I checked my cheese after reading this and yeah the carbs are very low.

Milk actually has non-trivial carbs, at least if you consume a lot of it. I think it's 11g per cup or somethig.

Meat is a complete food containing all the essential vitamins and minerals in dense quantities. I might take cod liver oil but will not consider taking any further supplements. I want this diet to be as natural as possible.

Why exactly?

-Mike

IMO, it is likely that the way our body processes nutrients from natural sources is superior than man-made products. Cheese, butter, yogurt and oils seem to be an exception to this. Almost no other supplements have shown any strong significance to acquire lean body mass in well controlled studies.

We have evolved to eat certain foods and can be nourished extremely well by them.

Sooo ur saying a well balanced diet + multi < a well balanced diet by itself?

-Mike

You are arguing that the multi will have better nutritional properties than food of similar nutritional value. This might be true, I don't know, but it certainly could be that it is not as beneficial as consuming whatever nutrients are inside that multi in food.

If the multi is better than perhaps it could be better to eat much less and have more multis

Well if the diet is truly well-balanced the multi will be by definition largely redundant.

Plus I think Greek is trying this partially as an experiment, not in the belief that he has conclusively solved the mystery of the ideal diet.

You may want to consider, like, vegetables.

Carbs are non-essential nutrients and the vitamins in veggies are not nearly of the same quality as those in meat.

There's more to our diets than macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. You're neglecting fiber and other important micronutrients that help keep us healthy, including the ones we either don't fully understand or haven't discovered yet. Any argument against eating vegetable is complete lunacy. This + some of the other things you've posted here make me question your sanity.

My mom wants diet tips, she's a mid-50's woman, 5'2", 148 lbs, not sure on the body fat percentage but she's very active. She lifts weights twice a week, runs a couple times a week, swims once a week, plays tennis a few times a week depending on season and works a desk job.

I had her keep a diet log for the first week of December and it averaged to 2,306 calories a day, 91.3g fat/307.4g carb/71.5g protein/4.2g alcohol, or a 34/52/12/1 macro split.

So my first question is how much protein does she need? All the information is really on guys in their 20's, I'd guess 100g would be a good place to start? Or would 75g be fine? She seems to have an aversion to large meals, she'll rarely finish more than three ounces of meat in a meal and the way she makes her sandwiches is two big pieces of bread, one thin slice of meat and one thin slice of cheese. She complains of frequent hunger and snacks constantly, waking up in the middle of the night etc.

Since her meals, which are generally pretty well composed are small, she tends to get a lot of her calories outside of them, primarily junk. Over the course of the week, from butter, coke, orange juice, ice cream, cheesy poofs, chips, and chocolate she averaged just over a 1,000 calories a day from these sources.

Her goals are to drop body fat and weight, and while excited by small changes in the scale, I think around 120 would be her ideal. I'm thinking if she ate more meat and eggs and dropped the coke, cheesy poofs, chips and chocolate she'd lose a pound a week? Reasonable? It's doubtful she'd continue with her food log though. Also, she's very reluctant to increase the weights she lifts regardless of what I tell her.

Yeah, just get her to snack on nuts, eat more meats, eggs, cheeses etc. She eats a lot of carbs.

I thought 1800 was more the calorie level for the average woman, and your mom is either average or shorter than average depending what you read. So that would make her 500 calories too high! No wonder she's heavy.

It sounds like she has a horrible diet. Tons of starches and sugar. This is very unhealthy on a lot of levels (inflammation, diabetes, weight gain, potential mood swings and yo-yo'ing energy levels). It also looks like she does the standard chick diet of cutting back on the healthy things, like protein and decent portions of healthy stuff at regular meals, as a way to excuse her snacking on crap outside of meals. Chicks(and moms qualify) often put yummy snacks first, meals a distant second. They get it exactly wrong.

What your mom needs to do is get self-discipline, and that is somewhat independent of food. I suspect she rewards herself with food, feel she "deserves" some tasty treats, etc. However, this is the way a self-indulgent kid thinks, not an adult with their lifestyle ducks in a row. She may be very resistant to change because the way she is doing things satisfies her and makes her quite happy.

Lots of people like to nurse drinks too. This can lead to a lot of soda consumption over the course of the day. Try getting her different sorts of flavored sparkling water(not the kind with sugar in it). This will give her something fun to drink with some flavor, but get rid of the awful amount of high fructose corn syrup in coke. Eliminating coke alone should have noticeable effects on weight.

Unless she turns that into an excuse to indulge herself elsewhere, like it looks like she does by eating tiny portions at regular meals already.

It's hard to change older people. Good luck.

I think if she ate till she was stuffed she wouldn't want to eat for quite a while and that would probably help her avoid all those ****ty snacks. She should fill up on good stuff once a day imo.

What he said.

I think you could take skunk's into "Any argument against eating a varied diet is complete lunacy." Even eating potatoes in large helpings everyday sucks.

the dosage makes the poison.

I'm going to be eating a lot of doughnuts in the approaching future.

