The most common mistake in meal planning
quick version:
All fitness goals start and end in the kitchen. The most common complaints from a typical diet are:
not losing enough fat
gaining back lost weight right after
not building enough muscle
These are all caused by failure in the kitchen.
Many bad diets focus on cutting carbs and many bad muscle builds focus on increasing protein. In both of these situations, you are not supplying your body with its preferred source of energy but are rather training your body to burn protein for fuel. As a result,
too much weight loss is muscle and not only fat.
when carbs are reintroduced, the body isn’t ready to use it and converts it to fat instead.
muscles don’t grow like they could.
The answer is calories. If you want to lose weight, cut total calories, not just carbs, and maintain the appropriate proportions of ~65% carbs, ~15% protein, ~20% fat. These are the optimal proportions for good nutrition to keep you feeling healthy strong. If you want to build muscle, increase total calories, not just protein - proteins are the bricks but you can’t build with them if you don’t have the energy. Optimal growth requires optimal nutrition, not one that is unbalanced.
Additional information:
The body’s primary function is to maintain homeostasis - a state of biochemical balance. This is generally accomplished using negative feedback loops wherein any change to that homeostasis causes an opposing change to try and balance it. In other words, when you’re too hot, your body cools you down. When you have too much salt, your body excretes it. Understanding this is important for creating a diet that actually works and provides healthy nutrition for your body.
Example 1 - Losing weight:
In the first example, cutting carbs to lose weight, two key feedback loops are engaged (there are more, but two that we care about for this discussion). In the first loop, less carbs for energy causes your body to compensate by burning more protein and fat for energy. So yes, when you cut carbs, you do lose weight, but since fat (7 Cal/g) has so much more energy per gram than protein (4 Cal/g), you end up losing more muscle than you do fat.
In the second loop, when you cut carbs, your body compensates by building less carb-digesting enzymes (you no longer need as many). This means that your body is not ready to properly digest carbs when you end your diet. This is why you gain weight back so quickly: you eat the carbs but, without the enzymes to digest them, your body considers the new carbs excessive and excess carbs are stored as fat. The net result of your diet now is that you lost some weight, but it was almost muscle since your fat was replenished shortly after.
So, if you want to lose weight, cut total Calories and not just carbs but maintain the healthy macro proportions required for optimal nutrition.
Example 2 - Building muscle:
In the second example, eating too much protein to try and build muscle causes your body to compensate by increasing the amount of protein-digesting enzymes. Yes, it also increases the amount of protein available to build muscle but, without extra energy sources, you can’t build much. Your body does build some muscle this way but it only does so by burning the vast majority of protein that you ingest for fuel.
One pound of muscle only contains about 100 grams of protein but it requires approximately 2800 Calories to build. That equates to burning 700 g (1.54 lbs) of pure protein or 3 lbs of meat (including fat) just to build one additional pound of muscle. So if your normal daily diet is ~2200 Calories, you would require over 60 lbs of meat per month just to maintain your weight, and an additional 3 lbs of meat for every pound of muscle you’re hoping to build. That’s a lot of food and is really hard on the ol’ wallet.
So, if you want to build muscle, add the appropriate amount of fat and carbs to your meals in the same proportions discussed above. You’ll be amazed how much faster you grow once you fuel yourself for building.