The Paleo Diet for Bodybuilders
Author: Jeb Roberts, MA; Illustrations: Mark Collins
http://www.musclemag.com/Nutrition-and-Supps/Articles/The-Paleo-Diet-for-Bodybuilders.aspx
Burn fat faster while sparing muscle tissue - and potentially live a
longer, healthier life - by looking to the past for a new approach to
performance nutrition.
Fat-loss diets are hardly known for their staying power. While
bodybuilders have spent the past century carving out a slow, steady path
to building muscle and cutting fat through eating clean, unprocessed
foods, the rest of society has scrambled from one fad to the next,
taking its nutritional cues from greedy gurus and Special K commercials,
all while getting fatter, slower and more disease-prone with each
passing year. But one
"trend," called Paleo by its diehard followers, is
cutting a swath of long-term fat loss and enhanced muscle building
through the fray of useless dietary fads, and its secret is that it's
not new at all. In fact, it's as old as our genes.
According to current anthropological evidence, the human genome has
remained fairly steady for the past 120,000 years. That means that if
you travelled back in time to the last ice age and carved a caveman out
of a glacier, he'd be pretty much genetically identical to us. He'd have
the same capacity for language and advanced mathematics, and he'd have
the same dietary needs. If you think of those 120,000 years of human
existence as a 100-yard football field, for almost the entire length of
the field, humans were Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, eating primarily
meat, with some vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. In fact, it's only
in the last 10,000 years (less than the last 10
yards of that field)
that humans have become reliant on modern agriculture and its Neolithic
staples of grains, legumes and dairy. And according to the latest
anthropological research, it's also during these last 10,000 years that
we've become significantly shorter, fatter, less muscular and more prone
to disease.
Paleo in a Nutshell
In the simplest sense, the paleo diet cuts out grains, legumes and
dairy, each of which purportedly contains toxic elements that fatten our
physiques and shorten our lives, and encourages consumption of meat -
lots of it - along with plenty of vegetables and some fruits, nuts and
seeds. In other words, if you can kill it or forage for it, bon
appetite. But while many see the Paleo diet as a way to live longer and
avoid modern scourges like obesity, diabetes, cancer and cardiac
disease, athletes in particular have been experimenting with Paleo
nutrition as a way to
lean out and build muscle with greater efficiency.
Given these tendencies, it should come as no surprise that the Paleo
diet offers benefits for the bodybuilder. And no Paleo proponent is
better equipped to customize this ancestral diet for the bodybuilder's
needs than former research biochemist Robb Wolf, CSCS, author of the New
York Times best-selling book, The Paleo Solution (Victory Belt, 2010).
When Robb isn't traveling the globe promoting performance-enhancing
nutrition or giving talks at NASA to help astronauts combat the
muscle-wasting effects of space travel, he's training world-class
athletes, including MMA fighters and pro football players, at his Chico
(CA) gym, NorCal Strength and Conditioning, which was recently named one
of America's top 30 gyms.
"You can look at the Paleo diet in two ways," Robb says. "One is that
it's a diet completely focused on unprocessed or very
minimally
processed foods. And the other piece is that when we look at foods that
we theoretically co-evolved with over millions of years - lean meat,
seafood, roots, tubers, fruits and vegetables - relative to Neolithic
staples like grains, legumes and dairy, we tend to get much more
nutrition per calorie."
Scratch any notions you may have of weak, scrawny evolutionary ancestors
cowering in caves and scrounging for root vegetables. While our
ancestors may have shared our genes, paleo advocates point to evidence
of them being significantly taller, leaner and beefier than us because
of the foods they ate. "Our Paleolithic ancestors were very fit, very
strong, and carried good amounts of muscle," Robb says. So why are we
and our Neolithic brethren shorter and chubbier by comparison? Most of
that answer, according to Robb and other paleo adherents, boils down to
a protein called gluten, which is found in many
of our staple grains.
Against the Grain
While animals may be armed with natural defenses - from teeth and claws
to heightened senses and the ability to outrun most predators - it's
easy to assume that the plants we consume are docile, harmless and eager
to be eaten. But the truth is, most plants - including grains - have
chemical defenses that are just as dangerous as any pair of claws, and
most are constantly engaged in chemical warfare with one another and
with anything that hopes to make a meal of them.
