Pulse: Generate GH with GBC

So, from earlier in the Pulse series, we know that you have to generate GH (Growth Hormone) to create fat loss. I'm going to detail here the best way that I know of to release GH when weight training--something called GBC (German Body Composition) by Charles Poliquin.

Here's the short version:

1) Super set all exercises. For instance, do a set of a lower body exercise, and follow it up with an upper body exercise.

2) Keep rep ranges, in general, between 8 and 12 (although you may want to do some sets of 15-20).

3) Rest only 30 to 60 seconds between sets. If your first movement in an upper/lower body superset is squats, you might want to rest 60 seconds before attempting your second movement. However, if your first exercise is a fairly "easy" exercise, like leg extensions, you might only wish to wait 30 seconds before doing the second part of the superset.

4) Do a different Body Comp workout each day, doing three or four workouts a week. (Charles' actual program involves 12 separate workouts, done in succession. After the 12 workouts are completed, you simply start with the first one again. This whole "cycle" can be done up to three times, depending on how much fat you want to dump.)

5) Work larger muscle groups, such as quads, back, and chest, earlier in the workout.

6) Try to keep a balance between all body parts so that none are neglected.

From TC Luoma's How to Deep-six Holiday Fat.

There's a sample workout in that article. For another sample, click here.

For more on this topic, read an article by Charles Poliquin on Advanced GBC, or check out his book on the same topic (Manly Weight Loss: For Men Who Hate Aerobics and Carrot-Stick Diets, Finally, a Weight-Loss Program That Melts the Fat and Spares the Muscle) that explains it in much more thorough detail.

Our take-home point today is simple: to lose fat, incorporate short rest intervals (30-60 seconds) in your weight training.

Coming up in the Pulse series, how to conduct your "aerobics" sessions in order to release more GH, how to release GH by fasting, and how to put all of this together.

Pulse: Growth Hormone Basics

There's a slight difference between what Gary Taubes says and what Brad Pilon says: Taubes says that the main precondition for fat loss is to lower insulin levels. He does say that you need some other hormonal responses, but that basically everything else is antagonistic to insulin, including growth hormone, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and glucagon.

Pilon says that you can actually suppress fat loss by suppressing GH levels, which I'm not sure about-I'm still doing the research. It is clear that having a high GH level reduces muscle breakdown and inhibits free fatty acids from going back into the fat cells, as well as encouraging the use of free fatty acids for energy.

Basically, what this means is, a low insulin level "opens the fat cells up" and a high GH level will protect your muscle from being burned while encouraging fat to come out of the open fat cells and be burned for energy. This is a great turn of events for fat loss.

So how do you increase GH levels in ways that we can manipulate in our own bodies (without a prescription)?

1. Fasting
2. High protein meals
3. Exercise
4. Sleep

Things are just getting interesting now that we know how to cut calories, control insulin, and increase GH. Stay tuned: we're going to start putting this knowledge into practice.

Pulse: Macronutrient Basics and Low Carb diets

I concluded the last pulse post with the following:

In order to lose weight:

Eat a low carbohydrate (LC) diet of probably less than 10-15% but definitely less than 40% of energy

But what is a low carb diet? What does this mean exactly? It's time for a lesson in the basics of macronutrient composition.

All the calories that you eat (or drink) are made up of four types of what are called "macronutrients": fat (aka "lipid"), carbohydrate (carb, CHO), protein (PRO), and alcohol. Carbohydrate and protein have four calories per gram, fat nine, and alcohol seven. And calories are just a synonym for "energy".

