The first question really is: Why do you want to change your eating habit? Is it to lose 10 kg and that's it? If so, then stop reading and don't bother. You won't be successful in the long run. What you really need to get your head around is the fact that you need to listen to your body and perhaps also go a bit against general believes. That's what I did to some extent. I realized that eating only a few times (once to twice) per day really made me feel better. So that's what I'll do! I don't care if a doctor tells me that I need to eat 10 times day - it's rubbish if it makes me feel bad. I also eat very little carbohydrates. Because I feel sleepy and dizzy after it. And what was the results? I felt so much better and lost so much fat that some people actually couldn't believe the results. That's what I call being in sync with your body. If you know what buttons to push, you can change your body dramatically without suffering. And the most important button to me was insulin. In the end what it's really all about is insulin control...
Whenever your insulin is spiking, you will not burn fat (http://mcb.asm.org/content/30/21/5009.full). Now think a little bit about it. What it means is: If you eat every two hours or so, just a little snack, you will not burn fat the whole day. And that's a fact, take it as "carved in stone". So what you really want to do is give your body the possiblity to burn fat. How do we do that? By fasting. And fasting every day for a sufficient amount of time. For me, it turns out that 14 to 18 hours were enough to seriously affect my body composition. Because this site is all about simplicity, let me break it down for you. That's how one of my tipical days looks like:
7 am to 1 pm: Only coffee and sugarfree energy drinks (careful, don't overdo it with coffee: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/12/2990.full)
1 pm: First meal. Eating window begins. I eat a salad with balsamico sauce, protein bread, cheese, low-carb quorn, some fruits as a desert, protein shake or low-carb protein bars.
7pm: Second meal (ideally after your exercise session). Again low-carb quorn, some more fruits to get a little bit of sugars after your exercise, protein bread, tuna or chicken, low-carb protein bar, low-carb chocolate if you really, really are craving sugar.
Starting from 7.30 pm or so, you will not eat anymore until 1 pm the next day.
This will give you more or less fully 18 hours of fasting - this means 18 hours where your body will increase HGH levels and lower your insulin levels - with increased insulin sensitivity in the long run (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10484056).
Now, if you really have long-term targets, which I encourage, you can't eat like that for a very long amount of time, because your body will adapt. I noticed that after 9 weeks or so I had to further lower my caloric intake to see progress. So after 10 weeks I had my first cheat day. Basically what I did was eating some dates and more fruits for my first meal and add some sweets to it. That's it! Don't overdo it as well here. Cheat day doesn't mean that you can eat like a pig - it just means that you increase your caloric intake a little bit to boost your metabolism. So my suggestion really is that after 10 weeks include a cheat day and then go back to the intermittent fasting routine. If you have reached your ideal weight, I wouldn't really stop fasting - there are so many health benefits to it... all you need to do it increase your caloric intake in your eating window (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting#Benefits). This means that ideally you will eat your calories around your exercise, best thing would be to time your carbs after your training session. This has a lot of reasons I will address at some point, if you're interested in it now, just read up on GLUT4 and insulin sensitivity of your muscles. You'll be amazed to see what actually happens in your body once you put it under heavy duty!
And again remember: the magic in your body doesn't happen while you exercise (ok, some of it does;), it happens afterwards. So make sure to give your body plenty of rest! A calorie restiction will add stress to your central nervous system - so you need more rest when shredding weight!
One more thing: You want to avoid at all costs alcohol. It will decrease your ability to burn fat greatly (http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/70/5/791.long).
The next section will cover some more details about protein intake and such. If you're not interested in that, then don't bother with it.
Adapt your protein intake to your intermittent fasting routine:
Today I rethought my protein supplements and started googling. While reading all the articles about the benefits of whey isolate (fast digesting protein, only the hydrolized version is even faster) and the benefits of micellar casein, it suddenly dawned in my head. Everyone is banging on how one should combine whey and casein, becasue whey will increase your protein sythensis more (look here e.g.: http://www.precisionnutrition.com/whey-vs-casein). But really this is due to the high content of BCAA in whey, and especially l-leucine. If there is one amino acid you should love and worship, that's l-leucine. It's as anabolic and anti-katabolic as it gets. So you probably see now where this is going... I think this is really what I would regard the ideal protein intake recommendation for everyone looking to shed not only some weight, but really wants to go below that 10% bf with intermittent fasting:
If you are following an intermittent fasting regime, use micellar casein for your eating window and fasting window as well if you're having troubles keeping your strength or going without food. The reason? Casein won't spike your insulin levels, because it's digested really slowly and contains low levels of l-leucine. Take some l-leucine directly after your exercise with your casein shake or use some whey isolate. For your fasting window, you don't want to use whey isolate, it will just turn that fat burning switch off. You really need to get it in your head - if your insulin is up, you're not burning fat. (Even though I'm convinced whey is not that bad for a diet, for me personally it makes a huge difference having that whey shake in the morning or not... it's unlucky for me, but everyone else should just try it out.)
