We have another article from our resident nutritionist Chris Chapman, aka MisterC aka M&Ms (who is now also making regular appearances in a monthly Mens fitness publication!)

This one provides some insight into his experiences in gaining weight. Yes, that's right, GAINING weight! Enjoy.

Introduction

This article combines my knowledge of nutrition, with my experiences as a Crossfitter, so hopefully many of you will find it relevant. In my 16 years of training, I’ve always been a “hard gainer.” To put it simply no matter how I trained, what I ate, and how much I wanted to put on some muscle, I always had the – enviable to some, no doubt – ability to maintain a pretty constant body weight.

For a while I’d been hearing about programmes which promised large gains in lean mass over a relatively short period, provided you put the hours in at the gym and were willing to consume a lot of calories – programmes like these are pretty well known to most, the best known being Squats and milk and Gallon of Milk a Day (GOMAD).

Theoretical background

The underlying mechanism for this process is the energy balance. This basically states that if you take in more energy through food than you expend, the body will store this energy. Usually this takes place in the form of fat, but under the right stimulus, i.e. strength training, and given enough protein, the body will store this protein as muscle.

The use of milk as excess calories here is simply due to its relative ease to consume. Drinking a gallon of milk will give you an extra 2400kCal, 200g carbs, 120g fat, 120g protein on top of your regular daily diet. Obviously, eating enough solid food to give you all these extra nutrients would be a quite a challenge, so milk is the way to go to tip the energy balance over to storage. While the milk is high in carbohydrates, which produce an insulin spike, this has a positive effect in this case because the insulin causes protein to be sequestered into muscle cells. Also, and quite importantly here, full fat milk is a good source of saturated fat. While the merits of this as a nutrient are the subject of much debate, in this case it has its benefits because this fat serves as a precursor to testosterone, which is needed for heavy weight training and muscle growth.

What I did

The Nutrition

Being a Crossfitter, I like rather more variety in my training than the Squats and Milk programme offered, so I thought I’d have a stab at GOMAD. In the literature about it, it says that drinking 4 litres (or 8 pints!) of full fat milk a day is not easy (true), so it’s a good idea to ramp up the amount as you go along. I planned to start on half a gallon, and increase it over the first week or 2 until I was on the full gallon. I never got to the full gallon stage; the most I regularly consumed was 6 pints a day. Below is an example of what I ate each day when I was consuming the greatest amount of milk:

·         Breakfast (also post-workout, as I train first thing): smoothie – pint of whole milk, tablespoon of peanut butter, 1-2 bananas,  1 & ½ scoops of whey protein powder;

·         AM: apple, 3 mini Babybel, large handful of almonds, pint of whole milk;

·         Lunch: chicken breast, vegetable sticks and cherry tomatoes, small pot of hummus, pint of whole milk

·         PM: large handful of almonds, pint of whole milk

·         Dinner: wholewheat pasta, 3 sausages, tomato and vegetable sauce, pint of whole milk

·         Eve: whatever I wanted, usually chocolate with nuts, but anything to get in as many calories as possible – peanut M&Ms came in useful here, as a 250g bag has over 1,000 calories – plus a pint of whole milk;

·         Daily supplements: fish oil, multi-vitamin and –mineral, probiotic.

This lot comes to a total of 5,330 kCalories, 450g carbohydrate, 284g protein, 272g fat.

The Training

As for training, I adapted my usual metcon-aholic training, to a programme that offered more heavy lifting. I liked the look of the Crossfit Strength Bias, not only because it offered more heavy lifting which would provide more muscle-building stimulus, but also because strength training is a weakness in my armoury, and this offered the opportunity to address this at the same time as my mass-building experiment. My training schedule throughout the GOMAD looked like this:

·         Day 1: squats, press, sub-5 minute metcon;

·         Day 2: longer (20m-ish) metcon using bodyweight exercises and/or running/rowing/skipping;

·         Day 3: heavy lift (usually deadlift or power clean), sub-12 minute metcon

·         Day 4: rest

·         Day 5: as day 3

·         Day 6: as day 2

·         Day 7: as day 3

·         Day 8: Rest

What happened to me

Weight gain certainly happened – my weight steadily increased from 11stone 3lbs to 12stone 8lbs in 3 weeks. Obviously not all of this was muscle, but once I stopped taking in all the extra calories and trimmed down, I stopped at 11 stone 12, a net gain of 9 pounds of muscle. On top of this, during the period my strength numbers went through the roof. Of the 12 different lifts I trained during this period, I got a personal best on 9, and as an illustration, my 1-rep max back squat went from 105kg to 115kg – this was something of a miracle, since I have always struggled with my squat.

However, it wasn’t all easy and pleasant. For the first couple of days, I revelled in being able to eat as much as I wanted. Drinking the milk wasn’t too much of a problem either to begin with. However, within a few days I started to feel full all the time. This persisted for at least a week after I finished the programme, and it took that much time for me to feel hungry again. I also felt bloated and my abdomen looked distended. I also experienced gastrointestinal discomfort.

However, overall the effect was positive. The muscle mass I gained I have kept despite returning to my previous diet, and the bloating and appetite loss soon disappeared. I did this in June, and when the weather turned colder and I had to dig out my winter clothes, I noticed they fitted tighter, especially around the shoulders, thighs and glutes.

Conclusion

Overall, it proved an interesting experiment, and one that showed that these systems are much-vaunted because they do work. If you want to add mass, they will certainly work, although at the time the side-effects were very unpleasant, and are worth bearing in mind if considering this course of action. If I did it again, I might invest in some lactase (the enzyme which helps us digest the sugars in milk) which could help reduce the bloating.

How to Paleo

So in our second part is an overview of how we roll with Paleo

Foods to avoid.