While this is no secret to people with a gluten-based autoimmune
disorder known as celiac disease, you may be surprised to learn that all
humans are at least mildly susceptible to the damage gluten causes. The
perpetrators of this damage are lectins, phytates and protease
inhibitors, and together they limit protein and mineral absorption while
inflicting a severe inflammatory response, which Robb
likens to poison
oak in your intestinal lining. "Because of the gut-inflaming elements
found in grains, they tend to cause inflammation in the digestive tract
that gets transmitted to the rest of the body," Robb says. "Whenever we
have inflammation, we tend to retain water. That's why you see a lot of
contest-prepping bodybuilders instinctively migrating away from
wheat-containing carb sources and opting more for potatoes and rice. And
when we pull out the rice and the corn and we stick with yams and sweet
potatoes, we find that people have much less inflammation throughout
their bodies and retain less water in total."
As you might imagine, all of this gut irritation severely limits the
amount of nutrients you're absorbing, and that holds especially true for
protein, says Robb. "When you're putting a premium on literally every
gram of muscle that you have, digestive efficiency is going to be huge.
It's not
just an issue of how much food you stuff down your pie hole -
it's a matter of how much nutrition you actually get into your body. And
if we remove these gut-irritating foods, we tend to get much better
absorption."
And if that's not enough, inflammation also impacts your immune system,
subsequently impairing your ability to recover from heavy training and
build muscle, to say nothing of its relationship to modern-day diseases.
"This systemic inflammation and the resulting overactivity of the immune
system throughout the body is an issue in everything from Parkinson's to
Alzheimer's to cardiovascular disease," Robb insists. "And it's
especially important for bodybuilders because their recovery is
predicated on immune function. The better functioning your immune
system, the better you can recover, and the quicker you can get back in
the gym and lift heavy again."
The Other Offenders
While grains
and their lectin weaponry may be the main culprit, other
Neolithic staples - namely legumes, dairy, sugar and processed vegetable
oils - have the same kind of gut-irritating and inflammation-promoting
properties. "Legumes have similar anti-nutrients - similar lectins - to
gluten, and all of them affect different people in different ways, but
in general we find that people tend to do better without them," Robb
says. Naturally, that means all soy products and peanuts - yes, peanuts
are a legume - are off the table.
While no one will question the importance of cutting sugar, eliminating
processed vegetable oils may raise some eyebrows. After all, they've
been touted by government guidelines for the past four decades as
healthy cooking alternatives because of their high polyunsaturated fat
content. The problem is, the bulk of that fat comes from omega-6
polyunsaturates, and humans evolved to eat an approximately
1:1 ratio of
omega-6s to omega-3s. Throw off this ratio too far in favor of omega-6s
and the results, yet again, are systemic inflammation and reduced
recovery.
Ditching dairy may be another hard sell - particularly for hard gainers.
But Robb thinks there's a way around it. "The dairy is kind of a gray
area," he explains. "If you can get grass-fed dairy, it wouldn't be much
of a problem. But because we grain-feed our cows, we concentrate the
lectins from those grain sources in the milk, so it tends to be just as
pro-inflammatory." Cows, we're finally realizing, evolved to graze on
grass, and they're just as intolerant of gluten as we are, which is an
issue that extends well beyond their milk and right into the meat we
rely on to build and maintain muscle.
The Meat of the Matter
Go back to our evolutionary history, when there were no 24-hour produce
markets brimming with brightly colored fruits and
vegetables gown
hundreds of miles away and ripened on trucks before making their way to
your table. The bottom line is that most of what we think of as dietary
staples are purely seasonal, and we didn't have constant - if any -
access to them while our genotype was being hammered out. So what made
up the bulk of our year-round diet? Meat, say most anthropologists.
The problem is, the meat sources we co-evolved with were drastically
different from the cellophane-wrapped cuts at your local supermarket,
and what our food eats is just as important to our health as what we
eat. Grass-fed beef, it turns out, contains the ideal 1:1 ratio of
omega-3s and omega-6s, not to mention plenty of CLA, which helps with
fat loss and can decrease insulin resistance. The polyunsaturated fat in
grain-fed meat, on the other hand, comes mostly from omega-6 fatty
acids, meaning it's another sure-fire recipe for
inflammation.
None of this should suggest that our ancestors ate nothing but meat, of
course, but protein played a major role in our evolutionary development.
As Robb points out, "The reconstructed human diet looks a lot like what
bodybuilders would typically want, which is very high protein, anywhere
from moderate to high fat, and carbohydrate filling in the rest." If the
words moderate to high fat set off an alarm, you're likely not alone.
