Athletes that are lean are usually extremely insulin sensitive. This is a good thing (and if you insulin resistant, your doctor will try to change your diet to make you more sensitive). How is this done? Train hard, eat high carbs immediately after your workout so your body gets trained to put the glucose into the muscles and liver, like it should. Otherwise, have a fairly low carb diet to keep insulin at a normal level. You'll feel a lot better (no blood sugar spikes means fewer headaches) and it will actually get difficult to gain weight. What's more, you'll find you have more continuous energy throughout the day since you will be (correctly) utilizing the burning of fat as your major source of fuel. Finally, you'll just stay lean (in a very good way) and not really ever have to think much about weight control.

How much do I Need To Eat?

To calculate this take your weight (first thing in the morning) and

In my case, I weight 187 so this works out to about 3,100. This gives you your baseline. Add in the number of calories you need for activity. So if you weigh 187 lbs. (um, like me) and run 3 miles, this means you have burned off 150 calories/mi. * 3 miles = 450 calories. Take into account other activities, so add 300 - 500 calories per day, depending on how heavy you have been training. So if I really hit the gym hard (heavy lifts or lots of active training) I am pushing 1,000 calories a day. So all told, I am eating 4,100 calories a day to maintain weight. Nom nom nom. This is a lot of food, make no mistake. Were I trying to lose weight, I might run a calorie deficit of 500, bring the total down to 3,600. It is *easy* to lose weight with this level of activity and, in point of fact, maintaining weight when I am very actively training is the ongoing issue. The most common complaint in the men's locker room is guys who weigh themselves and find they are losing weight. I suspect this is different in the women's locker room but have not been in a position to verify it. Nor am I likely too...

Computing meal sizes

I normally take my daily allotment and divide by 16. This gives me a basic snack unit. So assuming am having a light day and need 3600 calories, here is what it looks like: One snack is 3600/16 = 225 calories. I eat 3 snacks a day and 3 meals. Two meals are equal to 4 snacks, the major meal (post workout) is 5 snacks. So my major meals would be 1125 calories vs. 900. Generally your largest meal is immediately (as in within an hour, two at most) post-workout and it should be very high in carbohydrates and protein. Typically, I get a bit about of half my carbs at the major meal. Other meals are much lower in carbs. The reason for this is you want an insulin spike as part of "metabolic training" so your body gets accustomed to taking excess glucose and stashing it in muscles and the liver.

Composition of meals

I tend to aim for 20% of calories from protein, 35% from fat and 45% from carbohydrates. (Standard nutritional guidelines are 10% protein, 15% fat and 75% carbs.) I use the following notation of [carb, fat, protein] in grams. Note they are listed in alphabetical order. I also use parentheses to denote calories (because a "(" looks like the letter "c") hence 100 calories = (45,35, 20) = [11, 4, 5].

My post-workout meal contains roughly 60% of the calories from carbs, reducing the fat but not the protein. So if my meal is 1400 calories, I need 1125 = (810,280,280) = [202, 11, 56]. That's a really big meal consisting of a huge plate of, say, spaghetti with a low-ish fat meat sauce. Note that this is taken from the daily total for carbs, so other meals (usually breakfast) tend to have a higher fat component.

A comment about good cooking. One summer when I was a teenager, I got a job for a month with my buddy Craig. We had to put in a fence by hand over rough terrain, so we sawed down trees, dug out stumps and then dug postholes all by hand. Every morning I had a huge breakfast with all the fixings. Didn't gain much weight at all and I think I even lost some. My point is that eating like that is perfectly fine if you are doing heavy manual labor and the "unhealthy" American diet is only unhealthy if you are living a sedentary life. The argument that it is inherently unhealthy dodges the important fact that there is a mismatch between activity levels and fuel. It sure feels a lot better to talk about how bad for you a diet is rather than the unglamorous statement that "I've sat on my backside all day at the office and really shouldn't eat much."

