A new way to eat

When you fry meat, it turns brown. This is a process known as the Maillard reaction, which is a binding of sugar to protein.

This is almost identical to what happens in your body when you habitually keep your blood sugar levels above 85 dl/mg. If blood sugar levels are kept high enough for long enough, you basically cook yourself, leading to kidney disease, joint deterioration, stiffening of connective tissue, hangovers and arteriosclerosis.

Can you pass me the Franky Barbecue Sauce ?

Continually high blood sugar levels not only cause you to slowly cook yourself, but also lead to metabolic problems including, but not limited to, insulin resistance and obesity.

The logical question that follows from this is what causes persistently high blood sugar levels. Well, aside from someone who follows a typical American diet, the person who is most susceptible to high blood sugar levels is someone who eats large amounts several times a day and never lets it get to the point of being hungry. Basically, this may be a person who, on the advice of hundreds of nutrition experts, keeps their blood sugar levels "stable" over a period of several years.

Does this sound like someone you know? If I'm not mistaken, this sounds like the way pretty much every bodybuilder or "physique athlete" on the planet diets.

I think it may be time to adopt a new way of eating....

The problem

In normal, healthy people, glucose is absorbed into the bloodstream and transported into the cells where it is burned for energy. This whole thing is mediated by insulin, which is produced and released by the pancreas after you've eaten a meal.

However, in diabetics, glucose builds up in the blood because the cells are unable to use this glucose correctly, leading to a condition known as insulin resistance. Over time, the pancreas gives up and can no longer produce sufficient amounts of insulin to successfully transport the glucose into the insulin-resistant cells. As this disease progresses, the pancreas produces inadequate amounts of insulin or no insulin at all, leading to all the terrible health problems I mentioned above.

Frighteningly, there are estimates that between one-fifth and one-third of all Americans will reach this disease state by mid-century.

A large percentage of these people, perhaps including you, are merely insulin resistant right now and years away from reaching the condition that is virtually indistinguishable from Type I diabetes. Nevertheless, you may already be experiencing some of the negative side effects and this could very well be related to the supposedly 'healthy' diet you are following, the cornerstone of which is your rigid '6 meals a day' eating plan.

The dubious thing about this is that this continuous eating keeps your insulin levels permanently elevated for years.

While your cells were once very sensitive to insulin, you have gradually become more resistant to insulin because you have been exposed to a rush of insulin in your bloodstream all this time. It is quite possible that your average blood glucose levels are well above 85 mg/dl and you are already insulin resistant, or already on your way to full-blown diabetes.

A little blood sugar history

Between 1979 and 1997, the medical establishment said that one of the criteria for diabetes was a fasting blood sugar level of 140 mg/dl.

In 1997, they re-estimated their levels and moved the diabetes level to 126 mg/dl and added that anyone with a level above 110 had an "impaired fasting".

Let's jump forward to 2003, since then doctors have been saying that no one should have a reading above 100 mg/dl and this is the cut-off point that still applies today. Clearly they were concerned about elevated blood sugar levels and their potential problems, and they don't know exactly where to put the milligram per deciliter bulwark.

One hundred seems like a logical number, but there are a number of problems with that number. For one, glycation, or the "cooking" that I mentioned in the introduction, seems to start at blood glucose levels above 85 mg/dl.

Furthermore, the whole concept of fasting blood glucose levels seems kind of twisted. For those unfamiliar with the term, fasting glucose levels refer to blood glucose levels measured in a blood sample taken in the morning after a night without eating.

The problem with this is that not eating - especially for us strength athletes - is kind of a rare situation. Most of us eat practically all the time. That being said, even normal people eat throughout the day and experience chaotic blood sugar spikes and low blood sugar levels. To really get a useful idea of how your body is dealing with food, you would need to take several blood samples throughout the day and analyze the results.

However, this does not happen.

So we don't really know our blood sugar levels. Sure, you could buy a blood glucose meter and test your blood sugar several times a day, but few of us would go that far. Instead, I prefer to use this assessment scheme:

If you're a massager type, if you eat multiple times a day, if you eat carbs indiscriminately, if the only veins you can see on your body are the veins on your penis, if the existence of your abs is as dubious as the existence of Nessie, then you're probably at least a little glucose intolerant and insulin resistant and are probably on your way to full-blown diabetes.

And for you, you vain bastard, probably more importantly, getting lean becomes less and less likely with each carb-overloaded day of elevated blood sugar levels.

Do you have any evidence?

Do I have any evidence for this? Admittedly not a great deal. However, I do have logic, empirical data and at least one or two studies on my side.

Logic tells me that if you expose your body to a continuous flow of blood sugar, your cells will become less sensitive to insulin over time. It's simply the way the body works.

I have also experienced it personally. I've been eating six meals a day since the late eighties, only to watch my fasting blood sugar levels rise year after year until they peaked at 117 mg/dl in 2010. And no, I didn't eat junk. I haven't eaten a McDonald's burger in over 20 years and I don't even remember what doughnuts taste like.

Nor do I have an obvious genetic predisposition to high blood sugar levels.

No, it seems like my 6 meals a day thing was the culprit.

Last but not least, there seems to be some experimental evidence to back me up. One study in particular seems to confirm my thoughts: "Effect of meal frequency on glucose and insulin excursions over the course of a day" (Holmstrup, et al, 2010).

