Form Factor Nutrition – Part One

Introduction

Finding the right nutrition plan is like finding the right lover, this article series offering a novel approach to just such an endeavor. It argues that there is no ‘right’ nutrition plan, because looking for the right nutrition plan is a fruitless pursuit, a waste of mental energy. Like love, the right nutrition plan should instead come to you, should fit you, should complement you and your personality and your life. I find it dispiriting that non-athletic populations now require eating agendas, veritable consumption itineraries in Excel as complex as an office work-chart, to see them to an admirable physique. It is to take something instinctive and biological and routinize it, to suck the joy from one of life’s simple luxuries. Form Factor Nutrition is my effort to restore the pleasure inherent in eating, to put the stick and rudder of nutrition in the hands of the people and wrest it from the grips of a distracted diet industry.

For those of us in the industrialized world, the food scarcities our grandparents endured have all but disappeared. In turn, we have lost touch with our hunger. Hunger was a regular sensation for our elders, an experience welcomed before supper, which, in just a few generations, faded for millions entirely. Before fast food, before microwaves, before canned goods, you had to cook to eat. Vegetables had to be chopped, batter had to be whipped, and those chocolate chip cookies you’re eying right now baked.

Think about it, of the meals you ate today, how many did you cook? I am lucky to eat two meals a day birthed from my own labor. Unsurprisingly, these two meals provide the greatest preponderance of fiber in the form of vegetables and protein in the form of meats, making them the healthiest meals of my day.

If you are searching for the answer to the obesity epidemic, or maybe phenomena a little more intimate – your love handles, for instance – I have an answer. We eat too much food. A soon to be released research study by Swinburn et al draws near perfect correlation between food availability and our expanding waistlines, destroying, in the process, all claims of insulin resistance and excessive dietary fat as causal mechanisms in obesity. We just eat too damn much.

Yet every day more articles hit mainstream media outlets talking about the dangers of food sub-types – too much fat, too much salt, too much sugar – and transient, unidentifiable, intractable ailments like Syndrome X. This is bullshit at its finest. Steven Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Gates of Fire, amongst other works, while working at an advertising agency was told by his boss to “make up a disease. That way we can sell the cure.”

Look, the cure is less food. Our problem is too easy and too ready of access to foods that never find themselves situated in a proper meal. Can you imagine sitting down to a meal of eggs, toast, and a Snicker’s bar? How about chicken marsala, asparagus, and a bag of Dorito’s? One of these is not like the other. If you operate like a typical American, these isolated food products that should be treats or occasional indulgences make up 75% of your daily intake, all eaten in isolation.

Ironically, in my consultation practice, my clients and I start by not talking about food. We begin first by unpacking the client’s psychological tethers and self-limiting beliefs independent of whatever their physique goals may be. The same halting resistance confronts both my fat-loss and my muscle-gain clients. If we can key in to the absurdities and jettison them from our conversation, if we can barricade the mainstream media’s perpetuation of misinformation, we win.

Once the mental stuff is out of the way, we start plowing through the physical limitations: time, money, irregular schedules, irregular sleep, no gym, stress. Carving out time to exercise usually is not a problem. Finding time to prepare healthy meals, however, is another beast entirely.

And this is where my nutrition methodology, what I call Form Factor Nutrition, fits in. It is nutrition for the real world, a world with power outages, business luncheons, the co-worker who brings in cookies every day to the office, your significant other’s parents who want you over for dinner, and children who demand pizza five nights a week.

In the field of quantum physics, a form factor is as a function yielding the properties of a specific particle interaction in absence of the underlying physics. When a calculation proves too difficult to solve, a form factor can be measured experimentally even if the underlying physics cannot be explained. Over the past ten years, as more supplement companies, food industry organizations, and financially vested interests began to sponsor peer-reviewed research, the usual filters in place served to vet information have failed to operate as well as they should. Academia is a funny place where grants can come as easily from for-profit corporations as they can from non-profit groups. As a result, the literature looks at present like a contradictory mess.

Thankfully, for those of us tied by divine providence to critical analysis, we march on undeterred. Most of the major questions surrounding the body, food, and exercise have been answered. The debates in the field now focus almost entirely around minutiae. In turn, this obsession over trivialities like low verses high carbohydrate diets, or whey verses casein protein, continues to intercalate the lay-world of fitness professionals, further perpetuating gobs of misinformation, and missing the caloric forest for the GI trees.

Form Factor Nutrition takes what I have seen to work best with my clients – how I analyze, compute, and derive a nutrition plan from the array of variables each case presents – and distills it down to its essence so anyone can use it. Zealotry comes in many forms, and depending on your specific background you may completely agree or emphatically disagree with my points. Regardless, these principles have helped and will continue to help me and my clients in our pursuit of physical excellence.

The Basics

Form Factor Nutrition borrows from the literature and protocols surrounding nutrient timing and intermittent fasting. At the heart of the system beats the pulse of culinary hedonism. I wanted to solve the problem of food choice and efface the sense of deprivation and chronic restriction with which dieters often cope. At the same time, I wanted to provide tools for the less genetically gifted to make up for their biological physiognomy. By bracketing the majority of our calories before, and most chiefly after a training session, we optimize the body’s metabolic pathways and shift our biology to more readily lose fat and gain muscle.