Dieting done right

So I used to be fat and lost roughy 140 lbs. over two diets. I now run 185 lbs. at about 9% or less body fat. and have for a very long time. My family consists of mostly spherical German/Irish so there would seem to be a genetic predisposition to being fat -- which I roundly discount. How to do it? I outlined above how I eat for insulin sensitivity. This is the most major component that changed over time. The other is getting better habits of not just eating a junk food.

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There is a lot of hue and cry about bad food and "our diet is killing us" as if there were some vast conspiracy to undermine the health of everyone. Paranoia is attractive precisely because it makes life simpler. Besides, problems are clearly defined things with solutions, as opposed to worries. A problem is something for an engineer. Whether or not your paramour truly loves you is a worry, e.g.. and should not be handed over to a narrow specialist, IMHO. In any case, for the first time in human history famine is not a part of daily life, unless you live in a purely Socialist country, at any rate. You may walk into a store and purchase virtually anything at a reasonable price. Economics of scale and market interactions have made is so even the poor can be obese. Blaming others for ignorance about basic nutrition and requiring they fix it is foolish.

A social problem is a mismatch between theory and practice. People who are very long on such problems often fail to grasp that they see so many because they have a lot of stupid ideas about how to world ought to be....
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But if you want to lose weight I would argue against just blindly cutting calories. If you run a deficit of about 1,000 calories a day, then you will lose 2 lbs a week, which is what the suggested guidelines for healthy dieting are. Certainly, this works if you are very obese. Starvation is pretty nasty (see below). For people who are athletic, the downside is that 25% of all weight you lose will be muscle. So if you have been working for months to gain some serious mass, you can undo all of the in a month or two of dieting. Gaining 10 pounds then losing ten pounds means you have increased lean mass by 6.6 pounds, then lost 2.5 pounds of it to end up with a net gain of 4.1 pounds.

Body sculptors often follow a bulk then cut regime, where they will eat lots and lift heavy then go on a strict diet right before competition. They calculate how much they need to bulk to get a net increase. This is very strenuous and often unhealthy and cannot really be defended on health grounds. Much advice in magazine follows this because the results can be pretty eye popping. This advice is also used by far too many combat athletes trying to get in shape for a bout. Body sculptors know that on competition day they will be loopy from hunger and fairly well disoriented. This is fine if you are just showing, but awful if you are going to hop into the ring. More than one martial artists has squeaked into their weight class then barely known which end is up in the ring.

(ok, so when people starve, what is really going on is that there is about 2,000 calories of energry stored in glycogen stores. Once this is used up, the body starts to burn fat an turn it into ketones (which the brain can use, although they are fairly toxic and are similar to nail polish in chemical composition.) Once fat is exhausted, muscle is broken down and converted into glucose for the brain. This is a unique adaptive response that allows humans to forage for food even though they are critically starving. A common cause of death in starvation is that the diaphragm is metabolized and respiration becomes impossible. People were not made to starve, unlike some animals -- e.g. bears, which can do it fine for months on end. Near as can be told, people are made to be active and eat constantly.)

What is the best way to lose weight? Run a slight deficit, roughly 300 calories a day and 3 times a week do high intensity circuit training. I normally do 4 different full body exercises for 30 seconds each, wait 1 minute then repeat for a total of 4 sets. So my weight loss program consists of 33 minutes of activity a week. This is very different from the hours of cardio most people assume you are supposed to do. Besides, do footwork drills and rolling/falling floor combos and you'll increase your stamina and agility in martial arts training. This is a double win!

What will happen is a gradual body composition change. Research shows this happen on a 5:4 ratio of fat:muscle. So, taking 1.5 lbs/month as the max you can gain, 2.5 months of this training will mean you lose 5 lbs of fat and gain 1 lb of muscle. Your weight will barely budge but you will definitely notice the difference. I have used this several times and it works great. The problem is that the training has to be very intense indeed (burpee tabatas would be a good candidate for this.) Fairly explosive training is the bodyweight equivalent of going heavy on your lifts, which is why you grow so much muscle. (You can also do this with strength circuits, such as doing 10 sets of 6 reps of squats at 60% of your max, repeat 10x6 with pullups or lat pulldowns, pushups and 10x10 swings. But I really do prefer full body circuits.)