Why Eat Lots
Part 3 – Special Pops Recap

Edit: I do not know why the comments were turned off, but you can comment now.

The material I have been covering in the “Why Eat Lots” posts has been covered multiple times on this website as well as by Rip in his Q&A on the Starting Strength website. Nevertheless, let’s go through it again.
Note: Advice on strength training typically assumes a regular, healthy individual. However, individuals are individuals. There may be disorders, diseases, allergies, quirks, etc. that make you unique. Just use some common sense.

Women
Typically girls won’t be eating the same type of food as Skinny Guy. This should be intuitive. A girl probably won’t be drinking a gallon of milk a day and eating four hearty meals (although I have heard of girls drinking that much milk, but we’ll call that an outlier). In general, a woman who is new to training will need to eat much more protein than she was when she was not training. The breakdown of muscle requires protein to repair it, and an excess is needed in order for the existing muscle to grow.

How much excess calories a female will eat will usually depend on her body frame, how skinny she is, how she is training, etc. Skinny girls are free to eat whatever, but will usually have to be encouraged to eat more in order to recover properly. If the weight can’t be lifted in the next workout, then she more than likely didn’t eat enough. A girl in this situation might need to record a day or two of her food intake to get an idea of what she is actually eating. She may also need someone else — a coach, friend, but not a spouse — to remind her what the goal is so that she commits to eating for recovery. A skinny girl is free to drink any amount of milk.

If a girl is of a medium frame, or in other words is not in a position where she needs to gain weight, but needs her composition to change over to muscle, then she should probably keep her carbohydrate intake low while increasing her protein intake. If lifting is a new method of training, her metabolism and body composition will change as a result — ASSUMING a proper program is adhered to and adequate protein is eaten. A medium girl may need to limit milk intake.


If a girl is of a large frame and/or is in a position where she needs to lose body fat, then she will keep the carbohydrate intake low, plenty of protein to recover and aid the increasing metabolism, and she should eliminate milk from her diet. Milk is something that makes baby mammals grow, and if she is trying to drop body fat, then she does not need any help growing. She will probably benefit from some conditioning sessions throughout the week. Short, intense, sprint-like endeavors can be done after she lifts, especially if she is untrained. An untrained woman will not have any trouble recovering from an additional conditioning work load until 6 weeks in at the earliest. Assuming she is untrained, rowing sprints will be one of the best things to use until her strength has increased to a point where she can use some other methods like running, prowling, barbell complexes, etc.

The biggest problem most females will have is with trusting a barbell training program. Skinny girls have been told their whole lives that being skinny is not only okay, but it is preferable. They also think they are going to get “bulky” — a ridiculous assumption since a female has one tenth the testosterone as a guy. The percentage of females that can actually build muscle easily have already done so to some extent, so the skinny girl doesn’t have anything to worry about.

A woman’s body obviously functions different hormonally, so it makes sense that their dietary requirements are going to differ from a male doing the same program. However, the same rules still apply: stronger is better, and muscle is harder to gain than fat is to lose.

Fat Guys
I really shouldn’t have to address this again, but a fat guy needs to stop eating a whole bunch of carbs. He probably should eliminate milk from his diet until it becomes necessary for recovery. In other words, a paleo-type approach with plenty of protein is on the agenda. If the guy is pretty damn fat, the barbell training alone will change his body composition over time. In such a case, some conditioning may be done, but ONLY if it does NOT interfere with the strength recovery.

Old Guys
Old guys usually know that their body doesn’t function as well as it did when they were 20 years old. They can still go through a linear progression, but some tweaks may need to be made. They obviously will not eat like a 20 year old skinny kid though. Plenty of meat and fat, and they would watch the carbs. If they started gaining too much fat, they could pull the carbs back down. Standard deal.

