@Brant_Drake and @TrainForPain ya’ll built up the mythos of me so much I can’t possibly deliver, and TFP already gave you an outstanding answer, but here’s my short at it as well.
“Eat for performance” is exactly that. It’s telling you what outcome to eat for: performance. The difference between this and what you are describing as cutting, maintaining and bulking is that BOTH methods involve eating for an outcome: the outcome is the difference. You are describing maintaining, bulking and cutting to mean eating in a manner such that you see an outcome reflected in terms of scale weight: weight goes up (bulk), weight goes down (cut) or weight stays the same: maintain.
When THAT is your outcome, the levers you have to pull are food intake but ALSO training output.
If we accept CICO as a model, there’s two parts: the calories going in, and the calories going out. We can influence both. Well if our outcome is PURELY based around scale weight, we will influence the calories OUT portion by altering our TRAINING to achieve the desired result. If we want to lose weight, we’ll just continue to up activity to burn more calories so that the scale weight drops. If we want to increase weight, we’ll decrease activity.
And that’s what makes “bulking, cutting or maintaining” different from “eating for performance”. In the case of the former, the training is a tool used to achieve the desired outcome from the eating. In the case of the latter, the EATING is a tool used to achieve the desired outcome of the TRAINING.
When you run Tactical Barbell, you are attempting to improve in variety of areas, to include your maximal strength, your strength endurance, and your conditioning. You track this, you evaluate your progress on it, and you eat to ensure you ARE progressing on it. And, in turn, these guiding principles “keep you honest”. Because check this: if you go full Dave Tate 2005 mode on your diet and mainline Little Debbies and put on 40lbs of fluff, your max strength will go up…and your mile time will be measured with an hour glass and your chin ups will cease to exist. But if your max strength is going up, your run times are going down, and your bodyweight exercises continue to improve, it’s reasonable to assume you have gained muscle and lost fat, or, if nothing else, gained muscle and minimized fat gain to the point that your body composition is moving in a positive way.
How you can do yourself a favor here is to focus on food QUALITY rather than quantity. If you make it a goal to eat only un/minimally processed foods and drink only zero calorie beverages while attempting to get in 1g of protein per pound of bodyweight WITHOUT a protein supplement, eating when you are hungry, you will most likely radically transform your physique so long as you are improving in your training.