But Paleo isn't necessarily a high-fat diet. In fact, Robb claims that
it's "macronutrient agnostic," as it focuses on food quality rather than
food quantity. So long as you avoid gut-irritating Neolithic foods, you
can customize your macros (protein, fat and carbohydrate) according to
your body's needs. That said, Robb insists that, based on what he's seen
in his athletes, a higher-fat approach leads to better results both in
terms of performance and body composition.
"When people step outside of
the mainstream and start playing with their macros, they find that if
they eat more fat, they feel better, they look better, they perform
better and they recover better. It's kind of a scary proposition when
they're counting calories [fat has 9 calories per gram, whereas protein
and carbs have around 4 calories per gram], but inevitably they end up
with better body composition," he says.
And in case you're worried about the saturated fat in many meat sources
that we've been warned to avoid, Robb urges you to revisit the science.
"As for the whole demonization of saturated fats, there have been
several huge studies recently, and they just can't pin anything on
saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, saturated fat and cancer, or
anything else. They've tried and tried and spent billions of dollars
attempting to prove that saturated fat was a problem, and it's just not
penciling
out to be the case." The authors of a recent meta-analysis of
21 studies published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition are
in full agreement with Robb on this last point, as they recently
concluded that no study could associate saturated fat with increased
risk of coronary heart disease, stroke or coronary vascular disease.
Putting Paleo into Practice
As mentioned, paleo is a diet that emphasizes food quality over
quantity, and many of its followers find that once they kick
agricultural staples - mainly grains - to the curb, they're too satiated
to overeat and they lose fat without ever thinking about calories. But
Robb isn't saying you should throw out the scale in your kitchen. "This
is the appropriate place for someone to weigh and measure with paleo,"
he says of the diet's application to bodybuilding. "When we're talking
about an extreme level of leanness, we can keep people leaner during
the
offseason because they no longer have a binge-and-purge kind of
scenario. We clean up their food and keep them within striking distance
of their contest prep, and then when it comes time to really shrink-wrap
them down, we bring in the additional attention to detail of weighing
and measuring food and monitoring total caloric intake, and it's easier
because they're already 5-10 pounds out of shape rather than 30-40
pounds out."
For bodybuilders who are leaning out, perhaps the best part of using a
Paleo approach is that you're less likely to lose muscle as you shed
fat. "We've worked with some NFL football players who have some really
impressive body composition - guys who are anywhere from 280-310 pounds
running sub-10% bodyfat - with almost world-champion powerlifting
totals, and we've been able to keep more muscle mass on them using a
Paleo-type approach than with anything else we've tried."
So
whether you're prepping for the stage or you're just looking to sport
a six-pack this summer, Paleo offers some pretty striking benefits, from
maintaining more muscle while leaning out to faster, long-term fat loss
with less cardio, not to mention better nutrient absorption and improved
overall health. But even after they hear about these advantages, Robb
admits that many people - especially bodybuilders who've seen slow,
steady success with standard bulking and cutting phases - aren't
motivated to give up the grains, claiming they've never experienced the
gut irritation and inflammation that drive the Paleo approach. "Some
people say they've never had a problem with these foods, but what
they've never done is pull them out of rotation for a good 30 days to
see how they actually do getting their carb sources from yams, sweet
potatoes and maybe a little bit of post-workout fruit to refill liver
glycogen."
For Robb, this 30-day window is critical. Whereas few bodybuilders will
agree to give up whole-grain pasta forever, once they've seen how much
better they feel and look after just one month eating Paleo, they
usually refuse to go back. "If they'll go with a 30-day run and get
their carbs from yams, sweet potatoes, squash and even regular white
potatoes in lieu of the bread, rice and pasta, they definitely notice
less water retention and being less puffy, and this is true regardless
of where they are, whether they're contest-prepping or they're in a
mass-gain cycle. In total, they have less inflammation, so they retain
less water and recover better, and everything they'd want goes in a
favorable direction."
According to Robb and other Paleo adherents, whether you're a
bodybuilder, an elite athlete or simply someone who still wants to be
bounding up stairs when they're 90, Paleo is your best chance
for
getting a leg up. "Bodybuilding is definitely pushing the human genetic
potential to the outer edges of hypertrophy expression," he says. But
the ancestral diet can still support that process. You may need to tweak
and fiddle with the details, but it's doable." And even if your only
immediate goals are to build a physique that's composed of as much
muscle as your frame will allow while dipping into low-single-digit
bodyfat, Robb insists that your physique goals don't need to override
your overall health. "Let's push that human performance element as much
as we can, and let's do it in a way that's not completely messing us up"
he adds.
For more of Robb Wolf's views on the paleo diet, visit
robbwolf.com.
