Nutritional Status Quo

[Devyn Stewart]

Coach Santana,

I'm of the understanding that the traditional bodybuilding model of nutrition goes a little bit like this:

Calculate your TDEE. Add/subtract calories if you want to gain/lose weight. Once you reach your goal, add back in/take back out calories to reach your TDEE, which may be slightly higher or lower depending on your new calculated TDEE given your new body weight.

This has not bee my experience at all, though my experience is limited. The way I have experienced it happening is that my body will adapt to a given amount of calories and then stay at the body weight it adapted to. For example, if my TDEE as their calculators put it is 3500, if I get 4000 calories, I will not gain a pound a week for many weeks in a row. I might gain 3 pounds the first week, 2 the second, and then stop entirely. And then if I were to cut down to 2000 calories, I would not lose 4 pounds week for many weeks. I would lose 6 pounds the first week, maybe 4th the second and third and then stop. I guess I've experienced calories kind of as a state function rather than a path function. That is to say that if I eat 5100 calories, my body will gain up to 235 whether I slowly add the calories to 5100 or simply start eating that much immediately, the resulting weight will be the same. Has this been your experience as well? Is the traditional viewpoint wrong, and what makes it wrong? Thanks for your input.

[Robert Santana]

Devryn,

It has been my experience that the TDEE calculators are not always accurate and do not account for individual variability. It has also been my experience that clients tend to report what they eat on one day or "the weekdays" and neglect to mention that they were not consuming the same amount of food on "the weekends." It is rarely the case that an uncoached person eats XXX number of calories for 7 consecutive days per week. The traditional viewpoint is that these calculators are an estimate and not meant to be taken as gospel. It will work for most for establishing nutrient needs but changes will need to be tailored as time goes on, training advances, and other factors influence metabolic rate.

[Devyn Stewart]

I see. Has it been your experience that, once you have an established daily maintenance calories, the traditional idea of 500 calories per day resulting in 1 pound per week has worked in practice? You see, it hasn't normally worked that way for me, so I was wondering if that idea is something that exists mostly in textbooks and that experts use different heuristics to determine an appropriate deficit and its adjustments along a weight loss period.

[Robert Santana]

No most certainly not. The "3500-calories-equals-1-lb-of-fat" rule is the result of a misinterpretation of research conducted in the early 20th century. I covered this at my presentation at the 2017 SSCA. In short, the biochemical studies of the early 1900s looked at the fat content of adipose tissue biopsies, bombed it, and reported a mean caloric content of ~3000 calories. In the 1930s Strang and colleagues conducted metabolic chamber studies where pre-measured food was provided, participants resided in a metabolic chamber, and using gas exchange they determined how many calories they had to overfeed to induce 1 lb of weight gain and how many calories they had to restrict to induce 1 lb of weight loss. The mean restriction was ~3700 calories per week. So we had ~3000 from the biochemical studies, ~3700 from the metabolic ward studies; 3500 sounded like a pretty good number to use as a "rule of thumb." However, the range of values in the metabolic chamber studies was as low as 1400 and as high as 6900 meaning that some individuals only needed to restrict 200 calories per day to induce 1 lb of weight loss and others needed to restrict nearly 1000 calories per day to achieve the same result. The conclusion: Lots of biological variability here. The only way to determine an appropriate deficit is to subtract calories until you lose weight and keep records of it. Then see if it holds true in subsequent cuts.

[Devyn Stewart]

Wow, what an in-depth answer! I appreciate all of that information, and I'll use it in the future. If you don't mind me asking one more question, I'm curious as to what your experience has been. Have you found that similar caloric levels for a given person will result in the same body weight after a given amount of time/training generally? Like, for example, a person eats 4000 calories throughout their LP. They finish LP at 220. They then begin eating 5000 calories and gain up to 240 while gaining strength. Has it been your experience that if that person were to reduce calories to 4000 again, that his body would slowly approach 220 like before? I imagine there is a good amount of variability here as well, but I'm interested to know if you've noticed a general trend, like if someone tends to retain their increased weight and you might only expect that guy to lose to 225. Thanks!

[Robert Santana]

Not a problem! My experience has been that as a lifter gets stronger, fat can be lost on higher calories and it typically takes more calories to maintain bodyweight after a cut. This has been my own firsthand experience too. I can lose fat on around 2500-3000 calories whereas pre SS I aimed for 1800 because I didn't train as hard and wasn't as muscular. I also did this by choice so there is an argument to be made that I could have lost on higher calories. I do not think lifting will double your energy expenditure per se, but you could get an extra meal or two in then you would otherwise be able to after a couple of years of serious training.

What I will say is that the calories necessary to cut below a person's "set point" doesn't seem to change and if anything that number gets lower. For instance, I'm 185 right now. To get to 175 or maybe even 170 I can accomplish this on 2500 calories. Now if I want to get down to 160-165 I will likely need 1800-2000 calories. So remember, this depends on total fat mass. As your fat mass gets lower, your body fights back and downregulates metabolic rate (I.e. adaptive thermogenesis). Outside of this situation, I find that lifters need more calories over time assuming strength is increasing.

[Devyn Stewart]

Not a problem! My experience has been that as a lifter gets stronger, fat can be lost on higher calories and it typically takes more calories to maintain bodyweight after a cut. This has been my own firsthand experience too. I can lose fat on around 2500-3000 calories whereas pre SS I aimed for 1800 because I didn't train as hard and wasn't as muscular. I also did this by choice so there is an argument to be made that I could have lost on higher calories. I do not think lifting will double your energy expenditure per se, but you could get an extra meal or two in then you would otherwise be able to after a couple of years of serious training.

What I will say is that the calories necessary to cut below a person's "set point" doesn't seem to change and if anything that number gets lower. For instance, I'm 185 right now. To get to 175 or maybe even 170 I can accomplish this on 2500 calories. Now if I want to get down to 160-165 I will likely need 1800-2000 calories. So remember, this depends on total fat mass. As your fat mass gets lower, your body fights back and downregulates metabolic rate (I.e. adaptive thermogenesis). Outside of this situation, I find that lifters need more calories over time assuming strength is increasing.

I see. So your experience has been just exactly opposite of the hypothetical situation I provided. That's interesting! I'd love to talk more, but I'm sure there's only so much information you can ask an expert to give away for free. Thanks!

[Robert Santana]

Are you a hard gainer? I have seen this in hard gainers. I'm referring to the middle of the bell curve in my example. Hard gainers are another story.

[Devyn Stewart]

Are you a hard gainer? I have seen this in hard gainers. I'm referring to the middle of the bell curve in my example. Hard gainers are another story.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "hard gainer". I was a very skinny young man for most of my life (6'3" ~165 before I started lifting and eating). Ever since I started tracking and consistently eating the amount I planned to each day, gaining weight when I want to has been no problem, other than it is occasionally difficult to get all the food into my belly that I want to.

I have only ever attempted weight loss once, and it was when I was ~195 -> ~180, so I was much too light to be attempting it in the first place (back when I was much more "bro"). I'll be attempting the post-LP reduction in calories outlined in Rip's "A Clarification" here soon (~235->~215-220 hopefully), so that's why I asked. I'm interested to hear what you have to say about hard gainers, though. Please do tell. It may apply to me, after all!

[nzafi]

how does this change for hard gainers?