feed the muscle rebuilding process (about 3/4 to 1 gram per pound of body weight), and focus the rest of your eating on carbs and fat (mostly carbs).   You see, your problem isn’t that you aren’t building muscle fast enough, it’s that your body is eating away all the muscle that you’ve build!!  But, if you give it enough calories (carbs) to fuel itself, then you’re protecting your newly built muscles from being devoured by your freaky-fast metabolism.

OK, OK, so what’s the diet already!  Below is a simple 5 meal a day diet (4 meals and 1 shake) that has worked for many skinny kids I’ve worked with over the years (again, if you ain’t a skinny young male, don’t do this!).

The Diet

Breakfast:
4 whole eggs
2 pieces of toast, each with peanut butter and jelly on them
16 oz of whole milk

You could instead eat Pancakes and eggs, or steak and eggs.  I used to eat a whole can of ready-make buiscuits with 4 eggs, syrup, butter, and a large glass of milk.

Lunch:
(you can easily pack this in tupperware and bring it to school)
1 whole box of mac and cheese, mixed with
1 whole can of tuna

You could use ground beef instead of tuna.  Mac and Cheese is great because it’s easy to make before school, easy to carry around, cheap as dirt, and very high in calories (one box has  over 1000).

Snack (an hour before working out):

Bagel, cream cheese, 160z Milk (you can add protein powder to the milk if you want)

During Workout:

Gatorade

After-workout:

32 oz. Chocolate milk

Dinner:
Whatever Mom makes (eat 2 servings), this is a good time to get vegetables.

Things like Burgers, pizza, etc are perfect.  But, it’s hard to say no to meat loaf, or Teriyaki chicken and rice!  Even better, YOU should start cooking dinner for your family (give your Mom a break, man!).  Some day you’ll be on your own, and if you don’t know how to cook, you’ll never reach your strength goals.

Before bed:
Large Bowl of ice-cream, or large bowl of cereal (always, always, always eat carbs before bed – till you get older and your metabolism slows, of course.)

Now just workout with weights 3-4 days a week on compound movements (squats, cleans, snatches, deadlifts), and do 2 days a week of cardio (cardio makes you hungry, this is very helpful–I hate cardio, too).  What are you waiting for?  Go eat!

Parents: I know that the above looks very unhealthy.  It is.  Especially for us adults.  WE can’t eat like that.  But, a young High School kid who is actively working out a lot and has a naturally high metabolism will thrive on the calories.  These kids are like aliens compared to us.

What you can do to mitigate any potentially negative effects would be to make sure they eat vegetables at dinner time, take a multi-vitamin every day, take extra vitamin C and E, and take Fish Oil capsules.  You combine that with the amount of training they are doing, and they’re fine.

(cross-posted @ Good Tithings)

Dr. Lam has a post on the link between sugar and all the ills of humanity. While I’m certainly for a low sugar diet (and the proscriptions in the post are largely fine), he brings up some points that are patently false (and therefor irk me something fierce).

In particular, he quotes (favorably) Robert Crayhon, the dude who created the “Paleo Diet”, in his distinction between what Crayhon calls paleocarbs and neocarbs (no, neocarbs are not a description of Karl Rove and his cronies):

Paleocarbs are carbohydrates that have existed since the beginning of time. They include fruits, seeds, and vegetables that primarily grow above the ground. Generally speaking, these are “good” carbohydrates as they provide the body with needed antioxidants, fiber, nutrients, and calories in a slow-release fashion.

Neocarbs are carbohydrates introduced within the last 10,000 years when modern agriculture first started. These include grains, legumes and flour products. Some neocarbs like legumes are grown above the ground and are nutritious. Others are grown under the ground. These include potato, yam and carrots, which are high in sugar and therefore not optimum for heath.

Ridiculous! “… have existed since the beginning of time.” No they didn’t! The most paleo of carbs are BY FAR simple sugars. Glucose, a very simple sugar. The earliest life forms (that had any sort of complexity) on earth were most certainly bacteria, and they use simple sugars all the time for cellular respiration as well as other processes.

True ‘neocarbs’ are anything at all having to do with plants, like cellulose. These wonderful complex carbohydrates that we are all so fond of eating for our health (a good thing) didn’t pop onto the scene for quite some time. And the newest of them all are fruits and vegetables! They are, in fact, a ridiculously recent invention.

Fruits and veggies come from flowering plants. Up until the Cretaceous period, there were no such thing as flowering plants. That means that early herbivore dinosaurs (like the Brontosaurus) didn’t eat fruit, they probably ate pine needles and other hard to digest foods (partially explaining the VERY large gut needed to ferment, digest, the food). That’s fiber, baby!

Fruits and vegetables actually constitute a relatively simple sugar in comparison.

The next complaint is about the idea that his neocarbs are all recent inventions. Many of them are new varieties, but we have to be careful. Wheat existed previously in the wild. We didn’t engineer it in the lab. We just selected for the right versions for long enough that the domesticated variety is now far easier for us to harvest and process.

Simple sugars are not good for you (except during a workout). But the reason is NOT because they are “newer” inventions in the history of life. Simple sugars are the ‘oldest’ of all sugars (still misleading). That isn’t the point. The point is that your body doesn’t do well when inundated with that much sugar.

We humans are a new ‘invention’, and as such we require a NEW kind of diet. Leave the sugar to paleo-creatures like bacteria and yeast.

Eric Cressey gets angry with bad research and its effect on the public’s perception of how they should diet and exercise.

They claim that the results show that low-fat, higher carb diets outperform low-carb, higher fat diets when both diets are low in fat and total calories. In other words, the implication is that they are calorically equal – when in fact, the higher carb group received 155 calories more per day (14.3% higher caloric intake). Over the course of the four month study, the low-carb group averaged five pounds more (28 vs. 23) in body weight reductions. At eight months, however, they had regained 18 pounds while the low-fat, higher-carb group had continued to lose weight. It must be the carbs, right? Wrong!

Go get ‘em!

Precision Nutrition has a new interview with Dr. John Berrardi. He goes over all kinds of interesting stuff like:  how he deals with athletes who need more calories; how he got Dave Tate to look so … well … not fat; and what he likes to parade around in early in the morning.