Rather than go into all the details of the study, suffice it to say that a group of normal weight subjects who ate 6 meals a day showed significantly higher blood glucose levels than a group who ate only three meals a day. Despite eating the same amount of calories, the members of the group with fewer meals had lower blood glucose levels than the members of the group that ate 6 meals.

And even though the insulin response did not differ between the two groups, the group with a higher meal frequency had higher blood glucose levels throughout the day. This means that insulin was more efficient at lowering blood glucose levels when fewer meals were consumed.

In addition to this, there are several studies suggesting that fasting - which is effectively a term meaning eating fewer meals - significantly increases insulin sensitivity.

What can I do, oh, what can I do?

The easiest way to treat the insulin resistance problem is to change your eating habits. Go down from 6 meals to 4 or even 3 meals a day. You don't necessarily have to eat less, just less frequently.

In my opinion (and experience), an ideal eating pattern on non-training days would include a large, conventional bodybuilding breakfast with an emphasis on protein, healthy fats and functional carbohydrates.

I would follow this a few hours later with a lunch that has a similar micronutrient profile, which would be followed a few hours later by a protein boost in the form of 5 grams of branched-chain amino acids or something similar.

(And yes, I know that protein and/or amino acids are insulinogenic - but not nearly as much as carbohydrates, which is especially true if you're only eating a few grams).

I would follow this with a big, late dinner of protein, fats and as few carbs as possible.

The diet on non-training days:

• Big breakfast: protein, healthy fats, functional carbs
• Lunch: Protein, healthy fats, functional carbohydrates
• Afternoon: 5 grams of protein pulse
• Late dinner: Protein, fat

On workout days, I do virtually the same thing, either replacing my lunch with my workout nutrition protocol or simply taking my workout nutrition protocol with me in addition to my planned meals.

On Saturdays, I do what I call a "fasting cheat day," which seems unorthodox because it is unorthodox.

I eat a big protein-based breakfast and then - apart from my protein pulse in the afternoon - I don't eat anything else until my late dinner, when I pretty much eat whatever I want. No matter what dietary excesses I indulge in during the evening, I have fasted throughout the day, which increases my insulin sensitivity and - at least in theory - allows my body to weather the evening calorie storm.

My plan, unlike similar plans, was developed as a whole life nutrition plan. Also, my plan is specifically designed to lower your blood sugar levels in a healthy way and keep them low. Fat loss and improved body composition are a side effect of my plan.

My plan is also not a fasting plan. I am not promoting squeezing multiple meals into an 8 hour window and fasting for the rest of the day. This type of eating plan might work for improving insulin sensitivity, but my hypothesis is that it will inevitably lead to a loss of muscle mass. Not eating for 16 hours forces your body to rob your muscles of protein. Apart from this, such a plan is not practical in real life. In other words, fasting for 12 hours is okay, but 16 hours is not.

This is not to say that my plan is free of problems. There is a price you have to pay for eating three times a day: it's harder to achieve a calorie surplus - enough to build muscle - if you don't eat so frequently.

The benefit, of course, is that you'll get leaner, be more efficient with carbs and feel electrified instead of lethargic.

This is the reason that Cyanidin 3-glucoside (C3G) has become so popular. It allows you to dance at two weddings at the same time.

One of the things that C3G does is dramatically improve the way your body deals with blood sugar. One study showed that C3G caused a 22.2 percent (+- 5.8 percent) improvement in insulin sensitivity (Stull, et al, 2010).

In addition, it blocks an increase in leptin levels (while improving leptin sensitivity), lowers LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels, promotes glucose uptake into muscle tissue, blocks fat accumulation and inhibits digestive enzymes that break down starch for absorption (meaning that carbohydrates cannot be absorbed and remain in the digestive tract).

This is why people who use C3G can eat more - often a lot more - while keeping their insulin sensitivity extremely high and becoming leaner and more muscular.

It seems to restore insulin sensitivity in affected people, while in people with supposedly normal insulin sensitivity, it further increases insulin sensitivity.

I was able to lower my fasting blood glucose levels from 117mg/dl to 77 mg/dl by using this diet plan and taking C3G, where it has remained to this day except for a few fluctuations.

And when I check my blood sugar levels throughout the day (as I do occasionally to make sure I'm on target), I see my blood sugar levels rise only moderately after a meal and drop back to baseline within an hour or so, which is exactly what you would want.

However, C3G is not essential. However, it is especially important that our little subculture starts to rethink our time-honored but horribly wrong 6-meals-a-day eating pattern.

You can improve your insulin sensitivity through diet alone, but it won't be as easy as with C3G and you won't be able to get extra carbohydrate calories into muscle tissue. Nevertheless, improving insulin sensitivity through diet alone is a reasonable and necessary goal.

The frequent meal eating plan, may have originally been developed with the best of health intentions, but this won't help the legions of insulin resistant, thick skinned, bulking bastards out there who can't for the life of them figure out why food is their biggest obstacle to becoming a lean, muscular, high energy, fat burning machine.

Let the multiple meals a day be, let it be.

Part 1

By TC Luoma | 02/24/12

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/new-way-to-eat-part-1

Related blog posts:

>> The eat as much as you want diet
>> Why insulin is an advantage.