I'm going to talk about maybe about 10 of the more common nutrition errors I've seen in my, what, 27 years of training I've observed in people, including I've made some of these mistakes myself. So let's talk about it.
I mean, these, some of these things seem obvious, but they're still happening quite a bit.
Let's start out with probably one of the more common mistakes when it comes to nutrition is taking in too few calories.
Of course, this applies more to bodybuilders or fitness or athletes that are trying to lose body fat. And their zeal to lose body fat. A lot of people will cut the calories too much.
This tends to happen, quite frankly, more in women than men. Women often go on starvation diets. What's a starvation diet? Well, if you figure out your basal metabolic rate, that's your resting metabolic rate.
Usually, it comes out, in a full-grown man, it's usually around maybe 1,100, 1,200 calories. That means that's the minimal amount of calories it takes to keep you alive, to keep your body going. So, if you go, here's the problem, though.
If you go too far, in a woman, it's a woman, in a woman, it would probably be about 1,000, about 1,900 calorie, I'm just guessing, basal metabolic calorie rate. But the point is, if you go too far below your basal metabolic calorie rate, there's a danger of losing lean mass and also a danger of turning off your metabolism completely because the body reacts to too few calories as a starvation. The body has systems, it's almost like a computer, your body has kind of backup systems, redundant systems to keep you going in spite of yourself.
So, for example, if you take in too few calories, the body will take your active thyroid hormone, there's actually two of them, T4 and T3. T4 is basically a prohormone that's converted by enzymes in the liver into the more active T3 form, which is five times more metabolically active than T4. So, after about maybe three weeks of taking in too few calories, your body interprets this as starvation and it doesn't want to let you lose your lean mass muscle because when you start to lose muscle, you're getting in big trouble from a health point of view.
So what it will do is it will convert the active T3 thyroid hormone into reverse T3, which is basically inactive, it's a metabolically inert form of thyroid. Basically what it's doing is, to put it simply, it's turning off your metabolism so you don't burn up your own body protein. Not only that, but when that happens, of course, the fat loss rate slows down considerably.
This happens not only to bodybuilders and athletes, but it involves anyone who follows a diet that overly restricts caloric intake. It's known popularly as the dieting plateau, where you go on a diet and about three or four weeks into the diet, you suddenly stop losing weight, the scales don't change. What's happening is you've gone into this reverse T3 dieting plateau situation, and the only way to get out of it is to increase the calories, or the other option is to, you could also, if you're not taking enough carbohydrate, you'd have to increase the carbohydrate.
Because you need to ingest at least 50 grams of carbohydrate a day for your thyroid to optimally produce the thyroid hormones. That's another way around it, if you're on a zero-carb diet. The other thing to do, or if you're on a zero-carb diet, you should be going off the diet about at least once a week.
That's another mistake, by the way. Not going off a diet maybe once or twice a week, because when you go off once or twice a week, you basically kickstart your metabolism and prevent these dieting plateaus. You get your thyroid working.
Regardless of what you might hear these people tell you, never go off your diet. They've shown in recent studies, they've compared two groups. One group had a diet cheat day, if you want to call it that.
The other group stayed on a diet seven days a week. The group that had the cheat day not only lost more body fat, but they also retained far more muscle. So that's one way around it.
Of course, the final way, which I don't really recommend, is to take thyroid drugs. I don't recommend that, because to get a true thyroid metabolic raising effect, you'd have to take more thyroid drugs than your body produces naturally. If you take a thyroid drug that matches your body output, there's a feedback mechanism.
All you're going to do is turn off your own thyroid. Let's use an example. Let's say your body produces three grains of thyroid hormone a day, and you decide you want to take one grain of a thyroid drug.
What happens is a feedback mechanism will cause your body to detect that you're taking in a grain of thyroid from the outside, and instead of producing three grains, it'll cut down to two grains, but you're right back to where you started. You're not getting any metabolic rise. To get the metabolic rise, you'd have to take more than your body makes, which would mean four grains of thyroid.
This is just an example. What happens, though, is as soon as you take more thyroid than your body makes, now you're risking a loss of lean mass, because if the thyroid gets too active, you start to burn away muscle tissue. The first mistake is ingesting too few calories.
On the flip side of that, the other mistake is ingesting too many calories. A lot of people will go on a diet, and they'll tell you that, I don't know what's going on. I went on this diet, I'm not losing any weight.
