How to [Eat Pizza Daily] & Stay Lean

Achieving Adaptability

The person who can eat anything they like, and often does, without any problems, can consume the most amazing food combinations without any issues.

This individual must have amazing metabolic health and adaptability. Everyone has this ability (bar those rare few with dietary misfortunes) to eat everything and anything, yet remain healthier than ever.

Achieving Amazing Metabolic Health

Your metabolism is a wonderful thing, it is incredibly adaptable and will change according to what it is given. It’s simply the total sum of energy burnt by our bodies. Whether it be brushing your teeth, digesting food, lifting weights or keeping you warm, all of these things add up to be your metabolism.
So how do we make our metabolisms amazing, so we can eat pizza daily? The most important thing you can do is to not restrict food intake needlessly. If you are constantly eating less than your body needs, your metabolism, being the adaptable bugger it is, will adjust downwards, meaning you will burn less total energy. So make sure to eat well, and by well I mean do not needlessly restrict intake.

Another simple addition to the above can be to move. It doesn’t need to be a load, but please avoid being sedentary for long periods of time. The largest component of our metabolic burn is our Non Exercise Activity Thermogensis or NEAT. This is the energy used for all movement outside of formal exercise, so it is the walking to the shops, cleaning our rooms and getting down in the bed room. That stuff really adds up! Stop laughing…

To take it a step further you can further ramp your metabolic rate up by implementing a few dietary changes. Protein out of all the macronutrients takes the most energy to be digested. So by changing the macro composition of our diet we can increase our metabolic rate. Also make sure you’re eating in a balanced way, that means not restricting any foods unnecessarily. Our body loves carbs, they provide the best fuel for us to perform exercise. You should be eating them if you want to get the most from your training.

And finally there is exercise, most people think that this has a dramatic impact on our total energy burn, but as I said previously NEAT is the biggest factor. However, it is an important aspect of having amazing metabolic health. I am going to start with the exercise to avoid, and that is slow, utterly boring, steady state cardio. That stuff really aint going to to do much for your metabolism. Our bodies will adapt to it in a jiffy, one month you might be burning 300 calories doing an incline walk for 30 minutes at 5mph, the next month you will definitely be burning less.

You want to be purposely increasing the intensity, volume and or distance of your chosen exercise. This way your body is continually adapting upwards, and you’ll be getting stronger and fitter. However, this is where the catch 22 comes in, now you’re fitter and stronger, that means you’ll burn less energy doing day to day activities. BUT, you can now perform at higher intensities, recover faster and handle more work all of which leads to burning more calories. Don’t over think it, do exercise, make sure to get outside of your comfort zone. 

So now you have the knowledge of how to get amazing metabolic health, how do you go about achieving amazing adaptability?

Amazing Adaptability

Remember how I said our bodies are incredibly adaptable? This can work against us, I am going to show you how. If you eat an all vegetable diet, you will adapt to that, if you eat an all meat diet, you’ll adapt to that. If you eat an all raw food diet, you will get sick if you consume cooked food. If you want to consume wonderful worldly combinations of any food and remain healthy, you need to adapt to the modern food environment and be able to handle pretty much anything.

Do you really want to feel like crap when you eat out, or go to a friends for dinner because you’re not eating your special diet food? On the other hand, do you want to get stomach ache when you eat any sort of vegetable, due to only being used to eating processed food? No of course not. You want to be healthy, and have it all.The number of people who can eat whatever they want without becoming fat or ill doesn’t need to be just a ‘lucky’ few.

How do we get to that point? It really is simple; be sure to eat a diet that is varied, that means it includes processed foods, high fibre foods, calorie dense foods, low GI carbs, high GI carbs, you get the picture.

Now You are an Adaptable Metabolic Animal

If you follow the above, you will have the digestive and metabolic machinery to annihilate anything. You want to do your best to feed yourself well, be active and eat a varied diet that consists of mainly wholesome nutritious foods but with the occasional meal out, bowl of ice cream and take away pizza.

