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those amounts seem very high to me, but each to their own I suppose

Definitely. Once again there is no one answer. But you're backloading carbs, so shouldn't you be on very high carb days as well? How high do you go? Do you splurge on pizza or something as nasty? Or do you backload neat and tidy?

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Prove the impossible!

I backload clean as a whistle, my basic set up is:

-protein shake for breakfast: 40g of protein from whey isolate
-couple of carb free snacks when I'm at work: nuts, cooked meats etc (usually comes to around 30 - 40g of protein, couple of grams of incidental carbs, nothing to worry about)
-pre training meal of meat and a TON of green stuff (usually 60 -70g of protein)
***train from 6.30 til 8.30***
-HUGE post training meal: loads of meat and rice/potatoes (usually about 80g of protein, 100g of carbs)
-pre-bed snack: usually a couple of bits of fruit and a protein bar (25g protein, 60g of carbs)

So that has me about 160 - 180 grams of carbs a day. On my non-training days I generally don't have the rice/potatoes but the amount of fruit I eat on those days means I'll still sit about 100g of carbs.

Once a week I go buck wild with the carbs. An example of this sort of day would be sunday last week when I had a McDonalds for breakfast, Dominos pizza for dinner and I went to an ice cream parlour in the evening and ordered myself an enormous Mars milkshake. Oh yeah.

I'm 5' 11" and 190lbs. Sit around 10% bodyfat

that's impressive.


How fast do you get hungry after the whey shake? and what exactly do you add in there?

This morning I had whey (about 26g protein worth), 50g blueberries, 8oz protein enriched milk (about 9g protein). An hour later 14oz fresh ground coffee; an hour later some carrots. 2 hours later spinach salad w grilled chicken and avocado (some other veg).

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haha, it's not that impressive but it's getting there! I was a 130lbs stick figure when I started so I'm doing alright I guess.

the only thing I add to my shake is a heaped tablespoon of psyllium husk fibre. I would love to do that thing where you blend loads of berries and stuff into it, but I don't have time for that in the morning. It wouldn't really fit in to my carb backloading schedule anyway.

I get hungry a couple of hours after the shake, so that's when I snack on meat and nuts. Usually have a coffee around this time too. This keeps me going til my first proper meal which is the pre-training meal.

what you listed there sounds pretty good. Good, low calorie, nutrient dense foods. Are you eating 1g of protein per lb of your bodyweight every day?

re: berries. I buy fresh and freeze them. Interestingly enough they dont get stuck together. Scoop out two handfulls of blueberries into a strainer and run under water to clean. Doesn't add time bulk. What is the purpose of that thing you add to yours?

re: protein. I try very hard to do that. That should be the goal even for 'off' days? My off days are either HIIT cardio or 4 various ab/oblique exercises 3 sets each.

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yeah you should try and eat that much protein every day. It doesn't have to be exact, but you should try and get as close to it as you can. It's not really that hard once you get into a routine.

I add psyllium fibre to my shakes because protein shakes mess with my stomach a bit, and the psyllium fixes that. I couldn't live without it to be honest, it's one of my core supplements along with fish oil, vitamin D3 and ZMA.

Catching up. The "heat engine" issue is misleading. Sure the body is, like everything else, a heat engine. Only it can use many, many different fuels, and we don't have a good way of comparing the available energy from those different fuels, and the body uses them if very different ways. To say a "calorie" from fat will cause the same about of fat gain as a "calorie" from carb or from prtoein assumes that the body extracts the same amount of energy from each type of food that a bomb calorimiter does, and that the body will use each nutrient in the same way and obtain the same amount of energy from each. None of which is valid. Keeping activity constant, consuming a certain number of fat calories will not give the same results as the same number of carb calories. Just doesn't happen that way in real life, no matter how one's understand of thermodynamics may argue otherwise. No, you can't violate the laws of thermodynamics, but we just don't understand all we need to as to how they apply to the human body.

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Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.--Francis Chan

testify!