Well, it turns out they're not really on the diet like they think they are. A lot of people overestimate or underestimate how many calories they're consuming, and it turns out in many cases, they're consuming too many calories to produce any substantial fat loss rate. The old idea of if you reduce your daily calorie intake by 500 calories a day, you'll lose about a pound of fat a week, and if you reduce it 1,000 calories, you lose about two pounds a week.
That's basically true, but a lot of people are not good at figuring out how many calories they're taking in, and they wind up eating too many calories so they don't lose any weight. Sometimes without realizing it, you'll be following a certain diet, you'll sneak a little extra something here or there, and that pushes you over the limit, where in other words, you might not be gaining weight, but it kind of puts a halt to your fat loss. That's another thing, by the way, I should also mention, that's another major mistake is trying to lose too much fat too fast.
Your body can only really realistically lose about a maximum of about three pounds a week of fat, pure fat. Anything more than that is water, and in a worst case scenario, muscle. You never want to lose muscle, you never want to lose muscle, because when you lose muscle, your resting metabolic rate drops.
So you can only lose about three pounds of fat a week, and if you really want to retain muscle while you're dieting, I don't care whether you're on drugs or not, the best you want to lose weight slowly, slowly. You want to aim for maybe a one to two percent loss of weight per week. No more than that.
If you try to do more than that, you're going to start to probably lose muscle. If you're trying to crash diet, one of those things, the weight always comes right back and also there's a chance of losing too much muscle. So again, you've got to be careful, too many calories will slow down weight loss considerably it's a common mistake.
Another common mistake is this fear of fat, where a lot of diets, especially some of these vegan advocates, they talk about fat like it's an evil substance that should be avoided at all costs. I've seen a couple of these vegan doctors tell people, people consuming something less than ten percent fat, sometimes even less than that. A zero fat diet is horrible, horrible.
As a matter of fact, an early advocate of low carb diets, he was an Arctic explorer, I can't remember his name, it's very hard to pronounce. People who are familiar with the history of low carb diets know this guy. He went up to the Arctic and he decided to follow the diet of the native Intuits that lived up there.
Turns out they were living entirely on fat and protein. There was no fruits or vegetables so they consumed no carbohydrates and yet they apparently thrived. So he tried it, but he made one mistake.
When he first went on the diet, he only consumed fish, no meat, fish. The type of fish he consumed, unfortunately, was extremely low in fat and him and his associate who tried this fish only diet got extremely sick. The reason they got sick was because of the total lack of fat in the diet.
Your body requires two forms of essential fats. One is called omega-6, represented by linoleic acid. The other is called omega-3, which is represented by, well, the government tells you to have alpha linoleic acid or ALA, they call that an essential omega-3, but the truth is the actual bioactive omega-3 are called DHA and EPA and you get that mostly in fatty foods.
Fish, mackerels, salmon, sardines, anchovies, halibut, that type of thing. Only in fatty fish. Now interestingly, you'll find that a lot of competitive bodybuilders, they go on a, especially the last maybe two, three weeks before a contest, they'll go on a fish only diet, literally only eating fish and a little bit of vegetables.
Now the problem is the fish they favor, like tilapia and orange roughy, they are low in fat, too low in fat, where they can actually have problems with fatty acid deficiency. It's not a smart way to do it and yet a lot of bodybuilders do that. So my point is don't fear fat.
Fat is unlikely to make you fat unless you overeat it and you have to get those two forms of essential fat. So don't believe the crap about cutting fat out of your diet completely, that's nonsense. Another very common mistake among bodybuilders and athletes is eliminating fruits and vegetables.
Very terrible, terrible mistake. First of all, fruits and vegetables contain nutrients that you're not going to find commonly in food supplements or vitamins and mineral supplements. These are called polyphenols and flavonoids.
These are what they call phytonutrients. They're only found in fruits and vegetables and some of these vegetables have nutrients that are absolutely tremendous at preventive health effects, such as broccoli, cruciferous vegetables. They provide a substance called sulforaphane, or actually they provide glucophanin, which is converted into sulforaphane by an enzyme called myrosinase, which happens when you chew the vegetable, the enzymes release that converts glucophanin into sulforaphane.
Sulforaphane has tremendous health benefits. It's a master antioxidant substance. It helps prevent many types of cancer and from a bodybuilding standpoint, it's interesting because it blunts myostatin, which is a protein found in muscles that prevents muscle growth.
