This morning I woke up at 5 am sore and aching all over.
This was expected. The last few months I’ve been waking up at unmentionable hours of the morning, for no reason I can understand.
And, since I’m going to be fat-boying it from Christmas Eve and on through most of the next week through to New Years, I wanted to create a fair-sized calorie sink before the onslaught begins.
That way when I do stuff my fat face, at least the momentum of the rebound will work in my favor.
I like “tricking” nature’s forces into doing work for me.
That’s already what I do with my diet anyway.
Four days of the week I keep carbs and total calories under strict monitoring. The other three days are more loose on both.
The loose days aren’t free-for-all binging on junk. I think that’s counter-productive, and shows a disorderly relationship with food. I keep the same “skeleton” of protein intake and the same meals. But I’ve been known to eat burgers, chocolate bars, and even throw down a six-pack to pad out the calories.
As long as I keep seeing veins turn up in the strangest places, I don’t question it.
Put the plan on autopilot and let ‘im cook.
During my trial-and-erroring, I have noticed that if daily carbs go below around 60-80 grams… and if that lasts more than a single day… you may as well take a sledgehammer to my body.
At my current leanness, all the negative metabolic crap kicks like a donkey at the first sign of a drop in energy.
Recovery drops into the toilet, along with my mood and energy levels. The “low” days leave me feeling like a “low battery” in my body and in my mind. Dealing with the afternoon energy crashes once the AM coffee wears off, and the crankiness too, is the hardest part.
Leptin is a cruel mistress, even if the carbing up is almost narcotic.
Point is…
Your diet creates its own stress.
It adds to the other stress going on in your life.
And your diet stacks with your training to create the effects you want.
For many years I focused more on training while treating diet as a whole separate thing.
It ain’t so.
What you eat, and how much, and when, all figures in to your training and recovery.
Nutrition is a stress in its own right. Or a stress relief, as the case may be. Protein and carb intake do all kinds of things to your hormones and your brain’s metabolic circuits.
Like I’ve been writing for years, there are no separate parts of your body. It’s not 80% diet and 20% training. All of them are 100%.
Play with one piece and you’re playing with everything else.
If you want to make change happen, you’ve got to play with ALL the dials and levers that are in your control.
Training and nutrition work best when they’re integrated into a single plan. The more you bring them together and use them together, the more you can force the changes you want to see.
Creating wild swings with intense but short calorie deficits and “overtraining”… then pulling your foot off the gas… can do all kinds of neat things to your physique and your performance.
I’m not pointing out anything magical here, but I do think most of us under-estimate the powerful effects we can create by combining these two factors.
So many fitness people obsess over tactics and micro-details and never think about the long term strategy.
Maybe that’s useful for you to know and meditate on.
It’s the kind of “insider secrets” that I bring to the clients under my care, too.
If you’re interested in the kind of fat-shredding, muscle-building jaktitude that I can bring to your life, stay tuned.
And go join us in the community while you’re at it. That’s where you’ll find the goodies.
Matt Perryman