The Truth About Cutting Calories

I love to talk training! If you have read any of my past articles, like How Not to Warm Up, Making Gains with Pain, and Stick Your Neck Out and Everything Push Ups, you know that I always try to deliver the smartest, most innovative and most effective strength and conditioning concepts that I can.

Trust me when I tell you that there is plenty more where that came from.

With that said, I’m going to take a break from talking training and share with you my Performance U approach to nutrition.

Let’s face it, what you eat and how you eat it can really make or break the effectiveness of your program, regardless of how good it is.

It is for that reason that all of my clients and athletes receive an orientation class that lays the foundation for fundamental nutrition concepts in relation to performance and fat loss. This is a concept that I adopted from Phil Kaplan.

The class is always a big hit with everyone who takes it and I have seen drastic changes in how fast my folks excel during training since starting the class some years ago.

I cannot tell you that the method I use is the best and only way to do things. There are plenty of effective methods out there.

However, I will tell you that the Performance U method is simple, practical and most importantly, it works!

If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be in business.

 

Calorie Restrictive Diets   

Everyone knows the word “calorie”. Many folks even know how many calories they are consuming per day.

However, I’m shocked at the amount of athletes who still have no idea what a calorie actually is.

What is a calorie?

Do you know?

If not, you may not know as much about nutrition as you thought.

A calorie is a unit of heat.

Your body is essentially a heat machine. Hence the term “burn” calories.

Now, I will admit that there is some merit to the relationship of how many calories you consume a day to the amount you burn per day.

However, the way I recommend my clients and athletes to eat, they end up taking in less calories and burning more, which I will explain later.

In my opinion, unless you are an advanced athlete or a physique competitor in the later stages of a fat loss phase, I don’t recommend counting calories for the simple fact that not all calories are created equal.

Here’s an example of why not it’s not just about how many calories you consume:

Let’s say that we take two guys of fairly equal size and fitness level. We put both guys on the same training program and allow each man to eat 3,000 calories per day.

Guy A – can only get his calories from lean meats /fish, fresh fruits and vegetables and sweet potatoes and brown rice

Guy B – can only get his calories from candy, ice cream and fast food

After 8 weeks or so, who do you think is going to look better and perform better?

Obviously Guy A.

So even though both men trained the same way and ate the same amount of calories, they will most definitely end up with very different results.

This is why when it comes to calories, it’s not the quantity that’s most important, it’s the quality.

 

Coming Next

  My next post will discuss Fat restrictive diets.   Be sure to check back tomorrow.