Old Gals
It has been my experience that you are lucky if old gals are willing to make a change in their life in general. They have been under pressure from the media and society about body image and what a “proper diet” is longer than younger girls. Get them training consistently first, then worry about food. Typically they will need more protein, but at this point training is about staving off the nursing home as opposed to attracting the opposite sex or competing in sport.

If there are any relevant populations that you think I need to highlight, slap it in the comments.

Why Eat Lots?
Part 2 – The Health Hysteria

Eating more than enough is important to grow, and growing is necessary if one is going to get stronger. The fact that growth is required to get stronger shouldn’t be novel, especially with how much I have written about it.

I am under the impression that nobody here thinks you can continuously gain strength in a linear fashion forever, nor do they think that body weight gains will continuously increase. There is this thing called “diminishing returns” that shows up a lot in life (economics, strength gains, running fast, etc.). In other words, in a given situation where increases have been made, more is required to make the same increase, so improvement is slower. Progress is made, albeit slowly.

In other words, you will not forever be in “mass gaining mode”. Nobody here has ever suggested that you eat tons of food when you don’t need to. If you are Fat Guy, you don’t need to be going ape shit with the milk shakes and large pizzas, even though it may be fun. If you are a girl who needs to gain weight or get stronger, you obviously won’t have the same dietary requirements as Skinny Guy does because you are hormonally different. However, if you are Skinny Guy, then you better throw down if you want to get strong.

Skinny Guy has an interesting task. He needs to drink a gallon of milk a day and eat four hearty meals. He needs to have eggs-a-plenty, bacon, and toast for breakfast. Skinny Guy should be consuming meat throughout the day and inhaling trail mix. There are hundreds of ways to add calories — hop on over to the Food FAQ for help or ideas. After getting more than enough protein, Skinny Guy will purposely be sloppy with his caloric intake if he is going to get as strong as possible in the shortest amount of time. If Skinny Guy is going to spend valuable time in the gym training, then he my as well eat, recover, and thrive so he doesn’t waste his or my time.

Skinny Guy may have been just Average Joe prior to his linear progression, or perhaps he was one of those “clean eaters”. It is understandable that Skinny Guy would fear eating tons of calories. After all, he is scared of losing his abs. Skinny (Weak) Guy shouts, “Hey, isn’t this unhealthy? I don’t want to have health problems!” Really, Skinny Guy?

The problem with this silly assumption is that it assumes you should eat like Homer Simpson for the rest of your life. Once you are done gaining lots of body weight, then you eat to maintain mass and/or increase lean body mass.

Since Skinny Guy is only going to be eating like this until he is no longer Skinny Guy, health issues are completely irrelevant. Do you really think that eating like The Blob for six months is going to pose long-term health risks? Unless you have some kind of pre-existing condition, You’ll Be Fine.

Besides, when you are training hard competitively, you must recover if you are going to succeed or improve. This requires lots of calories, and you must get them any way you can. When you instantly use the fuel you consume to repair your body, problems don’t exist. In other words, you can’t compare the effects of a sedentary person eating like shit and someone who trains very, very hard. I laughed when all of those assholes said that if they only “cleaned up” Michael Phelps diet, he would be an even better performer. The food he eats is the only way he can physically consume the calories that his body needs in order to recover. If training hard is a normal part of your life, you will eventually learn this.

A) If you are under weight, you must eat lots and lots to not be under weight.
B) If you eat lots, you are doing this for the sole reason to get stronger by increasing your mass.
C) Unless you have pre-existing conditions, six months of eating sloppy is not going to adversely affect your health. It takes years of unhealthy habits to start causing problems. Just ask your parents.
D) Inefficient people are annoying, so just eat the fucking food.

Tomorrow I will finish up by detailing food intake for the lifting population that doesn’t start with “Skinny” or end with “Guy”.
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Steve sent this video in. He squats 350 for a single and says, “Not too pretty, but got the job done.” More importantly, watch the end of the vid.