Go eat some great food, get out of breath, enjoy life and #ReviveStronger

Further Reading:

• Body Fat set point – fact or fiction?
• 2 Rules to a getting a 6 pack
• Why we suck in the short term

Your Daily Coffee Is Killing You!

Coffee is a Killer

Truth or Fiction?

OK so I very much doubt your coffee is killing you, but some people are this extreme is their views. They seem to think that coffee is the devil because it contains caffeine, which is a drug and should be avoided. Now I love coffee, consume it daily and also get caffeine from other sources from energy drinks to chocolate. I am going to look at what science says to make my opinion on whether caffeine is good or bad, because I know my coffee isn’t killing people, that we can be sure of. I will note that a toxic dose of caffeine is between 20-40mg/kg bodyweight, so I at 75kg would need to consume 1500-3000mg of caffeine, which would be 10-20 average coffees.

What is Caffeine?

Taken straight from Examine.com ‘Caffeine is a stimulatory anti-sleep compound extracted from coffee beans’. It is most commonly consumed in the form of tea and coffee, and is the worlds most popular drug. It has been heavily researched and is deemed safe, but like anything else this is assuming moderation.

Coffee in general has between 40-180mg per 150ml and tea 24ml-50mg per 150ml. Once consumed it can have an immediate effect, however peak values in the blood take 15-120 minutes and most commonly seen is 30 – 45 minutes. The impact of caffeine can last quite a while, as its half-life can be up to 4.5 hours but has been seen to be as low as 2.5 hours.

What are the Benefits?

Funny enough even the idea of caffeine intake can improve our mood, which suggests it has a potential placebo effect. I know personally if I smell a fresh coffee I automatically feel more awake, if only they could produce a decaf coffee that tastes like the real deal.

It has been shown that caffeine can help to reduce the risk of Parkinson’s, and can help in therapy against it. Furthermore, caffeine has shown to increase metabolic rate and fat loss, however be warned habitual intake can make us desensitised to this.

Caffeine is widely known as an ergogenic aid, which means it has sports performance benefits. It appears muscle cells have an increased power output, also it has been seen to improve endurance performance by decreasing fatigue.

One study looked at caffeine and it’s impact on the number of calories we burn and fat mobilisation. It saw that a daily intake of say 6 strong cups of coffee led to an extra 100kcal expenditure. Wahey, that’s pretty nice right?! Well not only that but caffeine has also been shown to increase fat mobilisation and oxidation.

What are the Downsides?

So apparently coffee should be avoided because of the insulin response it creates, and insulin is the fat storing devil right? Well no, it may have been seen to impair glucose tolerance in the short term, but in the long term, which is what matters, it has actually been found to lower people’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Suggesting coffee does not raise insulin for long periods of time or make us insulin insensitive.

You may have heard that we can get addicted to caffeine, currently however there is insufficient evidence to suggest you can get addicted to caffeine, yet this may change as it does interact with our reward systems such as acute dopamine release, but this gets blunted with chronic use.

Not really a downside, but more something that I personally get frustrated by is getting caffeine tolerant. To date the mechanism by which we become tolerant to caffeine is unknown, but with chronic use we do begin to lose some of the effects of caffeine. It does seem possible to actually consume caffeine routinely without developing a tolerance, only anecdotally but going for 3-5 days should be enough time so not to become tolerant.

Conclusions

So as you can see coffee and principally caffeine has been investigated thoroughly, but some things are still a little inconclusive, but that’s to be expected as science is tentative and ever evolving.

In the short term we see some benefits to sports performance and mood, but also decreased glucose tolerance and a slight rise in blood pressure. Yet long term studies show that overall coffee is beneficial, decreasing the risk of diabetes, parkinsons and increasing calorie burn and fat mobilisation. If we take this together we can see that overall coffee is only going to help in fat loss, our results, and health, because of the short term benefits and the fact over time the negatives are not seen.

However, like everything coffee and caffeine should be consumed in moderation, as we can become reliant on it and potentially addicted. I would also note that the benefits of coffee in particular are only apparent if the person isn’t adding a load of sugar, cream or even god forbid butter to their coffee. So continue to drink coffee, but don’t have too much if you still want to experience a kick!