So this is found only in cruciferous vegetables. So when you cut out cruciferous vegetables and fruit, you're cutting out, you're removing from your diet extremely protective nutrients and most of these nutrients, by the way, are kind of precursors, meaning that the phytonutrients aren't activated, a lot of them, until they get into your gut, where bacteria in the gut, what they call the intestinal microbiome, actually converts these flavonoids and phytonutrients into active forms that are health protective. Now the interesting thing is when you eat fruits and vegetables, you're providing a substance that feeds the intestinal microbiome, which is dietary fiber.
That's another reason why you should never cut out fruits and vegetables, because they're good sources of dietary fiber, which is the main food for the intestinal microbiome.
It's about how the intestinal microbiome affects training progress, health. It's a huge subject. It's one of the biggest topics in medicine right now.
But the important point to remember is you feed your intestinal microbiome by ingesting dietary fiber. As far as fruits go, the big problem there that a lot of people think, fruits contain fructose or fructose, whichever pronunciation you want to go by. A lot of people say, oh, fructose makes you fat.
If you eat fruit, you get fat. No, no, that's not the way it works. First of all, most fruits contain very small amounts of fructose.
You have to eat like three, four pounds of fruit a day to have any problem with fructose. Second is the fact that the fiber, a lot of people overlook this, the fiber in fruit kind of delays the absorption of the fructose in such a way that the fructose is rendered harmless. Fruit juices are another story.
With fruit juices, you have the fiber removed, so you're getting the full force of the fructose. This is why fruit juice is a lot more fattening, as we might say, than actual fruit. So don't cut out fruits and vegetables unless, there's one exception, if you're following a ketogenic diet, which is an extremely low carbohydrate diet that doesn't allow more than 20 grams of carbohydrates a day, you're not going to be able to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.
So if you like maybe one piece of fruit and a little bit of vegetables, that should only be followed temporarily. I don't believe that anyone should follow a ketogenic diet more than maybe six, seven weeks tops. So that's the only exception.
All other diets, you should always include fruits and vegetables, contrary to what these knuckleheads in these YouTube videos tell you. They don't know their ass on their elbow. Well, actually, not eating dietary fiber, that was my next point, but I already actually talked about that.
You have to have dietary fiber, it has a number of health benefits besides feeding the intestinal microbiome, prevents constipation, it helps to lower blood fats like cholesterol, it's very good for you. When you eat dietary fiber, the intestinal bacteria produce three short-chain fatty acids, butyrate, propionate, and acetate, that do a number of benefits for health, including helping to prevent colon cancer, helping to adjust your appetite so you're not overly hungry, and actually, the butyrate can travel to your brain and help to break down certain proteins that accumulate and cause diseases like Alzheimer's disease. So don't ignore dietary fiber.
Another common mistake, and this happens, I see it a lot of people, they eat too fast. They keep stuffing their food. It takes about 20 minutes for the apostat, or the appetite detection center in your brain to detect that you're eating food, and if you eat too fast, you could wind up eating too many calories, and it'll ruin a diet, and in worst-case scenario, it can help increase obesity and increase body fat accretion.
So when you eat, you want to slow down. I mean, there was an old system of, well, it goes back to the turn of the 20th century. There was a fad called Fletcherism.
It was started by a guy named Horace Fletcher, and the deal there was he had everybody chew their food 100 times before swallowing, 100 times, and this was followed by a lot of celebrities of the era, including the President of the United States at the time. So you don't really need to eat that slowly. The idea by Fletcherism, he felt that by chewing the food that much, it made it easier in the digestive system, and you'd absorb more nutrients.
There is a certain amount of truth to that, meaning that if you chew the food more thoroughly, you do make it easier on your digestive system, but you don't need to chew them 100 times. The whole point is to eat more slowly, give your brain a chance to detect that you're actually eating, and you'll wind up eating less. It's a little trick.
Also, another little trick is to drink a 12-ounce glass of water before meals. That will actually reduce your appetite as much as 30%, so you don't overeat. This next one is, I have to admit, it's not common with bodybuilders, and that's not eating enough protein, but it can occur, and this again relates to that earlier problem of not eating too few calories.
A lot of times, bodybuilders and athletes will go on diets that are so stringent in the calorie intake and the reduction of fat intake that they wind up not consuming enough protein. When that happens, you're going to lose muscle when you're dieting. Protein is very, very important to increase your protein intake when you're on any type of diet.
As a matter of fact, I recommend for a bodybuilder who wants to retain as much muscle as possible while on a diet, you want to ingest up to 3.3 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. Protein will help you retain muscle when dieting, and of course, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to know you need protein for building muscle. If you don't eat enough protein, you're not going to be able to build muscle.
