The 5/2 fat loss diet for strength athletes
Here's what you need to know...
- To follow the 5/2 diet, eat normally 5 days a week, while limiting your food intake to two 400 kcal meals on the other two days.
- Do not exercise on the low calorie days.
- Even if fat loss is not your main goal, this diet can improve insulin sensitivity and help you build muscle.
A diet without disadvantages
Fat loss diets are usually quite annoying - especially if you are training with the primary or at least secondary goal of looking really muscular and defined.
The diets are generally too strict, limit muscle gain too much, promote muscle loss, drive you crazy and make you want to hit the rest of the world over the head with a waffle iron. And these diets will not make you muscular and defined.
But the diet described here is not torture and will get you where you want to go in terms of body development.
While the origins of the diet I'm recommending are based on hard science and legitimate research studies, it was popularized in the fat loss world by magazines like Cosmo, Glamour and People. I've picked up on this approach and adapted it to fit the needs of strength athletes, bodybuilders and athletes.
The fat loss plan I modified is known as either "The Fast Diet" or the 5/2 Diet and two entrepreneurial authors named Dr. Michael Mosley and Mimi Spencer have written a book about it.
The diet is based on intermittent fasting, which is characterized by not eating for a period of time, but not continuously over an excruciatingly long period of time. Instead, you go without food for shorter, more tolerable (but still surprisingly effective) periods of time.
The short version
Eat what you normally eat 5 days a week. However, on 2 consecutive days, eat only 2 meals 12 hours apart, consuming only 800 kcal per day on those 2 days.
That is all. This type of diet will allow you to lose about a pound of fat per week while continuing to build muscle and strength. I believe this strategy will also set you up for unprecedented muscle gains as it will restore your insulin sensitivity.
Oh yeah, it will probably also dramatically improve your blood counts, protect your heart, ward off cancer and make you live longer, if you care about those things.
How can we make these claims?
Fasting in general is the oldest of all diet plans and probably dates back to the time when Antony told Cleopatra that she looked fat in her tunic. This makes sense, at least at first glance: when you drastically reduce calories, your body burns the fat to stay alive.
But fasting is problematic for a whole host of reasons. It's psychologically brutal and it can't be done in the long term. It can make you feel bad, it will give you bad breath, it will make your mere presence unpleasant for any sane person and - most significantly for strength athletes and athletes in general - it will preferentially break down muscle mass.
However, fasting also has its benefits. You will certainly lose some body fat. You may even feel clearer and more focused up to a point. And, most importantly, it improves insulin sensitivity.
If you eat all the time - or nearly all the time - then your insulin levels will always be elevated and as a result your body will always be in fat storage mode. Since your blood is a sugar-like substance, chemically more akin to Mountain Dew than healthy blood, your pancreas will be forced to secrete ever-increasing amounts of insulin.
As a result, fat storage will occur, but something worse will happen - the cells will stop responding to insulin and you will become a type 2 diabetic. Further fat storage will follow and you will have to keep your pants on.
I assume that many strength athletes are on the cusp of the type 2 diabetes cliff.
They eat continuously to ensure a steady and stable nutrient intake because they've been told by fat guys everywhere to eat this way (for muscle gains), which means their insulin levels will always be high and their insulin sensitivity will eventually plummet.
It's a bad practice that leads to poor body composition and poor overall health.
Fortunately, after just a few hours of fasting, insulin sensitivity begins to improve and your body switches from a fat-storing mode to a fat-burning mode, which is also the explanation for the effectiveness of intermittent fasting as a fat loss/health strategy.
Of mice and fat women
There are gigabytes of data on experimental animals and intermittent fasting. One such study, conducted at the Salk Institute, involved two groups of mice fed an isocaloric diet.
Both groups followed the same (high-fat) diet and were given the same amount of calories, but one group was allowed to eat whenever they wanted, while the other group had to eat all their food within 8 hours.
The latter group therefore fasted for 16 hours a day.
After 100 days, the intermittent fasting mice had put on 28% less fat and had lower cholesterol levels, lower blood sugar levels, less liver damage and lower levels of chronic inflammation. In the context of this experiment, intermittent fasting was therefore completely convincing.
Dr. Michelle Harvie and colleagues conducted another study with 107 female human volunteers.
In this study, the women were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group consisted of women who reduced their calorie intake by 25% 7 days per week, while the second group consisted of women who also reduced their calories by 25%, but only two days per week.
After 6 months, both groups had lost a comparable amount of fat and had comparable reductions in leptin, C-reactive protein, total and LDL cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure. Surprisingly, the intermittent fasting group experienced a greater reduction in insulin resistance than the group that dieted 7 days a week.
Insulin strategy
The data suggests that intermittent fasting is a smart way to lose fat and has huge effects on body composition and blood values, but is it also a smart approach for strength athletes? I would say yes.