The Paleo Diet advocates the avoidance of three main groups of foods:

·         Grains: any wheat products, such as bread, pasta, couscous etc. These all contain gluten, which can damage the gut. It is thought that far more people than just those diagnosed with Coeliac suffer from gut damage and related issues due to gluten intake. These foods are also very high in carbohydrate, resulting in release of large quantities of insulin.

·         Legumes: these are mainly in the form of beans, but also include peanuts. They contain chemicals in the skin called lectins. These lectins, while deactivated by cooking (which is why you have to cook beans for so long), can cause damage to the gut, similar to that caused by gluten. These foods are also often a concentrated source of carbohydrate.

·         Dairy products: as well as many people being naturally intolerant to lactose, the main sugar in milk, these foods also produce a rapid insulin response, leading to rollercoaster blood sugar levels.

·         Processed foods: pretty much anything that comes in a packet. These foods almost always have high carbohydrate and calorie loads, as well as little nutritional benefit, and very often contain gluten or other gut irritants.

Avoidance of these foods will not only reduce your exposure to potentially harmful substances, it will also remove from your diet a lot of empty, nutrient-poor calories and insulin-spiking carbohydrates. While not a low carbohydrate diet as such, eating in this fashion will generally limit the amount of carbohydrates taken in, as well as ensuring that the food that you do take in is loaded with beneficial nutrients.

What to eat

The best description of what to eat comes from CrossFit founder Greg Glassman’s World Class Fitness in 100 words:

 “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar.”

To put it another way, eat it if you can kill it or dig it up. The basis of this diet is protein from meat and fish, carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables, and beneficial fats such as those found in avocadoes olive oil, nuts and seeds. Eating this way will ensure maximum concentration of nutrients, since these foods are in their natural state and have lost little of their nutrients through processing.

A typical day’s eating would look something like this:

·         Breakfast: bacon, eggs, apple;

·         Lunch: large salmon salad, olive oil and lemon juice dressing;

·         Afternoon snack: cup of blueberries, handful of almonds;

·         Dinner: steak, baked sweet potato, broccoli, carrots;

·         All washed down with gallons of the water you are probably already drinking.

From this illustration it is easy to see that rather than your meagre 5-a-day, you are taking in far more vitamins and minerals, vital in recovery, repair and disease prevention. Everything eaten is very dense in nutrients, and while it may appear high in protein, this has the twin benefits of giving you extra building blocks to recover from training and keeping you feeling fuller for longer. The carbohydrates all come from the fruit and vegetables, which are a much less dense source than grains or legumes, leading to a smaller increase in insulin secretion, and consequently steadier energy levels and fewer craving for sweet foods. Eating this way will also act as a type of natural appetite suppressant; since processed foods are often devoid of nutrients they often leave the body wanting more food, while eating whole foods with all their nutrients intact will lead to greater satiety as the body gets what it need from these foods.

That, in a nutshell, is the Paleo Diet. Hopefully this has outlined the many advantages of eating this way. What is also important to bear in mind is that it is not a religion, just a sensible method of eating, based on the way our bodies were designed to eat. Eating this way, in line with the way we have evolved, will enable you to function, train and recover better than ever, with stable, elevated energy levels and reduced risk of disease.

Next Part 3…More details of taking ‘die’ out of diet and what to eat.

Chris Chapman aka M&Ms aka MisterC 

Welcome to CrossFit Reading’s first Nutrition post with our resident nutritionist Chris Chapman, aka M&Ms aka MisterC. Chris holds a First Class Honours degree in Nutrition, and is currently completing his PHD as well as working as a freelance nutritionist.  

Relevently, Chris is also a CrossFitter, so we are very happy to listen and share in his knowledge as well as go to him in our endevours for some more personalised nutritional guidance.

So, to kick things off, and as an intro to what will be regular nutrition postings on our website and, as a lead up to Team CFR joining in the Paleo Party next month, here is the first of two parts on an introduction to the Paleo Diet.

The Paleo Diet

Part 1: The basics – What is Paleo?

The Palaeolithic Diet (Paleo diet) stems from pioneering work in the USA by, amongst others, Professor Loren Cordain. The basic premise, is that the human body, and more particularly its ability to metabolise food, has not kept pace with changes in our diet.

What this means in practice, is that we have developed, and are eating food our bodies cannot deal with, and in many cases these foods are actually doing us harm. The most commonly-cited example of this is gluten, a protein found in wheat products such as bread and pasta. In conditions such as coeliac, this protein can damage the lining of the gut, causing not only gastrointestinal symptoms such as bloating and diarrhoea, but also reduced absorption of nutrients and increased chances of bacterial infections.

One of the main principles of the Paleo way of eating is that of insulin control. Insulin is the hormone which the body releases to help metabolise glucose, the main carbohydrate fuel. While certainly useful for moving carbohydrate and protein into muscles to help them repair and refuel, insulin also promotes fat storage, while consistently elevated levels of insulin are linked to such conditions as Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. When you eat a meal high in carbohydrate, the body releases high levels of insulin, causing a sharp drop in blood sugar, resulting in feelings of fatigue. With these in mind, it is easy to see why controlling insulin levels can be beneficial.

The Paleo Diet advocates avoiding modern foods and returning to an ancestral diet, such as the foods which archaeological evidence tells us our ancestors ate. This is the diet we are designed to eat, and one from which our bodies can derive the maximum benefit.

The main benefits of this diet include:

·         Increased intake of vitamins and minerals, vital in repairing the damage caused by intense training;

·         Greater muscle gain, coupled with fat loss;

·         Reduced likelihood of heart disease, metabolic syndrome and related conditions;

·         Higher, more consistent energy levels due to more stabilised blood sugar;

·         Faster recovers from training;

·         Reduced cravings for sweet/sugary foods.

Come back soon for part 2...