Eating Like An Asshole

I want to point out the title of this post includes the word “like” after “eating” and before “an asshole”. Most people who read this site, especially those who have been training for a few years, are shifting into cleaner diets. A paleo approach is an effective way to clean up a diet and set up a long-term way of eating. It typically improves the quality of food and has a standard drop in total carbohydrates with higher amounts of protein and fat. This style of eating can be augmented by proper carbohydrate timing — see Johnny Pain at Strength Villain for specifics on this. However, paleo can often not provide enough calories for hard training sessions, and this is the time that you’ll eat like an asshole.

Eating like an asshole is kind of like it sounds; eat in a way that would really piss off the diet groupies. It’s a high caloric meal that includes an amazingly higher carbohydrate amount. Guys who are watching their weight, waist circumference, or body fat know that when they eat a dirtier meal their weight and body fat will jump up a bit (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you have no business following the advice in this post). However, this dirtier meal provides the calories and anabolic environment to be conducive to a hard training session.

My friend Mike recently had to cut weight (again) to meet the PFT standards for his branch of military service. Unfortunately he has a short, thick torso and this hurts him in the waist circumference. He’s on a Texas Method style program, so the night before his intensity day he would eat like an asshole to prepare his body for the heavy lifting the next day. He’d eat quesadillas, bacon cheeseburgers, french fries, and an ice cream shake on Friday night (this is Mike’s heaven). On Saturday morning when he’d have jonathons (pancakes), English muffins, and hash browns. There are two things going on here: the higher calorie and carbohydrate amounts (mike normally eats 2.5 lbs of meat a day, so it’s not a significant increase in protein). The calories put his body in a surplus, a state of anabolism. The carbs jack up his insulin — an anabolic hormone — more so than lower amounts of carbs, protein, and calories would and create an optimal environment for that training session.

You don’t have to go over the top like Mike; he just likes to eat. Remember that it’s always relative to what your normal “during the week” diet is. If you only eat fruit and veggies for carbs, then a hamburger will most likely include more carbs than you are accustomed to. A chicken fried steak or meat and potatoes meal will have a relative higher calorie and carb count than anything paleo related. Breakfast could have the addition of toast, hash browns, and orange juice. Throw in some pancakes or a waffle, and you’ll be thoroughly prepared. As always, keep it relative to what you normally do. If you eat the same amount as Mike and shit yourself during the workout, it’s not my fault. It’s also not my fault if you get fat — your life is in your hands, dude.

Another example is AC. He works as a bouncer on weekends and usually works the night before his intensity day. This couldn’t less optimal, so what I recommend to him is a) eat a huge, dirty meal before work, b) bring a gallon of water with him to work (it’s absurdly hot and humid in south Georgia and he gets dehydrated from sweating his ass off in the bar), c) sleep for as long as he can after his shift (hopefully 9 hours), d) eat a big, dirty meal an hour or two before training, and e) drink some coffee before the session. Given his circumstances, this is will help him have an optimal training session. Of course there are other miscellaneous factors like sleep, hydration, diet, and mobility work during the week, but we’re focusing on what he can do in those last 18 hours before training to prep for that session as best as he can. In Mike’s case, give the fact that he has to cut as much weight and body fat as possible, it’s also the most optimal thing he can do within the first 18 hours of training.

The reason you’d want your breakfast an hour or two before the session is because the quickest that blood glucose levels will rise after eating will be about 45 minutes. This is the length of time that orange juice will effect glucose levels in the blood and is the standard with which other things are compared because it’s so quick. As a side note, FLEX magazine fucking thinks that orange juice is a slow digesting carb — what kind of bullshit is that? In any case, the fastest that glucose levels — and thus insulin — will be elevated is about 45 to 90 minutes, so training 60 to 120 minutes after eating is optimal. Of course you can ingest juice or other carbs like waxy maize during the workout to get ahead on your post workout nutrition. As for the coffee, it clearly is a dose of caffeine that will act as an important lifting stimulant. If you’re only doing conditioning, you wouldn’t have coffee since it increases heart rate…but if you were only doing conditioning you wouldn’t be doing all this eating because you’d be starving yourself to look like this (note to self: Googling “emo skinny guy” will elevate HR, blood pressure, and cortisol levels).

Brent and I ate like this before every one of our training sessions last week despite the fact that we both usually eat cleaner. Brent in particular relies on timing and types of food to help his training sessions because he doesn’t fucking sleep like a normal human (he previously didn’t hydrate well, but I think I mocked him enough last week to change that). If you have a particularly shitty week with lots of obligatory physical activity or lack of sleep, then eating like this and using caffeine (cocaine?) will help you get the most out of your training session. Oh, and doing “intermittent fasting” will be fucking useless if you’re actually trying to train and grow muscle. I can’t think of a shittier way to prepare for hard training sessions than not eating any calories. For the record, I think IF isn’t an optimal way to drop body fat either. And before anyone posts to defend it, I don’t really care: it isn’t a way of eating that is going to be optimal for long term health and is just fucking with hormone levels.

The more advanced a lifter is, the more muscle mass he has, and the less body fat he is will require him to pay attention to these ancillary concepts. Before all of you goons start shooting from the hip and say, “Justin said I can eat candy and soda on Friday nights and stay up past eight,”…settle the fuck down. You can accomplish this dirty eating with cleaner types of food, and you’ll need to if you’re aiming to drop body fat. Johnny Pain has mentioned using oats in the protein shake before bed, and technically you could accomplish the same thing with fruit or sweet potatoes/yams (stop calling sweet potatoes yams; yams are tropically grown). The concept of increasing calories and carbs is the same, yet it’s just not as fun. I do want to point out that there’s something to be said for some dirtier meals, particularly in cholesterol intake. In the 70’s Big Chat, Pendlay talked about the utility in cholesterol rich foods for people training really hard (e.g. his lifters). Cholesterol is necessary for healing tissues (that would be naturally damaged via training in this case) and hormone production, so making sure to get it will help the hormonal system smoothly. How you eat like an asshole is up to you, but now you have a conceptual understanding of how it will improve a heavy training session.

—————–
Here’s another vid from the Monterey vacation. This has no lifting and appears to be long, but I promise you won’t be disappointed.


Also: Gabe gets serious