Nimm's Journal, 22 May 2012

The MRA (magnetic resonance angiogram) was bumped up a week to this Friday at 4:30 AM. Yes, AM. With a funeral later that day (for the father of one of my partners at work), it's not quite how I planned to kick off the holiday weekend...

In the meantime, I'm backing off from the lifting, so I'll probably take this opportunity to lose a half pound of fat or so. Dialing the calories down this week from 3200 to about 2700. Treating it as a warmup for the next cut, which is coming up soon. Not sure when that will be, but it will probably have to be somewhere between 180 and 186 lbs when I switch, to shed some of the fat that's accumulated on this bulk.

In the meantime, today's link:
Greater weight loss and hormonal changes after 6 months diet with carbohydrates eaten mostly at dinner.

"No carbs after 6PM" is a lingering bit of dietary dogma out there that may be effective for some people as a dietary strategy, but you can still find people insisting that it has some unique benefit, other than just causing you to eat less overall. The argument is that because carbohydrate is essentially energy, and you aren't as active in the evenings, late CHO will necessarily end up as body fat since you aren't burning it off. This is so fundamentally confused, it's hard to know where to begin.

The study linked above is a handy rebuttal to that ancient argument. Two groups of obese Israeli police officers were instructed to follow similar calorie-restricted diets, in the 1300 to 1500 calorie range, with similar macronutrient profiles (20% PRO, 30-35% Fat, 45-50% CHO). The subjects back-loading most of their carbohydrate in the evening lost more weight.

Now, because this was not a metabolic ward study and intake was not carefully controlled, it's a mistake to conclude that there's in fact a metabolic/partitioning advantage to the timing of CHO. Particularly because there's a simpler explanation - as a strategy for ad libitum eating, intermittent fasting-type protocols can help keep dieters feeling more satiated throughout the day, indirectly reducing total calories through less eating.

I don't follow intermittent fasting myself, but I may give it a try on the next cut. Studies like this are making a compelling case for it.

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2666 kcal

Fat: 80.97g | Prot: 195.78g | Carb: 366.47g.   Breakfast: tomato, cocoa roast almonds, carlson fish oil, blueberries, meijer vegetable medley, peach, optimum strawberry, chobani plain nonfat, monster rehab. Lunch: cocoa roast almonds, meijer organics vegetable medley, spinach, Quinoa, asparagus, tomato, chicken breast. Dinner: blueberries, body fortress whey, optimum casein, quaker oats, soy slender, Milk (2% Lowfat with Added Vitamin A), quest bar. Snacks/Other: MONSTER REHAB, dannon light & fit toasted, sugar free jello, dark chocolate dreams, fiber one chewy bar, krema, quest bar, ben & jerry's greek frozen yogurt, apple, cocoa roast almonds, fiber one 80, tomato, blackberries, extra gum. more...