You may recognize this as nutrient partitioning, a concept I discussed in brief in an earlier article. It bears repeating here:

“Partitioning refers to what happens to calories when they find their way into your body. High-intensity activity, especially high-intensity resistance training, puts your body into an optimal nutrient partitioning state. By demanding a lot of your physiological systems, resistance training elevates a host of hormones and metabolic processes that encourage your body to build lean muscle and lose fat. When you consume food before, during, and after your workout your body wants to lose fat and gain muscle. Partitioning, then, refers to how many of those calories get stored as body fat and how many of those calories go toward replenishing muscle glycogen or building lean muscle tissue.

Nutrient timing is getting more press in mainstream literature; in essence, timing your food intake to benefit maximally from the calories your body receives. Regardless of the type of training you’re doing, you are best off consuming the majority of your daily calories before, during, and immediately after training. All that cool stuff resistance training does to your body puts it into a repair and utilize state rather than a store and waste state. But here’s the kicker – to put your body in this state you need to tax it.”

In Form Factor Nutrition, a minimum 80% of your daily caloric allotment will come in the eight to twelve hour time span surrounding your workout. On non-training days, you will repeat the same pattern and have your meals in the same time frame. Martin Berkhan of Intermittent Fasting fame advocates something similar to his clientele. In routinizing your eating patterns, ghrelin, the primary hormone controlling hunger, will adapt to your new eating schedule, prolonging the onset of hunger and making the fasting period (gasp) enjoyable. No food is off limits. An emphasis is placed on the consumption of lean protein sources and adequate fiber in the form of vegetables. By limiting the times in which meals are consumed, practitioners are encouraged to provide their own meals and avoid powders and meal substitutes wherever possible. The benefits are as practical as they are physiological, not to mention psychological.

Meal frequency remains a topic of heated debate. There seems to be more misinformation surrounding it than any other topic in fitness. Form Factor Nutrition challenges the “small, frequent meal” proscription invoked by fiat, spread to every fitness publication and drilled into the minds of nutritionists and personal trainers by well-meaning but wholly uninformed experts.

The Myths of High Meal Frequency

The erroneous purported benefits of an eating pattern incorporating small, frequent feedings began with a simple misunderstanding. A few observational studies quickly hamstrung the theory in academia but somehow the memo never it made it to the mainstream press. Food costs the body energy to process, with different foods costing the body different amounts of energy. This cost, known as TEF, or the thermic effect of food, negates roughly 10% of the calories of a mixed diet. That means in order for the body to process and utilize 2,000 calories across a given day, 200 calories will be burned. Researchers noted that the consumption of a given meal nets an acute increase in thermogenesis within the body. Someone then extrapolated from this that, by eating more frequently, we can raise our overall daily thermic effect of food.

In the tight confines of theory, sure, this could work. But in reality, the body’s physiological processes are working off a much longer time line than most people think. A given meal’s thermic effect is directly proportional to the size of that meal. So a bigger meal merits a bigger thermic effect. In practical terms, if someone has a 1,500 calorie a day diet and eats three meals, that person will burn 50 calories at each meal, for a total of 150 calories burned per day. Now, let us presume the same person eats six meals for a total of 1,500 calories. At each of these meals 25 calories will be burned. 25 calories over six meals? 150 calories. Exactly the same as the three meals a day group. At the end of the day, no actual or measurable difference in thermogenesis can be found.

The obvious corollary to the belief surrounding the thermic affect of food is the notion that, in absence of frequent feedings, the body turns to amino acids for fuel and burns off lean body mass. A typical adjunct to this theory is the now infamous ’starvation mode.’ In tandem with the aforementioned phenomenon, starvation mode is the supposed down-regulation of metabolic rate that occurs under low meal frequency conditions. Both of these theories fail to hold water.

As far as human data for the above theories, well, there is none. In fact, studies investigating fasting or intermittent fasting show a slight increase in metabolic rate, likely from cathecolimine upregulation and the associated fidgeting from an increase in norepinephrine in the brain. This increase is maintained for the first 72 hours of the fast, RMR decreasing only after about three or four days of practically zero calories. And considering that an average sized meal takes five to six hours to digest, amino acids will be trickling in from a meal for quite a long time, and yes, all of the protein will be digested. The notion that the body can only absorb 30 grams of protein in a given interval? Yup. More unsubstantiated semi-intellectual theorizing. Presuming adequate protein, long-term research shows no loss in lean body mass under strict fasting conditions while eating at a maintenance caloric level.

In the end, meal frequency has absolutely no impact on fat loss or muscle gain. Body composition changes are predicated entirely on what they always have been:  total daily caloric intake and exercise modality. Eating more begets an increase in weight, eating less, a decrease, regardless of meal frequency. In part two we will look at the costs and benefits of dropping meal frequency, and what populations might benefit most from this approach to nutrition.

Tagged as: fat loss, muscle gain, Nutrition, partitioning