Form Factor Nutrition – Part Three

Photography by Emily C. McArthur

After a good dose of scientific inquiry we’re onto the meat of our program, literally. I touched on intermittent fasting in part two and here we’ll see how it fits into a Form Factor Nutrition program. FFN (may as well acronymize it at this point) takes a lesson from fixed-time scheduling and productivity and applies it to the world of nutrition.

I design my eating schedule around the times in which I am most likely able to prep healthy, whole-food meals, and my clients do too. So rather than rushing about chugging protein shakes and downing bars to meet some arbitrary “eat every 2 to 3 hours” rule, FFN focuses exclusively on the quality and content over all else. If you enjoy what you’re eating – and I’ve yet to meet a person who actually enjoys living off of powder – you’re more likely to stick to your program. Striving for some theoretical optima takes a distinct backseat to getting the hard work done. With that said, let’s dive right in.

Step One: Find Your Time

Start off by mapping a daily schedule. I’ll give you two examples: Frank, the IT employee, and Allison, the student, whose schedules bear as little resemblance to each other as Velveeta does to cheddar.

Here’s a typical day for Frank:

• Up at 6:00am. Coffee.
• On the road at 7:00am.
• Grabs a Pepsi and donuts at the office at 8:00am.
• Works from 8:00am to 3:00pm snacking on nuts, candy, chips etc. If lunch is catered may pick up whatever is available. Typically something low in protein, high in carbs and fat.
• Finishes off the day at 5:00pm. Cruises to the gym and downs a Muscle Milk before his training session.
• Home at 7:00pm, flat out exhausted. Downs whatever is in the house, usually frozen pizza and chicken wings, and heads to bed by 10:00pm.

Now, is this the ideal schedule for someone looking to radically improve their physique? Unlikely. But working around our limitations is a requisite part of growth. Based on his itinerary it’s clear that Frank could benefit from an intermittent fasting protocol. Remember, we can train our bodies to get hungry at specific times by manipulating the hormone ghrelin, and that’s what Frank will do here.

Frank gets his first meal around 3:00pm. It’s a simple shift to move this first meal time to 2:00pm. From there he will intersperse quality meals until 10:00pm. Three meals would probably be ideal. He would eat one largish meal at around 3:00pm to break the fast, a smaller meal before hitting the gym at five, and then a large post-workout meal before heading to sleep. On training days his meals would be accompanied by ample starchy carbs, while on off days he’d focus more on healthy fats and fruits to pair alongside his protein.

Allison’s schedule as a student proves far more irregular than Frank’s, and when paired with an early morning workout, means she will need more meals. College students have schedules that often vary from day-to-day. Throw in extra-curricular activities and you have a packed schedule with minimal flexibility when it comes to nutrition. Allison would benefit from four evenly spaced meals per day: Breakfast before her workout, lunch after her workout, a mid-afternoon snack, and dinner. Macro-composition would be similar across all meals on all days given her workout schedule which has her in the gym six days a week.

Never compromise pre and post-workout nutrition for a set of dieting rules. At its core, Form Factor Nutrition is about matching proximal energy demand with proper caloric intake. By timing calories properly, bracketing protein and carbohydrate around a workout bout, though fat by no means should be excluded, you improve your chances of funneling those calories (that you were going to eat at some point of the day anyway) toward either increased power output during the workout or improved protein synthesis post-workout.

Step Two: Determine Your Maintenance Calories

There are a million different formulas out there to determine proper diet, maintenance, or mass gain caloric requirements. Ideally you’d take a week to track your intake, totaling your macronutrients and basing your deficit off of that final value. But my guess is that whoever is reading this wants to get started on their diet ASAP. Here’s the best simple and dirty formula I can give you for maintenance:

1. To determine protein requirements, multiply your bodyweight by 1.0 – 1.5. Those on a ‘cruising’ phase can drop protein closer to the 1.0 number. If you’re looking for more aggressive body transformation, multiply by a higher number (1.3 or above). That’s your total daily protein in grams.
2. Divide your bodyweight by 2. That’s your total daily fat in grams.
3. Daily carbohydrate total is body weight + 0, 5, 10, 15, or 20% of total body weight per hour of weekly exercise. If your exercise tends to be of a lower intensity, or if you’ve had difficulty maintaining a lean physique in the past, keep the range between 0-10%. If you’re a hard-gaining ectomorph, or someone who performs exercise at a high level of intensity, err toward the 10-20% range. Most folks would do well starting at 10%. So for a male who weighs 150 pounds and performs 5 hours of purposeful, aggressive weight training, he’d need 225g of carbohydrate per day. This is right in line with a more generic 1.5g/lb of body weight metric that comes up, but instead takes into account overall activity level.