In the world of body composition, insulin sensitivity is everything. The more insulin sensitive your cells are, the better your results will be in building muscle and the easier it will be for you to be lean enough for everyone to see those muscles.
For this reason, intermittent fasting - and specifically the 5/2 version - should allow a strength athlete to get steadily leaner with each passing week without losing muscle mass.
This strategy could also, in theory, allow a bodybuilder to go through a mass-building phase while continuing to lose body fat, as the increased insulin sensitivity would allow them to build muscle more easily while losing fat.
I am also convinced that strength athletes can prepare their body for a subsequent mass-building phase by performing a relatively short 5/2 stint.
So if you as a strength athlete were to do 5/2 for two months before starting a bulking phase, you would build muscle mass faster thanks to the increased insulin sensitivity.
What does the plan look like again?
Eat normally 5 days a week. On two non-consecutive days, eat two meals of 400 kcal each 12 hours apart. These two days should be non-training days or cardio days so that you do not interfere with recovery and hypertrophy after training.
On your two fasting days, you should consume a portion of fast-digesting protein either as part of the 400 kcal meal or 30 minutes before each meal to ensure that there is no muscle breakdown during the fasting phase.
5/2 for strength athletes: Q & A
Have you followed this fat loss diet yourself?
Yes, and some of my friends have done it too. It works as described above.
Won't I be missing nutrients if I restrict myself to 800 kcal two days a week?
Stop looking at nutrition in 24 hour phases. It's almost impossible to get all your necessary vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and micronutrients on non-fasting days - let alone fasting days.
Think in terms of weeks, not days. Do you think you've eaten well enough over the past week to meet all your nutritional needs? That is the way to good health.
In addition, the body stores most nutrients in case you don't eat them every day. Consider vitamin B12, one of the favorite vitamins of hucksters everywhere. Even though this vitamin is considered essential for health, most people have large stores in the liver that last five years.
Add this to the telling fact that you only need about 40 mg of vitamin B12 over the course of your lifetime, which is the equivalent of half a baby aspirin's worth of powder.
So you won't be missing out on any vital nutrients.
Will I suffer from hunger pangs on the fasting days?
Maybe, but live with it.
Will I have problems sleeping on the fasting days?
As answer to question 3, take a non-addictive, natural sleep aid.
Is it difficult to follow this diet?
The 5/2 diet plan is easy for most people to follow. Unlike most diet plans, it won't interfere with your social life too much. You may even become the hungrier, clearer-thinking animal you become on fast days because complacent animals don't get much done.
Can I continue to build muscle by following this plan?
- The 5/2 plan for strength athletes improves insulin sensitivity and in the world of growing muscle (and decreasing body fat), insulin is what matters.
Won't fasting days interfere with muscle growth and repair?
This is unlikely - especially if you are using a pulse-style protein intake during the diet. The most important times for muscle growth and repair are the first few hours after a training session. This is why nutrition around training is important.
However, this is also why you should not exercise on fasting days - only fast on non-training days or cardio days.
Why shouldn't I simply overcompensate and eat more than I consume on non-fasting days?
It's possible that you could eat more the day after a fasting day, but this doesn't seem to be an issue - neither with non-athletes who follow the original fasting diet, nor with the small group of strength athletes who have followed my version of this diet.
What types of meals should I eat on my fasting days?
You can eat normal muscle building meals, but they should be much smaller. For example, you could eat 125 grams of lean steak and a cup of broccoli, which would give you about 300 kcal.
Combine this with a protein pulse in the form of fast-digesting protein and you are in the region of 400 kcal, which is half of what you are allowed to eat on a fasting day. Certainly that's not a lot of food, but a generous consumption of coffee seems to help with hunger pangs.
How much fat can I expect to lose?
You should expect to lose one pound of fat per week, while perhaps gaining muscle mass a little faster due to increased insulin sensitivity.
Will this plan work for women?
Of course it will. However, women should also aim for a total calorie intake of 600 kcal per day instead of 800 kcal on their two non-consecutive fast days.
I should mention that the original diet as developed by Mosley and Spencer recommended that men eat 600 kcal on fast days instead of the 800 kcal recommended here, while women were recommended 500 kcal instead of 600 kcal.
I have manipulated the figures slightly as athletes and strength athletes have a higher calorie requirement than the average person.
How long should I follow the 5/2 fat loss diet for strength athletes?
You can follow this diet for as long as you want and you don't need to expect any diminishing results. Sure, you will eventually run out of flab to burn, but you should stay lean while benefiting from the muscle-building effects of greatly improved insulin sensitivity.
From TC Luoma | 09/24/13
Source: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/5-2-fat-loss-diet-for-lifters