dee pee e-mails:

Hey Justin I saw the video you put up with Mike and his shakes. My training has taken a dip the past 5 months and most of the inconsitency of not training was due to failure to eat right. I made my best gains last year when I did SS + drank a lot of milk. The only problem is that milk gets me very sleepy and groggy. My brain gets all cloudy, I can barely function on anything requiring any sort of mental or physical effort, it’s almost like I feel drugged. Also, I get VERY bloated. I go from size 34 to size 38. And I also stay bloated, it doesn’t really go away unless I don’t consume anything for at least 5 hours or so. I was drinking Homo Milk by the way, and I was also taking lactaid before drinking the milk but it didn’t do anything.

Is there anything I can do to prevent tiredness from milk? If there’s nothing you can think of, do you have any suggestions as to what I can put in the shakes that Mike makes to make up for the macros lost by using water instead of milk?

Thanks.

This e-mail touches on an interesting subject while highlighting a misunderstood concept regarding training and diet. Milk is a delightful beverage with impressive nutrition. A cup of whole milk will be about 150 calories and 8 grams of protein — this makes for easy additional calories when needed. Milk inherently provides proper nutrition for growing mammals before they are able to digest regular food. Aside from the macronutrients, milk contains the sugar lactose which is broken down by the enzyme called lactase. Many people complain about being lactose intolerant (the inability to digest and metabolize lactose), yet they are merely not allowing their bodies to adapt to abrupt changes in milk and lactose ingestion.

Certain ethnic groups have more of an intolerance than others, but it may still be possible to use a patient method of increasing intake over time — AKA not being a dumb ass. Most white people of European descent will handle milk fine while ethnic groups like Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians can experience some trouble. In any case, lactose intolerance doesn’t exist just because smelly farts occur after drinking milk. If you enjoy milk or want to use it to help your training, then simply have small amounts (as little as two ounces) and see how your body reacts. If it fucks your world, then you may have a problem. Start once a day if you’re terrified, and then increase the frequency (perhaps two times a day, then three, four, etc.) and then slowly increase the amount. It shouldn’t be a shock that there isn’t lactase readily available if there chronically hasn’t been any lactose to break down; allow time for this to occur if you haven’t had milk in awhile. The same thing occurs with Paleo folk; they eat a cupcake and complain about congestion like it’s the black death. As IronGarm says: you aren’t very elite if you’re taken out by a happy meal.

But wait — do you even need milk? Are you skinny and think you’re a hard gainer? Are you a pain in the ass about gaining weight? Then yes, you’ll benefit from including milk in your diet when on a good strength program since it will add necessary calories that you are (for some ungodly reason) not able to eat. But are you a big guy? Fat? Really fat? If so, obviously you shouldn’t drink milk since it’s designed to put on weight. It’s the same with puppy food; it has more calories to help them grow. If you or the dog is fat, they don’t need food sources that are biologically designed to induce growth. Duh.

What if you have gained some size, have some decent structure, but aren’t really defined? The same concept applies to someone who wants to lose body fat; a high caloric growth substance is not going to help decrease body fat. Unless you look Herculean, milk really isn’t an ideal choice and you can get leaner with better calorie choices.

Large quantities of milk act as a filler for people who don’t eat properly, and it particularly helps skinny kids get more calories when they’re incapable of scheduling food intake throughout the day. The concept of drinking a gallon of milk a day, or GOMAD, is familiar to people who don’t even train. Ultimately, telling someone to do this is just putting a band-aid on the “eating like a dipshit” problem that will still need to be addressed. Yet many people will follow GOMAD like a religion, including my new pen pal “dee pee” above.

Jacob texted this to me earlier this year

The first question I have for dee pee is what his ethnicity is. If he’s one of the intolerant ethnic groups, his milk relationship may not work out. He may even have some sort of allergy to milk. Without knowing any of this, I’d have to assume that by “drinking a lot of milk” he didn’t set his body up to handle this amount (see progression example above). I’d also assume that he is relying on milk for a major source of calories. In Mike’s shake video, he has five shakes a day with milk, yet that amounts to merely 40 ounces of milk total added to his regular food intake (that includes two pounds of pork and beef). A gallon is 128 ounces — over three times the amount Mike is actually drinking. If you’re not absurdly skinny and not complaining about not being able to get bigger, then you need to learn how to eat properly instead of using milk as the solution.

In dee pee’s case, he could try “lactose-free milk” (which is a fucking mummer’s farce since lactase is added — you can’t remove lactose from milk. That’s like removing fructose from fruit. Or teeth from your mouth by my fist when you drink soy or almond milk), but it sounds like he should just reduce the milk and tighten up his diet instead of continuing to do something that makes him feel like shit. As a general rule, if you ingest something and it makes you feel like shit, you shouldn’t continue ingesting that thing (my dog learns this pretty well and there’s no reason you can’t either).

It’s possible to improve the body’s ability to handle milk, yet you should reconsider whether milk should be what your diet revolves around. If you don’t need it, then save it for special occasions (like what comes up when you Google “sexy milk” with safe search off).