One perspective if all you care about is strength (not health or abs): garbage food has a crazy amount of omega 6/9 oils. These cause systemic inflammation if they are all you eat with no omega 3’s. Eventually that will catch up with your joints in your 30’s and beyond especially if you train hard. Angry injured joints will hinder your strength in a decade or two. So add some fish oil and maybe curcumin to that whopper diet llas insurance.
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which in turn is going to hurt your strength
Aside from it being 10k calories it is generally considered clean. IIRC Thor and Shaw try to eat clean as well.
I dont see how you wouldn’t. Ferrari’s can run off regular but they were made to run off premium. The same is true of humans.
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Just do it for 6 months or so and see what happens.
If possible, take a couple to a few hours on an off day and prep and cook meals for the week.
If you’re worried about not getting enough calories, then make sure you have some EVOO and peanut butter or some other nut butter on hand and add it to meal replacement/addition shakes.
The trend I’ve see in the past decade is that PL’s are getting leaner and leaner. It seems to make sense too. 10lb muscle moves more weight than 10lb of fat.
My personal experience is that it does help with recovery, but not as much as getting plenty of sleep and having low stress levels.
The main reason I do it is because I have more energy and lower anxiety levels when I eat healthier.
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Thats the thing I never have free time. That I’m what little time I get I don’t want to be cooking and stuff I’d rather be relaxing. Had a few people said it makes a huge difference I would give it a shot but seems like everyone is just saying to get in calories and itll be the same. Aside from health down the road
Short term, no it doesn’t matter. Long term, yes, it absolutely matters. If you want to be as strong as possible for your whole life, eating for health may be more important than even eating for recovery or performance.
Have you seen his documentary? Dude eats like a Stoffer’s stuffer and a pound of bacon every day, lol, not sure who considers that clean.
Let’s not pretend that Eddie isn’t seriously sacrificing long term health either.
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x2. Probably a better way of saying what I was trying to say.
Examples like Dave Tate and Eddie Hall certainly indicate that you can get monstrously strong on a very dirty diet, but they did (Tate) or will (Eddie) likely pay for that at some point later on. Bringing up Tate above, we should also probably note that Tate ended his PL career a clanking train wreck full of injuries and (I think) with sleep apnea, and he acknowledges in the latter stages of his Iron Evolution series that it would have benefited him not to get so fat in the first place.
So going back to my first comment…you can get monstrously strong on a shit diet; but if you’re looking to maintain this for a long while, you will probably stay healthier if you get something nutritious in the diet. I’m not saying it has to be contest-bodybuilder-clean. Just eat a damn vegetable once in awhile, and throw some fruit in a shake or eat some blueberries before bed.
I get what you’re saying, but eating semi-healthy really doesn’t take that much time. Chopping an onion and a bunch of carrots and potatoes and dumping them into the slow cooker with a pork or beef roast takes like 5 minutes in the morning. Making my post-workout shake with whole milk, spinach, berries, protein, and creatine takes me less than 5 minutes and I can drink it on my way to work. If you need the calories, add a big glop of heavy cream to said shake.
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Agreed. @Vincepac1500, believe me, I get it. I am all about relaxing during the very little free time I get. I’ve found spending an hour or two on Saturday or Sunday preparing a lot of food for the coming week allows you to relax at night throughout that week. I’ll make about 2 pounds of fish, throw something in a crock pot, hard boil two dozen eggs, and make a big ass pot of rice for a normal week. Then it’s just a matter of putting it in Tupperware in the morning or the night before and making a shake or two. The hardest part is fitting it all in the fridge.
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I thought I had and remembered him eating some desserts etc to fill out calories but the base of his food was “clean”.
Going to see i I can find that.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. He does eat clean foods, but he also eats a lot of junk to get the calories in. To me, that isn’t eating clean. It’s just what he has to do to be a WSM contender.
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I think you missed my post above.
Eric Helms says:
In other words, the concept of eating clean is bullshit. So long as you consume the right amount of calories to add, lose, or maintain weight, enough protein to recover, and enough micronutrients to stay healthy there is no problem with eating junk on top of it if that is what you choose to do. You can eat fruit or you can eat candy, both contain sugar and if you already got enough fibre and vitamin c then there is no added benefit from eating fruit.
If someone is really concerned about their heath they probably wouldn’t be in any WSM competition anyway, once you weigh 400+lbs. you can’t be too healthy no matter what you eat.
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I’m not really sure where we disagree…? Eddie Hall is one of the strongest men in the world and he eats a shit ton of junk. So, I don’t disagree with Eric Helms.
However, to call Hall’s diet “clean”, which is what Bot & I were talking about is inaccurate, to say the least.
Yeah no. It isn’t just about benefit. Yes, you could match the sugar intake of a candy bar by eating like 50 strawberries, but no that still doesn’t make them equivalent. There are negative effects of crap like candy bars other than not having micro-nutrients. If you care about things like systematic inflammation and oxidative stress (you should) there are plenty of reasons not to eat candy bars even when your micro-nutrient requirements are met.
I just disagree with the “clean diet” concept. I can understand kosher or halal, but beyond that there is no real logic except to make people feel bad about eating certain foods when it is the overall diet that is relevant.
The problem with Eddie Hall’s diet is the overall quantity of food, not necessarily the content. If it was the same amount of calories but “clean” he probably wouldn’t be able to force himself to eat it first of all, and if he did it wouldn’t make him any healthier. You can get fat on a clean diet too. A guy like Vince who can stay lean at 180-something while eating nachos and fast food doesn’t really need to worry about how clean his diet is as long as he doesn’t have any deficiencies of vitamins or minerals. I’m not pro-junk food, but if you stay lean and healthy there isn’t really anything to worry about.
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Well 190’s now. Been really trying to pack on weight. Strength is going through the roof it feels like. I cant wait to see where I’m at in about 8 weeks.
I don’t know enough about systemic inflammation and oxidative stress to argue that point but I’m sure that there are a whole bunch of things that cause them, including lifting weights. Eric Helms’ point is that there is no use in having more than the necessary amounts of micronutrients, you will just piss them out later anyway. Strawberries are a pretty bad example too, try some tropical fruits like (ripe) pineapple, mango, sweetsop, etc., those are pretty high in sugar. If you are you concerned about calories can’t eat too much of those, regardless of how clean they are.
You know what, Mike Israetel actually recommends keeping carb intake around the same all the time but increasing fat intake when bulking, he says it will help to maintain insulin sensitivity.
You haven’t really described your diet aside from regularly eating fast food, which in your case isn’t a bad thing, but what else to you normally eat? Do you eat fruits and vegetables (not counting fries)? Worst case scenario that I could see for you is that you don’t get enough of certain vitamins and minerals and after a few months you start feeling like crap, but even then you can take supplements. Find a girl who can cook!
No, working out isn’t anything like over eating on omega 6. There are many things in a snickers that are bad for you. Like a ton of omega 6 with little to no omega 3. It has over a 60 to 1 omega 6 to 3 ratio. That’s just plan terrible for you if you have all your micronutrients or not. You could perhaps undo some of the damage by eating more omega 3, but you are still better off eating less omega 6 heavy foods. Again it isn’t just a lack of nutrients, it’s that many contain things that are actively bad for your health.
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