May be semantics, but it doesn't really compute that her "meals" are good but the things in between all suck. Her diet sucks.

Eat real food-- even when you are hungry and it isn't during your normal meal time.

Breaking down the macronutrients and making p/c/f ratio recommendations seems besides the point if the way she makes it through her squares is with spray cheese on a chocolate donut.

I mean, it would seem she understands what good foods are. Some example meals from the week:

Chicken Breast with Green Beans, Carrots, and Grapes
Steak Tenderloin with Broccoli and Cucumber-Tomato Salad
Pork Chop with Carrots, Peas, and Apple Sauce
Ground Beef with Onions, Mushrooms, Carrots, and Peas

All I mean is what she eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner are generally reasonable. It's all the eating she does at different times that is absurd.

I understand. My point is that the distinction doesn't matter. Her diet sucks. She would probably do well to limit what she puts into her food hole to food.

Maybe you can fill the fridge with healthy whole foods for snacking.

I like how my sanity is questioned when I am the only poster who posts links on nearly every single post to back up the claim made. Yet you come out of nowhere to question my sanity because it goes against your conventional diet wisdom, which has little science to back it up. I have tried to point you guys in a direction where I get my material but I suppose it hasn't gotten through since Blarg refuses to comment on Good Calories Bad Calories.


http://westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/skinny.html
- a very good overview of fat and its importance in our body

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/
- an MD who has some of the best insight I have read in a blog

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
- is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. An endless amount of research can be done here

http://jap.physiology.org - Journal of applied physiology
http://jn.nutrition.org/ - Journal of nutrition

http://www.pnas.org/ - another science journal


Also fiber is useless to a person who eats a low-carb diet. It is indigestible for humans, providing 0 nutrition. Fiber could play a role if lots of refined carbs are in the diet which does cause constipation. Fiber does help stool move through the digestive system and softens it at the same time.

2 observational studies between 1994 and 2000 -47k and 89k people run out of Harvard school of public health said colon cancer is unrelated to fiber in diet as well as increased consumption of fruits and veggies. It also did not prevent heart disease, breast cancer or induce weight loss. 2 more trials concluded the same.

This is from GCBC

<rant>
So obviously Monday is national (I'm presuming international) ****** day at the gym.

I know this - so I try and get to the gym late on Mondays, hoping the ******s have already gone...fail.

So last night, there is a dude doing something (it actually looked like a somewhat fun exercise and probably pretty good?) like a hang clean to push press in one squat rack...

"How many have you got to do?"

"Oh about a billionty more sets"

Right. Light weight baby. Obviously there is a guy diong 66lb curls in the other rack.

"How many have you got to do?"

"Nearly done, mate. Just gotta do a burn set". Unloads the bar and does about 6 44lb curls for a sweet, sweet burn.

So I do some squats (in other news... two different PTs told my my squats had nice range... I think pre-Christmas is slow time for PTs...). Now I'm doing some presses and the dude in the squat rack beside me just finishes his hang-clean-push-press-thing and is replaced by a dude doing some squats.

He does a few sweet 1/4 squats at 135lbs, then loads up to 330lbs and continues with his sweet 1/4 squats. Like seriously, I don't even think he was getting to 45. I don't think I've seen a shorter ROM on a squat ever...

Now I"m doing some cleans and the clean-press guy comes back with a bb and looks very disapointed that there are no available squat racks... so he sets it on the floor and loads it up and starts doing some curls. Now how hard is it to do curls from the floor buddy? Lesson learnt.

Beside him, some dude comes along, loads up a bar and starts doing deadlifts standing on one of those little platforms. but he was not deloading the bar between reps and had visibly terrible back rounding..

</rant>

In other news...

I'm plateau-ing and even going backwards on my squat. About a month ago, I got up to 242lbs for about 3x3. Now I struggle to get 3x3 for 220. I've been doing lots of running/sprints and not eating as much... I'm guessing this is why...

I'm not really happy with my depth either, I think I got too obsessed with avoiding my hips rolling under and really aren't going much passed parrallel.

I think I'm going to cut the weight back significantly, maybe to around 175 and get back to working on atg.

Greeksquared - So let me get this straight. Vegetables are unnecessary, as is fiber, right?

Have you really tricked yourself into thinking that a meats & fats diet is *healthier* than eating a well-balanced diet made up of lean meats, veggies, and smart, unprocessed carb sources? You might lose more weight in the short term, but one thing we tend to do around here is believe that weight loss = healthy and vice versa. Weight & body fat loss is not the be-all, end-all health indicator.

What, do you really think vegetables (minus starchy ones) are going to knock you out of ketosis? You're got to be ****ing me. Calories from vegetables are barely worth tracking in your daily food logs. It is absurd that I have to tell you that vegetables contain important micronutrients that cannot be replaced by supplementation. I can't believe that what you believe is what's contained in that book "Good Calories, Bad Calories", otherwise I might have to organize a book burning.

Also, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritio...ber/index.html

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritio...ory/index.html