Part 3: Moving back to maintenance – ‘Reverse Dieting’

The ‘reverse’ diet – what, why, how?

So far in this series we have learnt about what our metabolism is and how it adapts to what we ‘feed’ it, we have learnt the importance of slow progressive dieting and how to incorporate ‘refeeds’ to help blunt the unwanted side effects of dieting. So we have the tools to best get down to our desired body fat %, now it is time to move out of the deficit, allowing our body again to reach homeostasis. However, this is the point at which can make or break your entire diet, this is where if you are not careful you can put back on all the fat if not more than you started with. Avoid the yoyo diet, and please continue to read about the ‘reverse’ diet.

The reverse diet is just as it sounds, when we diet changes are slow and progressive, the reverse diet is much the same, apart from the fact we slowly increase not decrease our calorie intake.

Essentially the aim is to bring our metabolism back up to what it should be, the easiest way to do that is to just eat more. However, if we just scoff a load more food you’ll put on a load of fat in a hurry, especially because our body wants to get back to its old self. To avoid this you have to increase your calorie intake slowly, allowing your metabolism to adjust upwards gradually. That is if you want to avoid as much fat gain as possible, there are cases in which a faster approach may be more suitable, but I am principally talking about people who have followed a successful and healthy diet.

Everyones metabolism is a little different, some are very responsive and others less so. Responsive metabolisms do very well off an increase in calories, and you can give them quite sizeable and frequent increases. However, others are not, and therefore you must take a slower approach.

I have a few approaches I like to put in place for my clients, but one that seems to work quite well is to increase carb and fat intake by 10-20% initially, getting them to maintenance. At this point you may want to lower protein in place for more carbs, because carbohydrates are the real ignitors for our metabolism and are protein sparring, plus you’ll be coming out of a deficit so the need for high protein intakes drops.

From this initial increase you’ll want to take visual and body weight measurements to then pick how next to act. Each week from here I would increase fat and or carbs by 5-10% depending on how they looked and how their weight responded. I have seen people drop weight and look better week to week while reverse dieting, but I have also seen others need very slow increases. Again like anything it is very much dependent on the individual. Also while doing the above you would be making sure to try and reduce the amount of cardio taking place. You would keep progressively doing this until the person was eating back up to a reasonable number of calories.

The above steps could be continued for a long time, especially if the person wanted to transition into a muscle building phase. I also want to note that some people actually find the reverse diet harder than the diet itself. This is because the changes are quite small, making it almost feel like you are still dieting. This can be very tough, especially when you do not have a particular goal in mind. I’d happily allow some people to speed up the reverse diet if they really couldn’t hack it. I personally feel that very small adjustments are silly, that is the best way I can say it. No one wants to continually feel like they are dieting, so an by increasing macronutrients by less than 10g really seems quite, well silly.

So now you have learnt how to get really lean in a healthy manner and then how to build yourself back up out of the deficit. Key is to remember everything our body does is to try and remain in homeostasis, our bodies don’t want to get really lean. So to get their we need to take it slow, and then once their we slowly need to build up our metabolism. Our metabolic rate doesn’t get damaged or break, we don’t enter some weird starve mode in which we can no longer burn fat. Our metabolisms are wonderful things that adjust to what we give them, treat them with respect and you can manipulate it to get the results you want in a healthy and sustainable manner!

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Part 2: Moving back to maintenance

Refeeds, Cheat Meals & More…

So in PART ONE we learnt about how our metabolism is adaptive to what we give it. It is there to keep us alive and when we enter severe calorie deficits it acts in a way to reduce our energy expenditure. Here I am going to introduce the idea of refeeds, in which an individual comes out of their deficit for a short period of time to try and negate the metabolism adapting. 

