More or Less?

“There is no such thing as overtraining, only under eating, and under sleeping.”

This is one of my very favourite quotes, and couldn’t be truer. This quote also plainly illustrates the intimate connection between diet and training. Let me explain.

Without fail, when I talk to a client about the amount of food they’re eating and how it relates to the amount of training they do, they mention Michael Phelps. Why? Following his complete domination of the swimming events in the 2008 Olympic Games, he mentioned in an interview the copious amounts of food he eats during training season.

It makes sense. He trains for hours every day, therefore he needs to eat like a horse to recuperate and to come back stronger and faster than before. If Michael Phelps only ate 1000 calories per day during his high intensity, high frequency training, he undoubtedly wouldn’t even have made the US swimming team. Let alone win 14 gold medals! He would have overtained himself into the ground.

This concept is true for everyone, Olympic Athlete or not.  The amount of stress you put on your body through exercise dictates the amount of calories you should eat. High frequency & intensity of training will require more food than the average recommendations from blog post number 2.

Among the biggest mistakes in the weight loss world is combining a lot of training with a very low calorie diet, and this is a recipe for disaster. Without adequate calories to recover from previous training sessions, your body will be unable to maintain the intensity of training required to really burn fat & build muscle.

Worse yet, this set up will backfire, and you’ll end up losing more muscle than fat; as I’ve said before, this is bad, Bad, BAD. To understand this concept, consider the fact that a fat cell (adipocyte) has a physiologic limit to the amount of fat it can release in a day. Exceed this limit, and body protein (muscle, organs, etc) will be broken down for fuel. While this is a very new area of research, a number has been proposed & confirmed by several studies.

31 calories per pound of fat is all you can expect to safely lose in a day. I know, seems like it’s a futile endeavor.  However, consider how many pounds of fat you may be carrying. A very modest 20 pounds of fat can release 620 calories of fat to be burned. Most readers of this blog have significantly more fat than this, and could therefore burn many more fat calories each day.

The relevance of this number, the physiologic limit of your fat burning potential, is that your caloric deficit should not exceed this number. Put another way, whether you create this caloric deficit though diet, exercise or ideally a combination of both, should not exceed your limit. Theoretically, you could exceed this limit once in a while and no, your muscles won’t just dissolve overnight.

However, exceed this limit for the long term and you risk not only stalling your fat loss but also losing muscle mass. Even if you don’t think the amount of muscle you carry is important (ladies, I’m looking at you) consider that muscle loss heading into old age is a primary determinant of how independent that person will be able to be. This is equally an issue of physique and beauty as it is of health & longevity.

If your progress in training is stalling, eat more. Simple. Start small, 250 calories or so and see how this affects your training. Lethargy, depression, moodiness & muscle soreness than doesn’t go away by the next workout are all sings of overtraining. In this case it’s better to err on the side being conservative.  

More is not always better; Better is better.

Here’s to your better health,

Matty