When I say, "eat fewer than 40% of your energy from carbs" I mean, if you were to keep a food log, (you are keeping a food log, aren't you?) your graph would show that less than 40% of your calories came from carbs. Here's the macronutrient breakdown of one of my recent days:

	Fat: 54%		Carbs: 10%
	Protein: 36%		Alcohol: 0 %

Probably the first thing you'll notice about this: I eat a TON of fat. Here's the deal with this: you can only eat so much protein (anywhere between 10-40%), then after that, you have to fill in your energy needs with either carbohydrate, fat, or a combination of the two. Since I'm trying to lean out, fat is my weapon of choice, and I find it easy to take in enough, since it's so rich in calories per gram. Butter (if you're eating dairy), olive oil, coconut oil, tree nuts and nut butters, as well as the fat that your meat (and if you're eating it, dairy) contain are all okay, as are fish oils and things like avocados and artichokes. More processed oils like canola, peanut, margarine , and anything with trans-fatty acids are not so good. Basically, I want to eat things that I can imagine coming from nature. If you squeeze an olive, you get oil, but I've never gotten oil out of a cob of corn.

The next thing you'll notice is how low the carbs are. This graph actually contains a combination of my grams of "active" and "fiber" carbohydrates. I usually don't count the fiber: I subtract the grams of fiber from the total grams of carbs, then multiply by four to get the calories from carbs, but fitday calculates the fiber as being 4 calories per gram. Technically, the fiber provides about two calories per gram--but you'll be hard pressed to get much more than 30g of fiber a day unless you supplement your diet, and I defy anyone to screw up their diet with 30 extra grams of fiber: it's too filling, and 30g of fiber only has about 60 calories with a minimal effect on your insulin levels.

So, you're only getting a few grams of carbohydrates a day, probably between 20-100g. A common question is, "What kinds of foods are the best when it comes to choosing carbohydrates?" Let me quote a couple of sources here:
From Jimmy Moore:

"When eating carbohydrate foods, look at the carb/fiber ratio and keep it under 6. Anything over that and definitely those in double digits are to be eaten very sparingly if at all. For example, the carb/fiber ratio of strawberries is just 3, but bananas is 10. Likewise, broccoli is 2, but corn is 9. Even so-called healthy brown rice contains 12–it’s better than than the 40 from instant rice, but both are still not good for you."

From Dr. Michael Eades:

"Okay, here are my insights. There are no good carbs and bad carbs. Carbs are carbs. They all run up your insulin levels and play havoc with your metabolic system. They are all sugar. Once you accept that, then the question becomes what is my trade off for eating all these metabolically disruptive carbohydrates. If they are packaged as pure sugar, then there is no good trade off. If they are packaged as, say, blackberries then the small amount of carbohydrate is offset by all the antioxidants and other healthful phytochemicals in the blackberries. Same with blueberries, asparagus, tomatoes, and all the rest. It’s a trade off. How much good stuff can I get to make eating the metabolically disruptive carbs worth it."

So basically, we are looking for high-fiber, low carb, high-nutrition foods like broccoli, spinach, berries, and other, similar foods. A good rule of thumb is to eat things that are darkly colored (berries, green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, etc.) and avoid foods that are pale (potatoes, corn, banannas, bread, etc.)

The last macronutrient is protein, which mainly comes from meat, eggs, and cheese. You can also get protein from soy or quinoa, or by combining different grain and legume foods, but that's not what I'm going to recommend here, since our focus is on losing fat, and not on being a vegetarian. The main thing to remember about protein is to eat good, whole sources of protein like meat, eggs, protein powder, or cottage cheese, and not stuff like gelatin or soy powder. If you stick as close to nature as possible, you won't go wrong: wild salmon, free range chickens, grass-fed (and finished) beef, game--these are great for you, but a bacon cheeseburger with no bun will do in a pinch. I wouldn't strip the meat of the fat--leave it on, you'll need the calories. Likewise, don't strip chicken of it's skin, unless you're eating something deep fried.

That's basically it, in a nutshell. 10% or so of calories from carbs--probably 10-50 grams, 100-250g of protein (10-40%), depending on your size and weight, and probably another 100-200 grams of fat (whatever calories are remaining) will be satisfying and help you lose weight. Feel free to adjust your calories as you need--you'll probably find yourself spontaneously restricting your calorie intake, and that's great. Just make sure to get at least 100g of protein a day. As you become leaner and more active, you may find it useful to include more carbohydrate. Just remember the guidelines I've provided above, and you won't go wrong.

Post any questions to the comments.

