BioLayne #9--Metabolic Damage

[tzanghi]

Jordan,

Have you seen this video from Layne Norton? I was curious about his ideas of slowly raising your metabolism over time. If you haven't seen the video, he essentially says that people with damaged metabolisms should slowly raise caloric load(on the scale of Twenty calories per week) over a long period of time. He said by this method he had a ~110 lb figure competitor eating over 2000 calories per day and maintaining weight. I had a few questions:

1)Does this sort of thing only work to get one back to a "normal" metabolic level? Or could it be used to increase one's metabolism to a very high level? Dave Asprey of bulletproofexec.com claims that he ate 4500 calories for 2 years without gaining weight.

2)Are the effects and processes of this type of approach similar to what happens when one does HIIT conditioning?

Thanks!

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

I've seen this video and in my opinion, Dr. Norton is dead-on correct in his assertions of people wrecking their metabolism and how to fix it. We have a very similar approach, as my end goal is to get someone to be fueling themselves with as much as possible while reaching their goals (especially as this relates to carbohydrate and fat intake). Per your questions:

1) There will be a point of diminishing returns, where intake above a certain level will either lead to inefficient weight gain, i.e. more fat than muscle. At this point, the macro levels need to be titrated down slightly for optimal results or the training needs to be altered in such a way where this increased intake is allowed for. I'd love to work with a person who eats 4000cal/day and 500g of carbs and wants to lean out, because now I have such a big range to work with for tweaking their food. The bulletproofexec guy follows a pretty keto-diet right? I've been trying to look into any research on upper levels of fat absorption and/or what sort of inefficient metabolic processes go on when dietary fat constitutes 60%+ of the dietary calories in an overfeeding state. From what I understand, the absorption is on the order of like 99.1% at an intake of 100g of fat a day. What about 300g/day though? Similarly, things like upregulating mitochondrial uncoupling proteins seems to have a big time increase in caloric expenditure with respect to the BMR and this seems to be increased via a higher fat diet. So if this extra "fuel" really isn't being put to good use, in our context-building muscle and recovering from training, then what does it matter if you eat 4500kcal (I'm just hypothesizing)? I just don't honestly know the answer to some of these questions, although I have some ideas based on evidence and anecdotal experiences/reports.

2) That's my interpretation, although the exact processes are a little fuzzy. HIIT does lots of different things that haven't been fully worked out, but I consider it an pretty integral part of training, save for some peaking cycles and rank novices.

[tzanghi]

I've seen this video and in my opinion, Dr. Norton is dead-on correct in his assertions of people wrecking their metabolism and how to fix it. We have a very similar approach, as my end goal is to get someone to be fueling themselves with as much as possible while reaching their goals (especially as this relates to carbohydrate and fat intake). Per your questions:

1) There will be a point of diminishing returns, where intake above a certain level will either lead to inefficient weight gain, i.e. more fat than muscle. At this point, the macro levels need to be titrated down slightly for optimal results or the training needs to be altered in such a way where this increased intake is allowed for. I'd love to work with a person who eats 4000cal/day and 500g of carbs and wants to lean out, because now I have such a big range to work with for tweaking their food. The bulletproofexec guy follows a pretty keto-diet right? I've been trying to look into any research on upper levels of fat absorption and/or what sort of inefficient metabolic processes go on when dietary fat constitutes 60%+ of the dietary calories in an overfeeding state. From what I understand, the absorption is on the order of like 99.1% at an intake of 100g of fat a day. What about 300g/day though? Similarly, things like upregulating mitochondrial uncoupling proteins seems to have a big time increase in caloric expenditure with respect to the BMR and this seems to be increased via a higher fat diet. So if this extra "fuel" really isn't being put to good use, in our context-building muscle and recovering from training, then what does it matter if you eat 4500kcal (I'm just hypothesizing)? I just don't honestly know the answer to some of these questions, although I have some ideas based on evidence and anecdotal experiences/reports.

2) That's my interpretation, although the exact processes are a little fuzzy. HIIT does lots of different things that haven't been fully worked out, but I consider it an pretty integral part of training, save for some peaking cycles and rank novices.

This is very cool stuff, man, thanks. Asprey does eat predominantly keto. I don't know if he made his way up to 4500 per day, but he claims to and he does look lean. If I could get up to 4500 even if it wasn't being used for muscle-building, I would certainly enjoy eating all that food! But it would be much better to get the food to work for you. I've gotten up to ~4000-5000 per day for about a week or so experimenting solely eating meat, butter, coconut oil, cocoa powder, and low-carb veggies. I ended up putting on a few pounds, but I did have the occasional cheat meal(including Thanksgiving), so I can't say this was actually useful to learn something from.

It's very cool for me to think about slowly increasing your caloric expenditure, but on the level he was mentioning, it would just be too long. However, if I had messed my metabolism up to the level of the figure competitors he mentioned, something would definitely have to change. That shit is nuts.

Thanks, again, Jordan.

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

You'd be surprised how common it is in the female demographic. It's really sad. Thanks for posting the video man!