So what exactly is a refeed? Well as I said it is a short term break from being in a calorie deficit. Their prime purpose is to maintain psychological and metabolic health. Their frequency and length depend person to person, some people may take a week off, others may just have them once a week. They have also been called cheat meals, but IMO this term is different. A cheat meal to me is a meal that is not accounted for, you break your diet completely and at most it acts as a psychological break but can set you back. A refeed is planned, it has a proper purpose and most of all you account for it.

Hang on? If I am losing fat then why bother ever implementing a refeed? Well you know how it gets harder and harder to lose fat as you diet, it’s because you metabolism is getting slower. So it makes good sense to try and maintain as high a metabolism as possible, thus we take have refeeds. They help reduce the speed at which you move away from you original metabolic rate.

Right so now we know what a refeed is and its purpose, when and how do we implement them? Between coaches there is quite a varied approach. Personally I implement them when I see a stall in progress, or the person is showing some signs of metabolic slow down. Up until that point I am happy for them to continue as they are, the number and length is then very individual. This is because our metabolisms all differ.

OK so what exactly do we do on our refeed day? Well we must bring overall calories to maintenance or slightly above to get the result we want. This is your CURRENT maintenance, not your old one, as we know our bodies are burning less energy now. I personally like to bring up carbs quite a bit, as these have the most impact on our metabolism. In doing so I also reduce fat and protein a little, because carbs and not being in a deficit is protein sparring, and fat is more easily stored as fat, making sense to reduce them a little. This also gives more room to increase carbs, which as noted raise our metabolisms the most. Reject carb phobia, carbs are your metabolic friend.

When is best to take them is really up to you, some people like to take them when they have their rest day, so they can enjoy more food and be social. Others with more performance oriented goals like to take them prior to their most intense training day. For me I take it the day before I perform deadlifts and do High Intensity Interval Training.

There we have it, you know what a refeed is, how it might be implemented and why it is important. One final note is that because you have eaten more food and likely more carbohydrates your scale weight the next day or so will increase. This is completely expected, and it should level out over the course of a few days, and you’ll continue to hit new lows if implemented correctly!

Refeed Essentials:
1) Use them when you notice signs of metabolic slow down.
2) Calories must be at or above your CURRENT maintenance intake.
3) Avoid pigging out, try and keep some structure to the refeed.

Next week I will continue in our moving back to maintenance series to talk about reverse dieting. If you liked this or found it helpful please share it on the social media!

#REVIVESTRONGER

Part 1: Moving Back to Maintenance

‘Metabolic Damage’ sounds scary right?

As we diet down something unavoidable happens, our human biology changes. Our metabolism adapts, it has to and it is something people often forget. This is because our bodies are smart, they want to protect against ‘starvation’, so we experience changes to bring our metabolism lower.

You might want to achieve low body fat levels but your body doesn’t care for vanity, it strives to survive and will do it’s best to prevent a loss in weight. You will experience more hunger, you will get lazy and have lower energy and reduce your energy expenditure, each will be more intense the larger your calorie deficit. The changes are expected, and it is understanding these that’s most important.

So lets take an example, me. I started my fat loss journey on over 3500 calories, my metabolism was high, I had loads of energy and my hormones were functioning well. The weight dropped off, but after a few weeks the weight loss stalled, my metabolism had adapted down. This meant the calorie intake I once lost fat on was now enough to maintain my weight, bummer. So I either needed to drop my calorie intake further or increase my expenditure, that’s if I wanted to drop more fat. So this process continued, once consuming over 3500 calories with no cardio and dropping fat, to now over 30 weeks later on under 2500 calories and doing 4 cardio sessions a week. My metabolism adapted, because my body doesn’t want me to lose any more weight.

In short; you provide your body less energy, it will burn less energy. It’s like when your computer gets to low battery and enters energy saver mode, we now function as a sub-optimal version of our former selves.

So now we understand that our bodies try their best to stop us losing fat, this is an inevitable safety mechanism we cannot avoid. We must just be aware of it, and by not rushing things we can slow it’s adaption. In part two we will learn about ‘refeeds’ or ‘cheat meals’, these little beauties can help reverse metabolic adaption, for a short while anyway.