Originally Posted by Zee

Things I know...
- Insulin control is the most important thing for fat and muscle production... A good diet keeps your insulin steady with minimal peaks and valleys. Diets hiogh in sugars and starches will cause your insulin to spike after eating. Working out hard causes your insulin levels to drop. Plan your nutrition accordingly. I like eating a paleo leaning diet. Not strict paleo, because I think being on a strict diet of any sort sucks and causes you to fall off the wagon, but if I am choosing between foods, i will pick foods that fit a more paleo centric diet.
- A calorie is not a calorie... Stop counting calories, start counting nutrition
- Great abs are built in the kitchen
- You cannot spot reduce, people coming and working abs to get a 6 pack are wasting their time
- Long bouts of cardio are catabolic (will reduce muscle mass)... weight lifting is anabolic (wil increase muscle mass)... HIIT is the best thing you can do to get lean. Snowboarding is HIIT!!!
- You shuld eat slightly less on days that you don't work out.
- 6 small meals are better than 3 big ones
- Skipping breakfast is one of the worst things that you can do
- Most personal trainers are a waste of time and money, although there are some that know their stuff.
- Compound lifts are your friend, isolation movements are generally useless and a waste of time unless you are a professional bodybuilder
- Processed food is evil!

That's my contribution, I'm 37, and have been working out since I was 16. This is stuff I have learned over the years.

Originally Posted by spirited driver

Ahahahaha, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Where do I begin? I won't waste my time going back and forth with this brilliant scholar, but maybe she can explain how I regularly eat food with large amounts of calories and protein and hold a low (sub 10%) BF. Wait, I can answer that, GENETICS. I'm a fucking ectomorph and god knows when my metabolism will slow down, but it sure isn't now, and for the time being it's busy keeping the fat off. I carry very little body fat no matter what I eat- where in your junior college textbook is that? Nevermind, it's right in front of my mirror. And where do you get off assuming I haven't gone to school for or relating to this topic? If you recall, all I originally said was that giving people blanket answers is misleading, and trying to cover it by telling them you're in "school for it" is even worse. Go preach to some overweight 40 year old at 24 Hour Fitness that wants to "change their life".

In addition, the website you linked to contains information written by Maia Appleby, a PERSONAL FUCKING TRAINER. I rest my case.

Originally Posted by BoardTheSnow73

Not everyone has the same fitness goals. So to make blanket statements like :

tends to piss off a lot of us weight lifters who have had good success when using supplements. I’m not completely defending supplements because a lot of them are basically marketing hyped sugar pills, but the tried and tested ones have their place. Many of us weightlifters go through bulking phases where we purposefully eat calories in excess of maintenance level to increase muscle/strength/athletic performance. For a large person like myself who lifts a lot of weights and tears down a large amount of muscle, you do not eat enough protein in your diet alone to make progress. Smaller people with fast metabolisms also have a hard time getting enough protein through their normal diets, which is why thousands of “How to Gain Muscle for Hardgainers” articles have been written.

When bulking, the idea is to build as much muscle as possible without becoming a 300lb blob. If you’re going to be eating extra calories for this purpose it makes sense to increase protein intake more than carbs or fat. Protien builds muscle. As you have stated, unused protein still turns into fat. However, as even the article you quoted shows, protein has a much more roundabout path to becoming fat. Protein is digested more slowly than carbs, and remains in the bloodstream longer thanks to all those processes that it goes through, so your body is more likely to put it to good use before storing it. This leads to the sought after positive nitrogen balance and anabolic state. Eating protein vs carbs also has less impact on raising insulin levels which makes your body less likely to store what it gets as fat. I guess it depends on what your “normal diet” is but for some of us it gets to be a pain to eat another meal, especially when all you want is the protein. It also gets to be unreasonably expensive to eat steak, fish, and chicken all the time. A protein supplement is much less expensive.

There’s no reason to overdo it on the protein shakes. Taking a 50 gram protein shake won’t really help you much more than taking a 25 gram shake. I can’t remember exactly, but I believe the maximum a typical person can absorb at one time is from 15-30 grams of protein depending on the size of the individual and weather you have been physically active before ingesting it. Through many years of training, I have experimented with and documented the effects of many different diets. I have found that if I take in the same amount of calories over the same amount of daily meals and perform the same amount of weekly workload, if I have a high percentage of protein, I gain a lot of muscle and strength, whereas if I have a higher percentage of carbohydrates I gain a much larger percentage of fat and strength gains are minimal.

As far as creatine, I personally don’t find it to be all that amazing. There are people who swear by it, but I always wonder how much of the effectivness comes from suggestibility and the placebo effect. I have used it several times and from my experience it did very little unless I take 3 times the recommended dosage and spread it throughout the day (which is expensive and a giant pain in the ass). I did have good results from using Cell Tech. But I wonder how much of that was because of the “Crea-Edge™ (Hardcore Anabolic Creatine Matrix)”, “Osmodrol™ (Hyperosmotic Cell-Volumizer)”, and “InsuloDrive™ (Accelerated Insulin Maximizer)”, and how much of it was the 75 grams of pure sugar per serving. My guess is that it was the sugar high.

Originally Posted by NyInfamous'Girl

Listen you fucking dumb ass, clearly you are mistaking what I am saying. If your a body builder that lifts every day busting your ass in the gym then YES YOU NEED MORE CALORIES AND PROTEIN. But for a person who is trying to lose weight and tone up they only need a certain amount of protein, anything over what they really need BASED ON THEIR ACTIVITY LEVEL WILL TURN TO FAT. As for your genetics- being as though you can stuff your face all day and not gain a weight, thats great for you but not true for a majority of the rest of the world. This thread is not about you jack ass. Honestly, your an really just an arrogant shithead who is wasting my time.

Originally Posted by NyInfamous'Girl

Your right. The protein powders and supplements and all that really does depend on your fitness goals. It is hard to find a good protein powder however, a lot of them have so much junk in it that you dont need that will actually do your body more harm then good- and thats more of what I was getting at. I should have mentioned that in the post.