Why Eat Lots?
Part 1 – The Conceptual Understanding

I realize a lot of you are new to all of this. You are possibly new to strength training and eating in order to recover from that training as well as increasing muscular body weight. Even if you have been involved in some kind of training, you may still be new to what we recommend on this website. It’s okay.

Let’s pretend you work in an office building and you have to make managerial decisions. Construction needs to occur in half of the building so that the plumbing can be fixed along with the installation of a network infrastructure to make things more efficient. Everybody that works for you gets moved to the other half of the building, and both guys and girls have to use the same toilet. Do you think it would be logical if I came up to you and said, “Uh…Mr. Lumbergh? I have to poop a lot, and now the women will always smell it for the rest of my life because they will forever share a bathroom with me. Please ignore the fact that my overuse of toilet paper is why we are fixing the plumbing in the first place.”

Assuming Lumbergh doesn’t can your ass on the spot, he is going to have to remind you that A) you brought this on yourself since you ruined the plumbing, B) this is obviously not a permanent thing since the other half of the building will open up after construction is over, and C) the entire office will run more smoothly after the new infrastructure installation, so just fucking deal with it. Yeah…

Look, when I tell you to eat lots of food so that you can not only satisfy the necessary protein and caloric requirements for training, but also an excess of both to stimulate new tissue growth, I’m not telling you to do this for the rest of your life. Why do you suddenly think I am recommending that everyone should ALWAYS eat triple bacon cheeseburgers and a bowl of ice cream with magic shell and brownies?

The terms don’t change. If you are fat or skinny, you have done something to make yourself fat or skinny. You have to do something different if you want a different result. Since the majority of both guys and girls are underweight and weak, they will have to train and eat more to get stronger and bigger. Since stronger is better, they need to do this ASAFP.

It is implied that you will no longer look like a skinny, useless human after getting stronger. This is the point. Emaciation is in vogue and stylish, and we aim to put an end to this societal quirk. The skinnier and more weightless you are, the more extreme your eating can and will be to make the most efficient gains. If you are a competitor and train very hard, you will need to eat even more to recover from your training.

Thing #1: You brought this on yourself by being weak and probably skinny in the same way that the guy in the story ruined the plumbing with his belligerent bowel movements.

If you aim to get as strong as possible in the most efficient amount of time — which would be the sensible use of your training time and resources — then you will inconvenience yourself with eating lots of food so that you recover and GROW.

Thing #2: You must make the sacrifice to change your habits to achieve results that are different than where you started. The guy in the story was unhappy with the women in his building inhaling his acrid aroma, but he is going to have to deal with it during this period of change — ESPECIALLY because it is his fault in the first place.

There is no reason you have to continue eating sloppy in the event you reach an appropriate body weight for your frame. This would be irresponsible and ill-advised in the long-term. Even though you are gaining muscle and fat, the majority of it will be muscle if you are training and eating correctly. Correctly means following a program (the novice linear progression from Starting Strength always produces results if properly followed), and proper eating means eating a quantity of protein that corresponds with your desired weight (1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight) as well as enough calories to recover and increase body weight.

Keep in mind that by doing this, you are gaining both strength and muscular body weight. The strength increase is the whole point and is universally useful (Note: especially in zombie survival scenarios). So what if you lose your abs? Abs were not meant to be concave. Besides, when you hit that appropriate body weight, you can adjust your diet so that body fat can be reduced. However, care must be taken that body weight is not lost — it’s obvious that a 230 pound man must eat differently than a 150 pound boy.

Thing #3: The goal is to gain strength, and this is ultimately useful. In the story above, the guy overlooks the fact that his office building will be much more efficient with the new infrastructure. This is analogous to your body functioning better with whatever it is you are trying to do. All athletic qualities are increased and augmented (automatically or through practice and conditioning), you will live longer, and you can wow your friends by tossing small children over houses.

In Part 2 tomorrow I will talk about why the majority of you are wasting your time when you worry about the health considerations for eating to grow.