What's the ideal amount of protein to eat under normal conditions? It ranges from 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight to 2.2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight. I go with the upper figure, 2.2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, which comes out to about a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. If you consume that much protein, you can't go wrong.
Another problem, again, the flip side of eating too little protein is eating too much protein. Again, a lot of bodybuilders, they hear about the need for protein, so what they do is they kind of stuff their faces. I remember interviewing an elite professional bodybuilder who was 12 meals a day, was eating 600 to 800 grams of protein a day.
There's no way the body can utilize that much protein. The good news is that if you're active like this guy was, I mean, he worked out twice a day, six times a week, the chances of that excess protein being converted into body fat are nil. It's not going to happen.
In active people, excess protein is oxidized. The nitrogen portion of the protein is converted into urea and excreted out of the body, excreted through the kidneys, but there's no need to stuff your face with protein. Eating any more protein than the figures I just mentioned, again, 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight, is not going to make you any bigger.
All you're going to do is, you're just wasting it, and you're actually increasing the burden of protein metabolism on your liver and your kidneys. Those are the two organs that basically metabolize protein. You're not going to really harm them by eating excess protein, but you are increasing the burden of work on those organs, and why do that when you're not going to get any benefit out of it? It doesn't make any sense.
Another common mistake, well, I wouldn't call it a mistake, it's a fallacy. You see this a lot, a lot, where they say, you've got to eat a lot of carbohydrates if you really want to grow. Bodybuilders need to eat as many carbohydrates as endurance runners.
That's bullshit. Bodybuilders do not, first of all, nobody, there is no human requirement for carbohydrate because your liver can convert other things into glucose. What you need is glucose.
That's the sugar that circulates in the blood. Your liver is perfectly capable, through a process called gluconeogenesis, of converting various substances into glucose, including amino acids, lactate, and glycerol from fat. You don't need carbohydrates.
I'm not saying you shouldn't eat carbohydrates. What I'm saying is you should eat, you should not go crazy on the carbohydrates because depending on your natural sensitivity to carbohydrates, eating too many carbohydrates could be a problem. If you're insulin insensitive or pre-diabetic, you don't handle carbohydrates well, and there's a greater chance of the carbohydrates being converted into fat if consumed in excess.
Now, some of these knucklehead experts, they'll say that, oh, carbohydrate, you can't get fat from eating carbohydrate because they're oxidized in the liver. Oh, God, that's such a bunch of crap. All you got to do is look around at these people that all eat all these refined sugar.
Some of them are hugely obese. They didn't get that way from eating protein. They got that way from eating carbohydrate.
The notion that you can eat any amount of carbohydrate without getting fat is just that they're in their own world. That's not real world. That's BS.
I know that myself. Whenever I cut carbohydrate, when I competed in bodybuilding, whenever I cut carbohydrates out, I always lost vast amounts of body fat, and if I kept my protein high, I lost very little muscle. I also ate a good amount of fat.
That's another thing they say. Fat makes you fat. Well, I was eating, my diet sometimes was 30% fat, 30% of calories as fat, and yet I lost fat constantly, every week, as long as my carbohydrate intake was down.
Don't listen to those clowns. I call them ivory tower academic clowns. They're full of crap.
Some people can handle carbohydrates better than others. If you can handle carbohydrates and you don't gain fat from them and you feel they give you more and more energy, fine. A certain amount of carbohydrates is good to have because you need carbohydrates to replenish glycogen in muscle and liver.
Glycogen in muscle is your main fuel for anaerobic exercise like bodybuilding training, so it is good to have carbohydrates. You just don't want to overdo it, but don't believe that you need to eat the same amount of carbohydrates as somebody who's engaged in endurance work. That's bull, but I still see that a lot.
Finally, the last thing I'll mention is not drinking enough water, not drinking enough fluids. You'd be surprised how many people will walk around dehydrated. I mean, you have to drink, there's no real set limit to the notion that you have to drink eight glasses of water a day.
That comes from nowhere. Somebody just took that out of the air, but you really should drink enough fluid so that you never get dehydrated. Remember, when your body metabolizes protein, your body uses a lot of water in metabolizing protein, so you lose water.
When you go on a low-carbohydrate diet, it has a natural diuretic effect. You lose water. You have to replace those fluids.
My last point as far as nutrition mistakes here, there's many, many more. I only covered a couple. I don't want to go too long, so I only covered these 10 or 11 points, but you want to pay attention to fluid intake.
Make sure you drink enough water. Fruits, by the way, are 95% water, so they count towards that too. So that's about it for the nutrition, common nutrition mistakes.