The benefits while fasting: Casein doesn't or really just moderately spikes insulin. This will allow you to remain in fat burning mode while not compromising your protein intake. You will feel satiated and won't have a hard time extending your fasting window if you're hitting a wall in your diet.
In your eating window: Casein will not cause an additional spike in insulin with your food. Whenever your muscles are not that sensitive to insulin (basically only after your exercise), you want to keep it as low as possible. So again, taking whey with whatever you're eating, will give you that extra jolt on top. I'd use whey only after exercising, that's when it really outperforms everything else. But for every other occasion, I really don't see why.
At the moment I'm trying to figure out if it's even enough to just take l-leucine and some carbs (with casein) post workout. Probably there won't be enough amino acids in your bloodstream to really let your muscles benefit from the environment l-leucine creates, so whey might still be the best thing here.
Update September 2013:
It gets even better: I didn't have to look far to find this article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23043721. So it seems that l-leucine really performs a brilliant job in combination with casein and helps to increase protein synthesis. So in the end the case for whey gets even shakier. As mentioned before, you really want to stock up on l-leucine, this stuff is great when cutting!
Update October 2013:
By following the simple rules of this blog, I lost in only two months around 15 kilograms, from 98 to 83. Just by skipping breakfast, eating low carbs and exercising regularly. I didn't exercise harder and didn't take any other supps. This just to show that most part of your success is determined by what you eat, how clean you eat and how well you rest your body, not how many hours a day you spend in the gym or how loud you scream at the weights. In the same amount of time I have seen tons of guys exercising harder than me, but they still look the same, exactly the same. So it's your choice really in the end... invest additional effort to change your lifestyle and your body, or just go to the gym, do your usual routine and convince yourself that it's enough...
Update April 2014:
Once you are below of 10% bodyfat, the whole diet dynamic changes dramatically. Basically you can't do the same diet with 13% bodyfat as you were doing with 10%. And you can't do the same diet with 7% as you were doing with 10%. It's important to realize that a lot changes for your body dramatically the lower your go. First of all the less bodyfat you have the more important it is to have a caloric deficit to lose any weight - but in my experience the less it is important to go low carb. A low carb diet works well if you start your diet with some bodyfat. But if you call yourself lean, i.e. <10% bf, you will profit more from a low fat diet and make sure you eat your carbs for your workouts. You also don't want to run on low calorie all the time. You will be hungry, a lot more hungry than you're used to if you are lean... so you want to make sure you don't indulge all the time. That's why you want to keep your caloric deficit to a minimum or be on maintenance level 5 times a week and only do an IF (intermittent fasting) twice a week. The simple truth is: You can't (or let's say I couldn't at least) keep the intermittent fasting up once I was lean. My body simply switched to autopilot and I ended up eating whether I wanted or not... I track closely my caloric intake every day, and this is what I deduce from it:
Eating at a ratio of 40% carbs, 40% protein and 20% fat seems ideal. With every meal, you want to eat at least 30g of high quality protein (whey protein isolate). This helped with my recomposition dramatically. Eating less carbs just led to me becoming less defined. Whenever I do a high carb day, I look harder the next day. If you are still afraid you'll gain weight, do some carb cycling - where you replace some of the calories from carbs with proteins. Keep the fat constantly low, but don't go under 1g of fat per kg of bodyweight. So for me this would be around 80g of fat per day. I don't need more than that, and sometimes I'll eat less. Not a big deal. My caloric intake has developed as follows:
First 5 months of the diet:
Between 1800 kcal and 2300 kcal, no problem in keeping this up.
Th next 5 months of the diet saw a steady increase by more or less 100 kcal per month, until I reached somewhat around 2500 to 2800 kcal, the increase was in carbs mostly due to an increase in training intensity as well (you need that energy if you train hard, especially after your workout).
Now I am around 2800-3000 kcal and slowly losing additional fat. You can't lose fat at the same rate when you started, and losing the, let's say, last 2kg of fat once you're lean will cost you thrice the effort as losing the first 5kg. You most important instrument in this fight will become your diet and HIIT cardio. As mentioned above, you can still reduce your caloric intake some days a week - but no chance in doing so in the long run. Perhaps other people will manage, but whenever I ate less than 2300 kcal a day and exercised, it only led to binge eating until I had reached my 2800kcal. Usually as soon as I hit that mark, I'm not hungry anymore from one moment to the next, very interesting to observe. So basically the take home message would be:
- When you're lean, it seems you can profit more from carbs than from fat (personal observation)
- You need to rely more on carbs and protein once you're lean - reduce fat to a necessary minimum
- Caloric deficit is not something you want to keep up once you have reached some sort of target (it never really ends, does it?:)). Slowly increase your caloric intake and make sure you find a balance with carbs and protein that works for you
- To help your body composition, drink 30g of WPI with every meal (source to follow, there's a good reason for it, 10g of EEA will influence how you metabolize your food)
Here are some updated pictures, this is an intermediate stage of the cutting cycle:
End of October 2013, after 10 weeks:
November 13, 2013, after 12 weeks:
November 23rd @82kg
February 2014, @79 kg
May 2014, 79kg, recomping:
