Diet/Nutrition Questions

1. Stop reading bodybuilding.com and fitness magazines - they're all advertisements disguised as messageboards and magazines. Everything you're doing is unnecessary and/or counter-productive.
2. There's no reason to bulk and cut. Your muscles don't grow any faster by eating above maintenance. If you don't want to gain fat, eat at or below maintenance. When you eat above maintenance, you look like you're getting bigger, but that's only because you're getting fat.
3. Macronutrients don't matter. Just eat a variety of vegetables and a daily average of 70-120 grams of complete protein.
4. Read my posts here to "figure out" how much calories you need.
5. What do you mean "best kind of oatmeal?" As long as you're eating your vegetables and not eating an excess of calories, you can eat whatever you want.

Your muscle gains is solely determined by the quality of your workouts and your daily average intake of 70-120 grams of protein. Calories may play a role in optimization, but that's theoretical at best, and even if true, it's going to be significantly less than maintenance, and also likely not going to make much of a difference.

Your fat loss solely determined by big your caloric deficit is.

just google macronutrient ratio study, there's a ton of them specifically designed to counter zone diet, atkins diet etc

forget google. anyone can write their own articles on the internet, but not anyone can publish a study for peer review. instead, check with pubmed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ make sure you know how to peer review studies. just as many bad studies as good ones get published - the whole point of getting published is for others to peer review them.

umm if you googled you would find that the articles are from peer reviewed journals.

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&h...894057c0dc71cc i see a bunch of articles but not a single study. i looked a few of the first links anyway and they're lengthy. i need a good reason to spend the time to read these essays. a quick browse though immediately made me think: macronutrients matter not because of their nutritional profile, but simply because different foods have different caloric densities which will help control your caloric intake. it's like the whole study about how diet soda was shown to increase fat levels. well, that's an incomplete statement, and if you assume that correlation is causation, you would too be misled. the truth is that diet soda can indirectly cause fat levels if you think diet soda gives you an excuse to eat more.

and LOL at the first link. that's a diabetes website. incidentally, one of the most retarded mainstream fitness and health advice thrown around is to pay attention to macronutrients to maintain glucose levels. just a few weeks ago, i got this dumb health & fitness email from my company: the part that is never mentioned is that this drop in blood sugar ONLY happens to people who have have a blood sugar disorder like diabetes. in other words, what they're saying about blood sugar is true, but it doesn't apply to 99% of the population who have normal functioning blood sugar regulation (and if you didn't have normal functioning blood sugar regulation, you would know it).

you dont have to do this, just eat lean proteins and watch your carbs and you can build lean muscle from there.
from my experience with people i know who do or have done this, they stay fat. or just an excuse to eat and never get around to 'cut' all their lives. theyre always saying "im just bulkin up now". always.

then what you should do (reading those mags do help, they all have some truths to it, just be discerning , that is all...you dont have to listen to 'absolutism' advise that proliferates on blog/forum sites all the time)

is in my experience again, eat some good carb an hour or two before workout, pasta, grains, 2 bananas, whatever. wholesome stuff.. and then go hit the weights HARD. proper form, rest between sets little or more, dont matter, up to your comfort levels, hit weights hard and then do some cardio (which will be killer right after weights) for some 15 minutes flush out the sweat, high heartbeat rate.

an hour or two after the workout eat a high protein meal let say 2 chicken breasts, lean turkey, or something, etc. some veggies with it.
dont worry about eating over maintenance if it is hard for you. just eat high proportion of protein (after workout) to thecalories you ingest.

no real science to it, you dont have to think too hard, just do it the way you like similar to that and you'll see some good growth and definition after a few months.

what ive found out is also to change it up in your steady state. take a long break like a week or two. it may scare you, as you think your body's going to flab, but fear not. just continue eating healthy and when you pck back up you''ll see some amazing results. i mean deathdefying results.

also, ive got to say, do a different form of workout. stop weights for a month, and say...go help your uncle with his moving company for a month. or , lift heavy stuff in your garage. dont count reps or anything or chart anything, just lift till your sweaty. or , go run through the woods if you have them nearby and roll boulders over and go run uphill and then do crazy stuff. whatever you can do that is drastically different for a month. i dont mean do those things speciifically, whatever is attainable for you in your environment and circumstances.

also, get out of your comfrot zone. do a gym weight exercise a certain way? well, hit it up a different way. go ask the trainer how to hit it up a different way or you may already know. do an exercise for a whole month that you have no interest whatsoever to do. like me, i used to see guys doing bent ovr rows. i never did them. oh well, one month i said ill getout of my comfrot zone and just do some bent over rows . it was not interseting the first week but i kept at it. i just said "body do this im going to kill you" and did it for a whol month. hell, man, im doing bent over rows now (not now) when i work out now. and my back did gain something from it. all these little things you add, you dont realize till after a year or year and a half, that you DID take it tot the next level , when during it you felt like you did not. i dunno

Why? This may be good advice for you. Just take a week off if its been 6-8 constant weeks of training. Trust me, you'll just be better after! And if you still want to go to the gym, just do light workouts. Basically, you want to give your body a little break. And picking up rows was obviously a good idea because it's a great exercise for your back!

And sorry for this little off-topic question, but I've been learning a lot from your posts recently and I would love to read some studies that have test this. I'm honestly curious

the claim that you grow more muscle from eating above maintenance is a positive statement, and the burden of proof lies on the positive, and as of this date, there is no scientific evidence to support that excess calories helps grow more muscle. if there is no proof, there is no logical reason to believe in the claim. to believe in it because it could be true would be appealing to probability, and no different from believing in flying pigs because while unproven (you can't "disprove" a negative), it could be true. HOWEVER, we have plenty of scientific evidence for the following: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14600563 http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Ab...Muscle.25.aspx (if you want to view the details) this research illustrates that muscle growth is possible without eating high amounts of protein, and also suggests that once minimum protein (and calorie) requirements are met, adding more protein and more calories does not seem to increase the total amount of lean mass that is gained from a resistance training program. furthermore... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10204826 research published in 1999 found that when men and women followed a 12 week diet consisting of only 800 calories and only 80 grams of protein per day, they were able to maintain their muscle mass as long as they were exercising with weights three times per week. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10332666 in another study published in 1999, obese men restricted their caloric intake by eating 1000 calories less per day than they normally ate for 16 weeks. they took part in a weight-training program 3 days a week and were able to maintain all of their muscle mass while losing over 20 pounds of body fat. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/con....full.pdf+html (this is the actual entire study) in yet another study, 38 obese women undertaking a reduced calorie diet for 16 weeks were also able to maintain their muscle mass by training with weights three times per week. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19508406 research has shown that fasting for as long as 72 hours (regardless of whether or not you are exercising) does not cause an increased breakdown in your muscle, nor does it slow down muscle protein synthesis.