Lou Schuler New Rules of Lifting

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.What s not to like?264 THE NEW RULES OF LI FTI NGFatI think it s a good idea to get at least 30 percent of your total calories from dietary fat.(I ll discuss the best types of fat in the next chapter.) That amount supports yourtestosterone production and leaves you feeling fuller longer a satiating effect itshares with protein.One Diet to Rule Them AllIf I had to choose one popular diet, mine or anyone else s, as a default plan, somethingthat would help most guys reach their goals, I d pick The Zone, with its classic 40/30/30configuration 40 percent of calories from carbohydrates, 30 percent from protein, and 30percent from fat.In a recent study (it came out as I was writing this chapter), researchers at Tufts NewEngland Medical Center put overweight and obese subjects on one of four popular dietsand monitored them for a year.The results show that all four diets Ornish (super-low-fat),Atkins (super-low-carb), Zone (balanced intakes of fat, protein, and carbs), and WeightWatchers (calorie counting, with no major bias toward or against any type of food) workwhen people stick to them.About 25 percent of the people in each group stuck to their as-signed diet to the letter for the entire year.Average weight loss for each diet, followed by the percentage of participants whowere still following the diet for a year (although not necessarily following it to the letter):Atkins: 4.6 pounds, 53 percent adherenceOrnish: 7.25 pounds, 50 percent adherenceWeight Watchers: 6.6 pounds, 65 percent adherenceZone: 7 pounds, 65 percent adherenceThe two most extreme diets Atkins and Ornish had the lowest adherence.The twomost balanced or flexible Zone and Weight Watchers had the highest.And the peopleon Zone had slightly better weight loss than the people on Weight Watchers, so if there s awinner here, it s the Zone diet.And, of course, it s the plan that most closely resembles what I advocate anyway: adiet that s more or less balanced in the percentage of calories from protein, fat, and car-bohydrates.WEI GHT CONTROL MADE EASY 265CarbohydratesFor most purposes, I also like to recommend roughly equal amounts of protein andcarbohydrates in your diet, simply because it s easy to remember and prevents youfrom overloading on one or the other.But if you have specific goals to gain or loseweight, I suggest these modifications:Adding weight: Go for a higher percentage of calories from carbohydrates, es-pecially starchy carbs like whole-grain breads, potatoes, brown rice, and pasta.Shedding weight: Cut carbs, starting with the starchy ones.(I ve also heardthem called dry carbs. ) You only need a few hundred calories a day from carbo-hydrates to keep your body fueled and smoothly functioning; any more than youneed and you risk undermining your goal of fat loss.PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHERHere s a very simple way to estimate the best diet plan for you.If you did the mathearlier in this chapter, you have a rough idea of how many calories it takes to main-tain your current weight.So let s return to Joe Workingstiff as our example.He weighs 200 pounds, andwe ve calculated his daily maintenance diet at 3,000 calories.He s decided to eat a gram of protein for every pound of his current body weight.Since each gram of protein has 4 calories, that s 800 calories from protein, leavinghim with 2,200 to round out his diet.If he simply chooses to split the difference, and eat equal amounts of fat andcarbs, he needs 1,100 calories of each macronutrient.A gram of fat has 9 calories, sohe ll need 122 grams of fat per day.A gram of carbohydrate has 4 calories, so he llneed 275 grams to reach 1,200 calories.Some people like to think of their diet in percentages.If Joe is among them, itbreaks down like this (with numbers rounded off to keep it simple):Protein: 26 percent (800 calories/200 grams)Fat: 37 percent (1,100 calories/122 grams)Carbohydrates: 37 percent (1,100 calories/275 grams)But let s say Joe isn t comfortable with all that fat in his diet and wants to cut backto a bare-minimum 30 percent of calories.That s an even 900 calories from fat, which266 THE NEW RULES OF LI FTI NGgives him an easy-to-remember target of 100 fat grams a day.Now his percentageslook like this:Protein: 26 percent (800 calories/200 grams)Fat: 30 percent (900 calories/100 grams)Carbohydrates: 44 percent (1,300 calories/325 grams)A relatively painless way to put together a diet based on numbers like this isthrough an online database.I like fitday.com, and there are probably others like it.You ll find that simply tracking your daily calories for a few weeks, and forcing your-self to tweak your meal plans to bring them in line with your calorie goals, can set youup for months of low-maintenance weight control.22Clean EatingThe beautiful thing about writing for an audience is that, at some point, you real-ize you re learning more from them than they are from you.I hit that tipping pointTseveral years ago when I began reading posts on my own message boards about theconcept of clean eating.Clean eating is perhaps the simplest, most elegant way to describe a dietary con-cept with which virtually every nutrition expert in the world would struggle to findfault: Eat the best stuff available most of the time, and you probably won t have toworry about counting calories.In fact, you probably won t have to worry about a lotof things.Your risk of heart disease should decline, along with your chances of gettingdiabetes and some types of cancer and the possibility that you ll become impotent.Your waistline should shrink, and your quality of sleep should improve.Without having a simple or elegant term for it, I described the idea in The Men sHealth Belly-Off Program when I wrote this:[Y]ou should only eat food that you can picture in its natural, pre-processedstate.When you see a hunk of beef, you can visualize a cow.When you see a267268 THE NEW RULES OF LI FTI NGsalad, you can visualize lettuce growing out of the ground.So what doyou contemplate when you look at a Twinkie or a bottle of Snapple? Can youconceive of herds of wild Snapple stampeding through an Arizona canyon? ATwinkie vine growing up the canyon wall?That s my take on clean eating.If you can t visualize it roaming, growing, or be-ing extracted from something that s roaming or growing, you probably shouldn t eatit.A few good foods take some mental gymnastics to picture: Whole grains, for ex-ample, require a visual leap from the hunk of bread or pasta in front of you to thegrains that were milled to produce it, to the plants growing in a farmer s field.You can make a game out of it: Three Degrees of Clean Eating.If you need morethan three visual images to get to the food in its natural state, then it s probably notworth eating [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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