Pulse: Insulin basics

In the first part of this series I explained some take home points. These were:

1. Insulin levels must be low for fat loss to occur
2. Growth hormone must be released for fat loss to occur
3. Calories out must be greater than calories in.
4. fasting drops insulin levels, raises GH levels, and cuts calories.

All of these points lead to some interesting questions. I'll deal with the first of these today: controlling insulin levels.

First, though, what is insulin? From Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories

Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated—either chronically or after a meal—we accumulate fat in our fat tissue. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and use it for fuel.

All food stimulates insulin release, but foods with sugar and/or starch (carbohydrate) release the most insulin.

Here's an excerpt from Taubes' book where he explains his basic ideas about nutrition or you can order his book here. You can also watch this video, but it's NSFW, since it includes shots of naked fat people. Taubes comes on about 2:40 if you're not interested in his bona fides.




So if insulin levels drive fat storage, how can we control insulin levels? There are three ways that I will consider here:

1. Eat small, frequent meals (SFM)
2. Eat a low carbohydrate (LC) diet of probably less than 10-15% but definitely less than 40% of energy
3. Fast intermittently (IF) for more than 12 but less than 48 hours

Let's talk about the "small frequent meals" theory. The idea here is that you can control your insulin levels by eating mini-meals of 100-500 calories, five to eight times a day. If you've read Body for Life or are a tupperware-toting bodybuilder, then you know all about this approach. The idea, as I understand it, is that you can keep things humming along, your blood sugar never dips, and you'll never get hungry if you just eat these small, frequent meals. The problem is that all eating has some insulin response. So eating five to eight times a day, even if they are small responses, creates insulin responses five to eight times a day. Even if Taubes wouldn't call this "chronically elevated" insulin levels, I think I would.

This also presents a couple of practical problems: if you have to eat five to eight times a day, this means you have to prepare five to eight meals a day: a tiny portion of meat, a tiny portion of carbohydrate, a tiny portion of vegetable. Five to eight of them. Welcome to the tupperware club, my friend. This is why supplement companies have hawked this plan for so long: not necessarily because it's more effective, but because preparing five to eight meals a day is such a pain in the ass, it's easier to eat a "meal replacement" shake--and if that stuff isn't processed food, I don't know what is.

The second practical problem with the SFM idea is ghrelin. If you've ever noticed that you get hungry at the same times every day, that's ghrelin in action. One of the effects is that you can basically train yourself to get hungry at specific times of day--we'll talk about this later, as it relates to intermittent fasting--but think about this for now, as it relates to SFM. If you eat these small, frequent meals at the same times every day, you are training yourself to get hungry five to eight times a day, and you're not eating enough calories to maintain your bodyweight, so the gherlin is just lurking in the background. So when you (inevitably) miss one of your five to eight meals a day, you get extremely hungry, and you go for whatever junk is nearby.

Ultimately, I can't recommend SFM as a solution for insulin management. That leaves us with two other options:

2. Eat a low carbohydrate (LC)diet of probably less than 10-15% but definitely less than 40% of energy
and
3. Fast intermittently (IF) for more than 12 but less than 48 hours

If you watched the video, you'll know that Taubes' solution is to use a LC diet to control insulin, and I think this is a good first step. I'll discuss my approach to LC diet later in the Pulse series.

The other option is to fast (not eat) intermittently for more than 12, but less than 48 hours. This isn't a complicated approach, but it definitely deserves its own post as well, because there are a lot of ways to screw this up.

The take-home points from today's post:

1. Insulin causes fat gain
2. Eating causes the body to release insulin
3. Eating carbohydrates (sugars and starches) causes a larger insulin response, and thus more fat gain

Stay tuned--the Pulse series is just getting warmed up.

Pulse: the Basics

I decided to make a series out of the post I've been working on--it's called "Pulse" and I'll let Brad Pilon kick it off.



Take home points:

1. Insulin levels must be low for fat loss to occur
2. Growth hormone must be released for fat loss to occur


Brad implies but does not explicitly state a few things here. The first is that calories out must be greater than calories in. The second point is that fasting drops insulin levels, raises GH levels, and cuts calories.

I'll be back tomorrow with more.