Return from Vienna: Fixing the Damage, Part 1

Aw, Vienna: the history, the art, the architecture and the food. Okay, maybe I enjoyed the food more than anything else and the extra 5 lbs I acquired proves it. Five pounds might not seem like much for two weeks of stuff-yourself-sick-with-pastries eating, but when you consider I continued lifting and walked 50-plus miles during the trip, I ate a lot.

Now I’m back in California with a gut I don’t want and a desire to start building muscle again. Nobody likes having a pooch, least of all me, as it reminds me of my fat-kid youth. That means it’s got to go fast with minimal detriment to my lifting. I’ll do what I do every time, what I recommend to my clients at all levels of performance, especially physique competitors: backload carbs and calories.

Backloading takes marginal effort and burns fat with little interruption to muscle building (well, assuming the right training strategy). The protocol requires a few simple steps. First, skip breakfast…

I hear it already, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” I’d argue it’s the least important, and depending on your goals, possibly the most detrimental.

Many years ago, I ate breakfast religiously. As soon as my alarm went off, my feet hit the floor and carried me to the kitchen where I prepared egg whites and oatmeal. Of course, I was trying to stay lean and build muscle at the same time. What I didn’t know, and what shocked the hell out of me when I found out, is that a low-fat breakfast decreases fat burning for the entire day. One low-fat meal, eaten religiously at 6 AM—what every diet book and health magazine recommends—sabotaged my goal. Any breakfast that’s more that 50% carbs produces the same results.

It gets worse. Cortisol levels naturally rise through the evening and peak around wake-up time. Cortisol, as you know, catabolizes body tissue, which can include muscle, but only if certain signals in the body direct it to do so. The specific signal: elevated insulin levels and high cortisol levels. That high-carb breakfast switched on the potential to burn muscle (although what happens in most cases is far worse, but I’ll get to that in a second).

If cortisol acts alone, in the absence of insulin, it forces the body to preferentially burn body fat; this is the exact scenario you find yourself upon waking, if you don’t screw it up by eating carbs. And if you don’t eat anything, or very little, cortisol continues signaling the release of body fat for metabolism, just as it did through the previous hours of snoozing.

Let’s say that you don’t care because you’ll ensure you eat enough carbs so that muscle won’t get burned. You want to build muscle, lots of muscle and you want to do it now; extra cardio can burn off the fat. Slow down, killer. There’s another problem with high insulin levels plus high cortisol levels. When the two are elevated together, the body gets another signal: start making as many new, empty fat cells as possible—the max number of which being determined by how much body fat you already have stored, the more fat, the more empty fat cells created.

The new fat cells start off empty, which means the cells send out hormonal signals to slow metabolism, because empty fat cells have one goal, to get full. Once full, the cells last forever. Only after 10 years of being kept empty do they die through a process known as apoptosis (their guts spill out through the membrane, almost like getting turned inside out). There’s a way to speed this fat-cell-slaughter process and you can find it in my first book, The Carb Nite® Solution.

Let’s recap. Skipping breakfast accelerates fat burning, spares lean tissue and prevents the formation of new fat cells. Eating breakfast—specifically a traditional breakfast containing copious amounts of carbs—creates new fat cells, stops fat burning and triggers the destruction of lean tissue if blood sugar levels fail to rise high enough. Feel like forgoing breakfast tomorrow?

Let me warn you, your mind works at a sloth’s pace without breakfast. You’ll just have to endure it…no, wait, no you won’t. I know it’s been drilled into our culture at school, in cereal commercials and even by Oprah’s trainer (who’s apparently failed Oprah more times than he’s helped her) that breakfast is the cornerstone of a healthy, productive day. One of the feature articles in a popular men’s magazine this month claims that recent research shows that breakfast is essential for weight loss and mental acuity. It’s bullshit. All of it. Most writers and experts take the results of a study out of context or don’t understand what’s actually been shown; and most never bother to look up the years of relevant research that doesn’t pop into their inbox through an automated service each Sunday morning.

Nobody needs breakfast. The studies you hear about, the ones that show kids perform better in school if they eat a healthy breakfast—the only studies with such results were conducted with malnourished children. Feed a malnourished kid at anytime during the day and they’ll perform better; they’re starving for Pete’s sake. In controlled studies where healthy children skipped breakfast (completely) and waited until lunch for their first meal, the student’s performance increased, not only in the morning hours, but throughout day. Nobody needs breakfast, although it can have its uses.

What’s difficult when giving up breakfast for the first week are the pangs of hunger. I get them. I had them this morning before sitting down to write this post: coffee to the rescue. I walked two miles to the local Peet’s coffee house—those of you on the East coast are missing out—and got a medium Americano. Hunger gone. As a bonus, the walk got my body warm, my mind humming and triggered more fat burning.

Now I’ll admit, this is not ideal and tomorrow I will probably do something a little different, for which I had failed to prepare myself this morning. I will once again have a cup of coffee, but I’ll add a tablespoon of heavy whipping cream and I’ll down half a scoop of my Blend 1 protein shake, sans leucine, from the Protein 2.0 article. The fat and slow absorbing protein don’t raise insulin levels but provide a small amount of fuel and amino acids to ensure that the cortisol doesn’t trigger muscle breakdown.

Please note that I specify coffee and not caffeine or a caffeinated energy drink. Energy drinks can have their use, as can pure caffeine, but coffee contains unique, only recently discovered central and parasympathetic nervous system stimulates (cholinomimetics) that suppress hunger and increase metabolism. They’re contained in both caffeinated and decaf coffee. Take your pick, but if you’re trying to spark fat burning and attenuate hunger, drink your coffee.

It sounds like I always skip breakfast. I don’t. When I’m in pure hypertrophy mode, I do eat breakfast, but it’s not conventional. That’s a topic for another day.

There’s more to what I do in situations like this, i.e. losing fat while focusing on hypertrophy, but this segment ran longer than I planned, hence the Part 1. I’ll give more details in the following days.