Un-fit gamers without a clue wanting to get into lifting/nutrition(ask me anything)

[jbhasban]

You don't have some super fast magic metabolism that prevents you from gaining weight. You simply do not eat enough food. I am training for a marathon myself right now, and also lift weights and rock climb several times per week. I have to eat 5,000 calories per day to maintain my weight.

You need to determine how many calories your body uses per day. There are plenty of calculators online to give you an estimate that should account for your activity level. Once you get your maintenance calories, increase it by an additional 500 calories. This should allow you to gain roughly 1 pound per week. If you want to actually put on muscle then you need to dedicate some gym time. bodybuilding.com has a lot of good info on weight lifting routines.

While some of this is true, it is also true that people have different metabolisms. Simply having a natural temperature that is a degree higher than average can result in a dramatic increase in calories burned per day.

[Deleted]

*Your work/school hours: 5 days school/week. classes till 16.15.
*Age 21
*Gender male
*Weight 67 kg's
*Height 1m 65
*Measurements (Waist/Hips/Wrist) (Waist is most important) ? I can wear Medium jeans =/ But most small do fit me right.
*Activity Level At the moment, I stopped going to fitness due to a semester Project involving crime rates in EU. But I do at least run once in a week for about 8 km's.
*Goal I want to start gaining some mass and burning my belly fat into some muscles. (want to achieve a visible pack on belly)


My question is mostly about Nutritions.

What does Whey Proteine do? I'd like to know the internal and external effects over a period of a good 3/6 months.

And what nutrition is the most important? I don't like to fill my body with that stuff, just need the stuff to make me a bit buff.

[jbhasban]

*Your work/school hours: 5 days school/week. classes till 16.15.
*Age 21
*Gender male
*Weight 67 kg's
*Height 1m 65
*Measurements (Waist/Hips/Wrist) (Waist is most important) ? I can wear Medium jeans =/ But most small do fit me right.
*Activity Level At the moment, I stopped going to fitness due to a semester Project involving crime rates in EU. But I do at least run once in a week for about 8 km's.
*Goal I want to start gaining some mass and burning my belly fat into some muscles. (want to achieve a visible pack on belly)


My question is mostly about Nutritions.

What does Whey Proteine do? I'd like to know the internal and external effects over a period of a good 3/6 months.

And what nutrition is the most important? I don't like to fill my body with that stuff, just need the stuff to make me a bit buff.

Whey protein is just a fast metabolizing protein. A protein is a chain of amino acids. When your body eats protein, it separates the amino acids. When your body builds anything that requires protein (enzymes, etc), your body utilizes these amino acids to create the proteins. The cells that comprise your muscles have a large amount of proteins. When you stress your muscles, your body responds by repairing the muscle and then building additional muscle to better handle the stress in the future. As such, your body needs amino acids to accomplish this goal. Will eating whey help you build muscle faster than any other type of protein? I have yet to read a study that convinces me of this but most people will tell you that eating 30 grams or so of whey after working out will increase your gains. This "magic windows" of an hour has never been proven nor has the advantages of whey protein ever been proven to my satisfaction. What is true is that whey is a cheap source of pretty much all the amino acids your body needs. But so is egg white, chicken breast, and cottage cheese.

[Mackeyser]

My point was about weight loss, not nutrition as a whole. I was just trying to get the point across that weight loss has nothing to do with what you eat as long as you burn more calories than you eat.

That is HORRIBLY oversimplified and in some caces DANGEROUSLY WRONG.

When we eat, we release the paired hormones insulin and glucagon in order to metabolize what we've ingested. The more carbohydrates we ingest, the more insulin is required. Insulin not only is required to metabolize sugars (complex carbohydrates end up becoming simple carbohydrates, but are better for you because of both vitamin and mineral content as well as glycemic index and we NEED some carbohydrates because our Brains ONLY use carbohydrates stored in the liver and from nowhere else), but Insulin is also a fat storing hormone. It will take the excess carbohydrate beyond what is balanced with one's protein intake and DIRECTLY convert it to fat.

