Lean Body Nutrition 101

Today, we’re going to explore lean body nutrition and what generally works best for most people who want to have minimum fat and maximum muscle.

First, I’d like to point out if you’re a woman and you’re thinking “but I don’t want maximum muscle!!” Stop. Relax. You have nothing to worry about…

Try this simple “acid” test: how many of your guy friends do you know that have been lifting weights for years? Now, picture them in your mind… and picture the big, gross, “bulky”, bodybuilder in your mind that you’re afraid of becoming… and now ask yourself: “do they look anything alike?”

You know the answer right? So if your guy friend who has been hacking it out in the gym for years doesn’t look all big and gross and “bulky” — then you don’t need to worry about it either. Mmm’kay pumpkin?

What’ll probably happen is you’ll end up looking like this picture of Nicole Scherzinger … and BELIEVE me … that is in NO WAY a bad thing

Lean Body Nutrition 101

Let’s start with the end in mind (always a good idea). What’s your goal with your eating? Why worry about nutrition? Well, the goal is to get your body into a “fat burning mode”.

This term gets thrown around a lot these days (almost as popular as “core training”)… but the idea is to get your body to switch over to using the fat that’s already on your body as your primary fuel source.

When you do that, then you’re said to be in “fat burning mode”. Now, you can induce this state through either 1. Exercise or 2. Diet… or… you can get faster results if you do it both ways. So that’s why we’re worried about nutrition.

Basic Rule: Carbs Suck (Most of the Time)

I’ll say it again: “I’m NOT a die-hard low carb type of guy” but the simple truth of the matter is the biggest changes in body composition come when your diet is composed of little carbs.

Here’s the problem: we’re lied to and led to believe that you need tons of food and carbs or else you’re going to die. The simple truth of the matter is that our body’s can run on VERY little food, definitely very little carbs, and most people (barring elite athletes) don’t need almost any amount of carbs.

You see this all the time: a guy is having an hour long weight lifting workout at the gym, resting long enough in between sets to talk to every other guy in the gym, and the whole time he’s sipping a gatorade with 100’s of sugars and carbs because he thinks it’s good for him (he’s been led to believe to be deathly afraid of running out of “fuel” for his body).

It’s this type of soft headed thinking that makes a 300 + pound guy who is 80% fat say he can’t go on a low carb diet because he needs the “carbs for his brain”.

Instead, learn to accept being hungry, learn to like it, and learn to teach your body to stop looking for the food coming into your body as a fuel source… and… start forcing it to treat your body fat stores as fuel.

Basic Rule: Fat Is Good

Another thing you’ve been lied to about, and led to believe is “bad” is eating fat. Everywhere you go there’s low fat this, low fat that… surprisingly the only time eating fat is bad is when you eat it with a lot of carbs.

The truth is that saturated fat is NOT bad for you… that sex hormones like testosterone are created from cholesterol… and that you should definitely have a lot of fat in your diet. In fact, if you start eating more fat than carbs, then you’ll turn your body into a “fat burner” because it will come to rely on fat for its energy.

For what it’s worth: I hear the elite military forces make sure they feed their guys a ton of fatty foods during boot camp because they know that 1 gram of fat has more stored energy in it than 1 gram of carbs… so teaching your body to run off fat instead of carbs is a more efficient change anyways.

Bottom line? Eating fat does NOT make you fat. End of story.

Basic Rule: Sugar is Evil.

I will go on record that the FDA and all them american health experts got this one right (finally!) — sugar is bad for you. That’s just simple science.

So try to avoid it as much as possible… and the best way to do this is to “ween” yourself off of it. To not become addicted to needing “sweet foods”.

See, most people just try to replace sugar with an alternate sweetener… and then you find out they eat so much of this alternate sweetener that it’s a carcinogen or something like that. The idea is to get yourself to stop NEEDING sweet crap all the time!

Then it’ll be ok to indulge and give yourself a sweet treat every once in a while… but anytime you’re addicted to sweet stuff it’s just not good for you because it’s just not natural.

Do You Need To Be a Nazi About It?

All that being said, you CAN have a lean body and not be a “Nazi” about your diet. You don’t need to always be counting calories or worrying about what you’re putting in your mouth.

Once you get a few things right, you really can screw up a lot of other stuff, and still make great progress and stay lean for life.

That’s why I make such blanket statements like “carbs are evil”… “fat is good”… “get a lot of protein”… because these are major things that as long as you get them right — the other stuff pretty much takes care of itself. Seriously. If you fill up on fat and protein (both of which make you feel fuller, faster, and for longer periods of time) you won’t over-eat on carbs, sugar, dessert and all that junk.

And on the weekends, you can always indulge. To keep yourself from going insane, just adopt the 80/20 or 90/10 rule — basically 80% of the time eat the way you’re “supposed to” and you’ll be fine.

So ok, now you know some very general, yet high-impact things about lean body nutrition.