It seems we all agree upon this principle, but when it comes to its application opinions differ.
No argument here either.
Again, if the "calorie" in this sentence stands for "as measured by a calorimeter and appears in the tables as the caloric value of certain foods" there is no argument. People do differ as of the digestion effectiveness and utilization percentage, and even for the same person these may change according the factors like hormonal state etc. (Hurray to Cortisol(*)). However, these tables are not that far from the truth, and healthy people do tend to have close values, otherwise all those RMR/BMR calculations were not of any value, while in fact they tend to be close to the truth for most people. The standard error the FAO gives for its BMR calculation is about 100 calories for females (see table 5.2 in http://www.fao.org/docrep/007/y5686e/y5 ... #TopOfPage ), so, like in so many other areas, we're not as unique as we'd like to think ("You are unique, like everyone else" :-)). Your very own profession is based on this fortunate fact, until we get to the promised land of individual medicine, that is. And, most importantly, we do know the only possible direction of the error for those people who are at the tail of the distribution function.
But we do understand them well enough to know you can't break them as you yourself said. We do understand them well enough to know they set limits that are not affected by the inner workings of the machine we call the human body, and we do know no amount of Cortisol on this planet will let you extract 1500 calories of a thousand calory consumption (I may extract 950, you may extract 980, none of us will extract 1001). This, again, is agreed upon by all of us at least at the level of paying lip service to the principle, up to the point of me being accused that by raising this trivial point time after time I'm arguing with a strawman, but when it comes to a trainee who claims to be in a steady state on 1000 calories a day while exercising for almost 2 hours daily- at least 4 or 5 standard errors off the charts (in the wrong direction. i.e. not wasting eaten calories by turning them to heat which is possible, but rather utilizing more energy than the calorimeter says there are when the food is totally burned), people still argue for the feasibility of this situation. Kpj seems like a serious fellow, willing to learn and improve, and I have nothing but respect for him. I could only wish to have instructors like him, and that's the reason I think treating his misconceptions under the "we don't know enough" umbrella is doing him, and his clients, disservice. His clients are doing something wrong, either lying to themselves or to him, and he can be a better trainer if he realizes it (I have no idea what he should do with the knowledge, but he should know. For the least he should keep in his mind this might be a case of eating disorder, which might eventually call for medical intervention). The same is true for millions of people all over the world who claim to be gaining weight while eating less than their calculated DMR (D = Daily). Sure, there are few who really have a slow metabolism (the thyroid gland being a main suspect, as you doctors know so very well), but it shows in their activity level and it can never fall under the BMR, which is the minimum energy needed to sustain life.

Sorry, this has turned out to be longer than intended, and mostly a repeat of stuff I have already said. My only saving grace is that people are not reading long posts anyway.
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(*) BTW, if chronic high level of Cortisol is bad, and if starvation raises this level, how do modern medicine explain the phenomenon of increased life span through caloric deficiency diet?

I would think there is a difference between words "Starvation" and "a minor caloric defiency". The metabolism isn't stupid, it won't run you dry if you're constantly eating 100-300cal too little. There are hormonal changes that drive the metabolism down, adapting to the lower amount of calories. And yeah, it can't drop to some silly numbers, but a caloric defiency, when talking about healthy and life length improving, isn't most likely 500-1000kcal every day.

Plus, another point I would throw is that people who eat in a slight caloric defiency, usually eat much cleaner. No junk. More veggies, more whole wheat and such. Clean and healthy eating usually leads to less calories, wether you wanted it or not.

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Prove the impossible!

I was thinking of calorie restriction experiments on other animals (yeast, worms, rodents and perhaps primates) like mentioned here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15247056 . 30% -50% less than normal is more "starvation" than "minor"... (Actually, after reading about intermittent fasting I was under the impression the term "starvation" is used for any state other than "well fed" in this context.)

Carbs and protein being stored as fat in the body is HIGHLY unlikely. We don't have efficient enough pathways to do it.

They simply turn off fat oxidation which causes dietary fat to be stored, which is done very easily.

Lipogenesis? (Or De Novo Lipogenesis, DNL) Liver and muscles can't really store that much carbos, and insulin takes them off the bloodstream. Where would you think excess carbs go? Especially when your eating heaps of it and not exercising. Of course these things need further research, but it's quite clear there is a connection with too many carbs and obesity. Beyond hormonal (insulin) levels as well.

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Prove the impossible!

They're burned off as the bodies main energy source.

Do some research on how efficient DNL is in humans - we suck at it, basically.

It's that the carb intake 100% stops fat oxidation that causes us to gain weight (all the fat we eat, stored as fat.)

Protein also has to be converted to glucose and then fat before it can be stored.

All of those processes use energy and cause a use of energy when converted - dietary fat requires nearly no energy to be stored.