Step Three: Plan Your Meals & Track Your Intake

I hate diet rules so I won’t inundate you with many. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to haphazardly remove entire food groups from their diet. Depending on your goals and personal tolerance, you should aim to consume at least one serving daily from the six basic food groupings:

• Protein (meat, eggs, and other animal derived protein. Soy and milk-derived powders would theoretically fall in this category as well)
• Fats (butter, oils, nuts, seeds)
• Starches (anything you think of when you don’t think “salad,” corn, potatos, peas, beans, bread, pasta, rice)
• Non-starchy Vegetables (green vegetables or “salad” vegetables like broccoli, asparagus, carrots, lettuce)
• Fruits (come now…)
• Dairy Products (milk and milk-derived products like cheese, yogurt etc.)

And here are the basic rules:

1. Plan your meals around protein. This would solve 95% of all the over-eating I see on a regular basis. Protein promotes the greatest satiety out of all the macronutrients. The Greeks were onto something with their nomenclature. Since this is the application post, no science here. Now go eat some protein.
2. Have some fat with each meal. If you’re eating a low-fat source of protein like a protein powder, non-fat milk, or extra lean chicken breast, feel free to include some oil, butter, nuts, or seeds to fill out the meal. Roughly 10-15g per meal is right in the neighborhood. If you’re using intermittent fasting as a strategy, this rule proves more flexible.
3. Try to get some form of fiber in with each meal. Vegetables would be ideal, but if it comes from your starches or nuts that’s okay too.
4. Add in fruits and starches based on daily caloric allotment and overall goal.
5. Include dairy products to fill in protein and fat requirements. If you don’t tolerate dairy, no sweat, just take a calcium + vitamin D supplement to cover micronutritional requirements.

From here, it’s as easy as plugging in values into something like CalorieKing or FitDay. I urge clients to not track veggie intake as the FDA still doesn’t have a concrete guideline on how to determine the caloric value of fiber-rich foods. People get freaked out when they see that 1 cup of broccoli has 6g of carbohydrate and 35kcal. The FDA has yet to institute its revision on fiber’s caloric value or carbohydrate calculation methods, and there’s currently debate about the caloric value of protein. Some researchers are arguing the value is close to 3kcal/g versus the typically cited 4. This is a long way of saying “don’t worry about it,” so eat as many vegetables as you damn well please. Under dieting circumstances, increasing your vegetable intake isn’t a bad idea. It can help slow the digestive process and fill in micronutritional gaps from reduced food intake.

Step Four: Pursue Your Goals

I hesitate to proscribe fat loss or muscle gain diets for individuals unaware of their maintenance intake. Getting in a proper amount of protein, taking into account nutrient timing considerations, consuming enough fiber, resting, and inducing a proper exercise stimulus is often enough to produce improvements in body composition and decreases in fat mass. Conversely, eating enough protein and training properly (less volume, more weight) can do the same for the muscle gain crowd.

I suggest testing your maintenance intake for a full week so you’ll know the effects of that given caloric level. Then, the fun starts. For the body recomposition crowd who is looking toward a long, slow road of fat loss alongside muscle gain with a minimal impediment on life style, you’ll want to vary your carbohydrate intake between training days and rest days. For the fat-loss crowd, take your current intake and multiply it by 0.8 – 0.85. That’s a 15-20% decrease in calories that should spur your body’s metabolic processes into mobilizing stored body fat. This decrease in calories should come mostly from carbohydrate, though hacking away at fat isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but I hesitate to have someone consume any less than 0.4g/lb of body weight in fat per day. At that point, maintaining hormonal and satiety levels becomes an issue.

Gaining muscle mass tends to be another story in of itself. Depending on your genetic predisposition outlined generally in the somatotypes discussed in part two, I find it easier to work off explicit calorie prescriptions rather than percentages. With dieting, so long as protein is kept high and training volume reasonable, folks can lose fat at a variety of rates and still hang on to lean body mass. The question, of course, is how much discomfort they’re willing to endure in that process. With muscle gain it’s a bit trickier. Sure, you could theoretically aim for a “get f’in huge” strategy and start piling down the calories, but few people are willing to sacrifice their daily appearance and wardrobe for a few pounds of muscle.

Instead, after finding your true maintenance, start slowly increasing calories until you find that sweet spot where muscle is coming on with minimal (or reasonable) fat gain. An extra 250 daily calories with most of your added foods focused on carbohydrate seems reasonable, with the rest going toward protein and fat. Measure your progress over the course of a week, and if weight is stable or gains insufficient, increase your daily intake by another 250kcal.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Form Factor Nutrition. This is how I design diets for myself and my clients. Sure, it gets a little more involved when portioning out individual meals but the principles are the same. What you know is only as good as its application. So rather than mulling about what diet you should hop on for 2010, take some time to analyze what you’re doing now. This will give you much needed information on how to adapt your habits for the physique of your future.

Tagged as: bodybuilding, fat loss, fitness, form factor nutrition, health, intermittent fasting, muscle gain, Nutrition