Thus, when eating it is NOT a case of every calorie is the same because of something called the Glycemic Index or how quickly the food item is metabolized and it's products enter the bloodstream. 300 food calories (or 300 thousand actual calories) of leafy greens will enter MUCH slower than pure table sugar or glucose and thus due to the better Insulin/Glucagon balance present when eating the leafy greens, you'll lose MORE weight when eating the leafy greens than the SAME number of calories of table sugar.

Moreover, the leafy greens contain vitamins and minerals that both aid and stimulate the burning of calories in a way that sugar or any other vitamin depleted food source doesn't.

Losing weight puts a fair amount of stress on the body. It is CRITICALLY important to put GOOD fuel into one's body while losing weight go give the body everything it needs to repair and rebuild while it's tearing down.

Old fat cells can carry sickness for years and anyone who's been on a chain of diets will often complain of getting sick, usually after about 6 weeks or so, once they really start getting into those adipose stores. Pure calories of the sugar variety won't bolster the immune system the way vitamin and mineral rich whole foods will.

I've studied digestion for 20 years as someone with Crohn's disease and used diet to get mine into remission (no, it's not possible for everyone to do this with diet. It is possible for Crohn's sufferers to VASTLY improve their living conditions, however. Vastly. I was basically bedridden for almost 2.5 years and I remember what it was like). I've learned enough about the digestive process to actually educate a few of my Internists over the years and point them to some of the latest research papers.

It's laudable to want to help people, but you actually have to know what you're talking about.

Calories in < Calories out is the very beginning of weight loss. However, that is NOT a basis upon which to responsibly advise someone.

Moreover, if you don't acknowledge right up front that every calorie isn't the same, then any advice has the potential to be both wrong and dangerous.

[Deleted]

Both links you gave me were not studies. They are hearsay. I cannot read the methodology or interpret the results themselves. I do not know what these people they were testing were eating otherwise or anything else about them. For instance, maybe these people have a low protein diet to begin with and their amino levels are low to begin with. If that were the case, it would make good sense that eating protein right after working out may be beneficial. However, if someone has a large amount of protein in their diet and consistently eats protein (and therefore has a high basal amino level), then maybe whey wouldn't be effective. But I cannot say because I cannot read the study!

I cook almost all my meals, have protein in all of them, and consistently eat fruits, vegetables, and nuts. I use to use whey but the taste was always so synthetic that I couldn't deal with it. Regular food just tastes sooo much better and if that means I don't get slightly larger, then fuck it! Some things are more important than being able to dead lift over 600 lbs.

So you might agree that post workout supplements might be a good idea? Maybe it is not that important to you, but to others the 0.2 extra inches is a dealbreaker for their motivation to keep going.

here are further links to back up my claims. If you don't find this sufficient i would like to see some studies which points towards that post workout proteins is useless.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/94/3/795
http://jp.physoc.org/content/590/11/2751.abstract
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/94/3/809
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?t...6%29%3A1106-13.

[warhoof6556]

Your work/school hours: 9-5 M-F

Age: 33

Gender: Male

Weight: 298

Height: 5'11"

Measurements (Waist/Hips/Wrist): 42" waist

Activity Level: Currently working with a trainer 2x a week. Intense weight-training with 30-45m cardio on off-days. Seeing benefits with energy but I have no willpower when it comes to diet. I eat like crap. Really need to get the weight off at this point, though, so I'm willing to give it a try.

Goal: Used to be really into running. Would love to get back down to 170. Haven't been there in 10 years. I play WoW way too much (since Vanilla), and my weight and health have gone out of control. I need to totally re-orient my priorities.

Thanks for any advice.

[FishtheFish]

I think the best thing that anyone can do if they want to change something in their life is to stay committed to what ever it is that they want to do or change. This past summer I told myself that I would go to the gym 6 days a week and make going to the gym a habit. I have gone six weeks now without missing a day and I can say it definitely makes you feel better about yourself and accomplished when you achieve your goals.