gwarp posted:

can i lift on a calorie deficit?

im curious why you would try. its like if you stayed up for a couple nights in a row lifting weights instead of sleeping, you're not only sabotaging your apparent goal but also adding all these other additional risks as well. there may be a genuine reason for doing that instead of other weight-loss friendly exercise that i don't understand but lifting without putting enough energy in your body to break even would be unwise at best and compulsive behavior at worst

fleights posted:

225 lbs bench is in the bag today

Nice dude, must have really impressed the lads in HS freshmen weights class. Meanwhile ill be benchin 226 for reps.

fleights posted:

c_man posted:

weight lifting is a great hobby for insecure nerds. the engineers that i went to college with who went off to make six figures at tech companies are constantly telling me about all of the health benefits to weight lifting right after they get done talking about how /r/seduction is full of useful advice and which league of legends character they're playing this week.

what do engineers use for birth control?


their personalities

A steel girder

gwarp posted:

can i lift on a calorie deficit? i take bcaa before cycling on an empty stomach, so i could also take that before lifting, but i don't think it would do anything.

This is pretty sound for the most part. I don't think BCAAs are worth the money, the only essential amino you really want is leucine, and isoleucine interferes with it's absorption (they both are absroebed through the same pathway). Leucine on it's own increases protein synthesis and stymies protein degradation, it's the most important amino for the purposes of lifting. The problem? It takes like poison, worst tasting shit in the world. My God, but, as a bodybuilder, are you not already eating from the trashcan of Exercise Physiology?

There is, also, no real detriment to lifting in a calorie deficit, in fact, it generally (sans keto) increases insulin sensitivity which is beneficial. Can use a calorie cycling regime (intermediate or alternate day fasting), which is, imo, the best way to lift/exercise, provided physical activity levels aren't too demanding (i.e. being an olympic swimmer). The vast majority of muscle weight, and size comes from water, due to glucose stores in the muscle (glycogen) which hold 2x their weight in water. But, this is ephemeral, and not a good indicator of actual muscle accretion or loss (muscle here, defined as quantity of actin and myosin, z-bands, the myofibrils, rather than by weight/size). Decent overview: http://www.weightrainer.net/physiology/Moore_Sarcoplasmic.html

Within the sarcoplasm there are soluble (or aqueous) components (making up 80 percent of it); composed of ions and soluble macromolecules like enzymes, carbohydrates, different salts and proteins, as well as a great proportion of RNA. This watery component can be more or less gel-like or liquid depending on the condition and the activity phases of the cell. In general, margin regions of the cell are gel-like and the cell's interior is liquid.

When people experience a loss of "muscle" in a calorie deficit, or on a keto diet, the perceived loss in muscle is due to atrophy of the plasmic space encompassed within muscle cells, but again, this is ephemeral and less relevant than protein tissue degradation. Provided you keep your protein intake high (it needs to be higher when cutting calories, proportional to the calorie deficit) then loss of muscle tissue will be avoided, as well as potentiating muscle accretion. Yes, it is possible, and easy imo (but slow), to build muscle in a calorie deficit, but the amount of volume training the muscles can handle will decrease due to lower energy substrate availability.

Impper posted:

im getting hgh

thought you were using that shit for a long time already?

anyways, careful, a lot of it is fake.

Superabound posted:

is it possible to build muscle up from nothing

I don't know if this is a serious question but yes of course.

or should i try getting really fat first and coming at it from the other direction

I would not recommend it.

fleights posted:

slowly gain fat as you slowly gain muscle, thats my advice, take it with a grain of salt

Salt is good if you want your veins to look like they're going to pop out

swampman posted:

So from now on I should fast every other day, and on the days that I am eating, I should eat two cans of tuna, 12 bananas, 3 gallons of water, and what else?

The critical thing about diet and exercise is that it's highly subjective due to people having varying lifestyles and physiology, which translates into a variance in dietary requisites. So, a lot of it is fine tuning various approaches that work best for the individual. For people who are relatively sedentary, I think an intermittent fasting approach works well, where a person consumes their daily food allowance within a 6-8hr time frame. It helps with satiation and quelling hunger, but that is again relative to the individual. A big problem sedentary people face is insulin resistance, the issue is further compounded because a lot of our food is comprised of high processed junk foods. As an aside, the success of keto diets is largely due to the aforementioned, rather than keto being any more efficacious of a dietary method (it's merely better tailored for sedentary people compared to high carb diets in circumstances where high carb diets are superfluous or deleterious).

I'm not quite sure what your goals are here with the tuna and banana diet? Losing weight, building muscle, or just maintaining a general sense of well-being?

Two cans of tuna is like ~50g protein? 12 bananas is around 1,200 calories from glucose/fructose? I would probably recommend some type of variance to that, at least to break up the boring monotony. An "ideal" diet is higher in protein, which is both expensive and may be difficult for a vegan? I don't know if you eat eggs or not, but I like the liquid eggwhites from costco, $7 for ~300g protein—it's cheaper than whey and the scrambled eggs turn out alright. Another thing, if you break down your weekly caloric intake average (assuming AltDay-Fasting), you're only eating 3.5x a week consuming ~1,300 worth of energy substrates those days (I personally don't count protein towards caloric requirements because of how the body processes it*), so it's 4,500 calories for the week, which is 650cal a day (or 750 if you count the protein). Kind of low, and with low calorie diets, you want to have a disproportionate amount of the calories coming from ingested protein, to prevent the body from using endogenous amino acids (i.e. muscle) to convert into glucose as a fuel source to power the central nervous system, if that makes sense? While 1,200 calories worth of sugar is kind of "bad" in a decontextualized pov, since the weekly calorie intake is so low, risks of insulin resistance cumulation is nil or negligible (concomitant my assumptiong you ride a fixie all day like a degenerate). To go on a tangent: Insulin resistance is really bad. Chronic insulin resistance is both unhealthy, potentiates a host of extremely bad health issues, and leads to those weird types of fat deposits you see on all old rich white people who continually have to get chin lifts due to jowl formations.

Anyways, while I personally like alternate day fasting, and incorporating intermittent fasting on days that I do eat, it might be difficult for people who are on their feet all day? They may run the risk of being chronically hypoglycemic, which is not a fun experience. I would try an intermittent fasting approach first and see if that resonates with you (scheduling wise) and your body. This guy does a pretty decent overview of how IMF looks: http://www.leangains.com/2008/06/brief-primer-on-popular-approaches-to.html http://www.leangains.com/2010/04/leangains-guide.html It doesn't have to be this rigid or formulaic, however.



*Protein intake essentially staves off muscle catabolism. The body's utilization of protein and conversion to glucose is an energy negative process for all intents and purposes due to being greatly inefficient (something like only 10-20% return on energy invested?). While ingesting protein *does* stymie weight loss on the weigh scale, the type of weight is muscle and as such should be viewed positively rather than negatively. Protein is awesome, the only negative is the cost and ethical dilemmas that arise from the production of protein sources. I personally would eat 200g worth of fish protein a day, subsequently dying from mercury poisoning, if I could afford http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11838888

Edited by AmericanNazbro (Sept. 13, 2014 17:57:03)