How you stuff your face

Who wants to be a fattie? Ok ok, I know most of you want to eat whatever you want, and that has taken a priority over being skinny. Sucks to be you. When you get your priorities in order and realize that being a fattie is for idiots and bacon, I've got a book for you to read: Advanced Sports Nutrition by Dan Benardot. Buy the book right now.

When you get the book, read it (stay focussed, re-read paragraphs as necessary). A week later, read it again armed with 3 colors of highlighters and post-it note tabs. Two weeks later, read it a third time, focussing on the high points you noted the second time you read it. When will you find the time to read it 3 times you ask? Try skipping a few meals.

I wish he had an entire chapter on ridding the world of fatties, but since he calls this "Advanced" I suppose you should go looking for that in a "basic" sports nutrition book. Instead you get a wealth of information on dietary intake for endurance and various metabolic pathways.

Dan has two charts in this book which help visualize two simple ideas that I had never seen so clearly depicted before:

Figure 12.2: Sharp Deviations in energy balance during the course of a day can affect body composition **Imagine how your caloric intake compares against your calories burned on an intra-day basis. Instead of only looking at the net result of the day (which would be zero if you are neither gaining nor losing mass), he depicts a graph for the full day.

Figure 12.3: An individuals eating pattern has the potential to greatly affect body composition**
This graph shows three different possibilities for intra-day calorie balance. All three depict net results of zero (again, burning as much as you consume). I personally keep grazing through the day and never eat more than 400 calories at a time, so don't have any giant peaks into the danger zones. Going into the upper danger zones means you spend most of the day with too many big meals

Note I said that both graphs show net caloric balances of zero in all cases. This means the day ends at zero in every situation. Now, if you are fat, this may be too complex to understand, but if you are a skinny person trapped in a fat body, you might have enough intelligence to see where I am going with this.

Eating pattern 2 in figure 12.3 is what most of you fatties do on a daily basis (well, on the rare days that you don't gain weight... see below). You meals are too big for your bodies ability to use the calories right away. Since your body cannot really store carbs, it converts all that pasta to fat to be used later. The problem is, you never end the day on a negative caloric intake, so that level of fat is always increasing or staying the same.

Eating pattern 3 in figure 12.3 is what you do on the days you think you are going to end up on a negative caloric intake.... You stay negative all day, breaking down muscles and fat, and then eat a huge meal at night that all gets stored as fat. Thus effectively having converted muscle to fat for the day

Here is what your graph looked like yesterday:
While you might have a base metabolic rate of 1500 calories a day, burned 500 calories in your morning run, and burned 2ooo calories when you rode your bike 100 miles, you ate so many candy bars that you had a net excess of 1500 calories for the day. This means you gained half a pound of stored fat. You fat fuck. Aren't you even embarrassed?

Stick with something that looks like eating pattern #1 in Figure 12.3, but ending the day at negative 500. You'll lose a lot of fat, and only a little muscle. Cycle a few times and you'll be skinny in no time.


[**From page 215 of Advanced Sports Nutrition by Dan Benardot, PhD, RD, FACSM]