Me as well. Except for my Confusious revised quote, which I completely believe in and have experienced my second training life.
My weird nutrition thing is: if I ever gear up for a big workout (big volume, heavy singles/doubles, etc.), I always eat sushi and drink as much water as possible before working out. The bloat and subsequent pump is amazing.
It’s intent for me. When I press, I get stronger, sure, but when I BUILD the press, I get jacked. It’s because a strong press requires strong shoulder, triceps, traps, lats, upper pecs and lower back. Just pressing in and of itself can develop all that stuff, but when I do the things that makes my press grow, it makes ME grow.
A lotta dudes just wanna do the lifts that get them stronger and think that’ll take care of the getting bigger part, but some breaking down and rebuilding goes a long way.
My principle after my experience until now: Disregard flat bench, sure do it but don’t make it the main, focus on inclines, and start with inclines, incline everything.
This has made tremendous different in my chest. To me flat bench has become somewhat of a bro exercise, like who can bench more among bro’s, it doesn’t help build the most aesthetic chest.
See, I don’t feel it’s there. I’ve trained so many different ways, and it really seems like effort and consistency was pretty much the key there, which are the “clean eating” of training.
I do wonder if part of this is simply the era I grew up in. NO ONE counted calories when I was growing up, unless they were a bodybuilder coming into prep or someone with an eating disorder. In turn, we all had nutrition superstituions we followed to stay on point. “Eat low fat, eat low carb, don’t eat after 7, drink ice cold water at every meal, eat every 3 hours to speed up metabolism, nothing but fruit until lunch”, etc etc.
For me, finding a maintenance and counting calories actually decreases stress around food. I like the certainty as opposed to not knowing if I can/should eat something
For example, if I were to go off of when I think I’m hungry, I could be “satisfied” with 12-1400kcal, but I’d be constantly questioning whether I should eat more or whether I can “afford” something extra. In comparison, I can maintain on 1800-2000
I actually agree with this. Not with the whole post, but I feel like it’s easier to go off my targets if I don’t have a vague idea of how many calories I’m eating, so tracking some of that helps as a reality check. Which brings me to…
@T3hPwnisher I don’t count calories per se, but I have laid out a meal plan that I follow very closely (pretty much 100%) every day, so I know what I’m eating even though I only calculated the calories and macros once, as opposed to having to log every meal I have.
Is it possible that that’s what people were doing back in the day? Maybe they weren’t counting calories every day but they had a set plan and were eyeballing portion sizes to adhere to that plan.
As far as training not having to be extremely complicated I agree: maybe I overstated it a little bit; what I meant was more that training does require a bit more planning than eating. Maybe not, but in my view it tends to.
There’s no delicate way to say this, but you do have an eating disorder.
I do something similar. I plan out my 3 base meals and my prebed protein bar, then fill in the rest with whatever I want. I’m often surprised at how much I can actually “get away with” to the point that I’m constantly questioning whether I’ve forgotten to account for things 
I already added some principles to this thread but have been thinking about this a lot.
I have another that has been really important for me in the last 10 years.
Compete in something
When I first started lifting weights al I wanted I do was get bigger muscles or lift more weight. The problem for me overtime is that the gainz are slow, the feedback via the mirror is not that positive. You are always chasing something you can’t reallly catch. We have all had that moment where we wish we looked the same as when we were pumped when we woke up the next day.
When I started running 10 years ago, I signed up for a race within the first 2 weeks and trained for that that goal. For the next 6 years I was always only 2 months away from the next race.
When I started back in the gym 4 years ago I always had the longer term goal of competing in powerlifting but waited just over 3 years to do a comp. This was a mistake, I should have done one much earlier.
I don’t think nutrition is less complex than training, at all. Maybe a product of my time as well, though.
I do remember (now that you brought it up) - we would have two fried eggs and two glasses of warm water for breakfast when wrestling, and rice for lunch. Here was our rationale: the breakfast was going to make you use the bathroom (easiest route to weight loss right there!), and the leanest guy on our team was from the Phillipines and he said they traditionally ate a lot of rice - obviously the secret to making weight, then, was eat rice. Sometimes we’d also weigh dinner to ensure that plus your current weight wouldn’t take you over weight for the next morning. I’m not sure if that math works out, but that was the thinking.
I do think there is an element of “all roads lead to Rome” here - if you’re consistently working toward a quality, it’s hard not to head in that direction.
Those jokers eat mountains of rice and are built like twigs. I could not believe the quantity of white rice that those guys can consume. It looked like they were consuming their own bodyweight in rice when I was there.
And thus a diet is born. Give me time to put it in ebook format
Sounds like my dad when he was young. My (and his) last name is a homophone with the chinese word for rice, so his nickname growing up literally translates to rice bucket 
Even my grandma used to eat 1/2 kilo a day when she was young. That was the ration for students… even though most of the country was literally starving
My diet ones aren’t anything ground breaking. I like to divide my daily protein into about 4 servings so I get steady absorbtion, maybe 3 meals and a protein shake. It can be hard to get it all in so I believe in eating/drinking 50 grams for breakfast to get started early.
In my younger partying days I made sure to finish all my grams before I started drinking.
Deadlifts and sushi (like eating until you can’t move) are a magical combination! It’s the new “squats and milk.”
It’s pretty much what I do today. Eliminating a macronutrient makes it stupidly easy. Eyeball portions of protein, eat unlimited veggies.
Oh man, I wish my nickname was Rice Bucket. So funny.
I would be a pretty happy camper if I foud out that eating tons of rice would really help lean me out. I find that I like it just with a bit of soy sauce and a good strong chili sauce mixed in. A bit of random meat to help round it out.
I mean, there is anecdotal evidence that eating tons of white rice actually works, but is this the general consensus?
Hey, a good opportunity to discuss some more nutrition voodoo if nothing else.
My wife has korean ethnicity and grew up on Hawaii. Rice is a big part of her upbringing, and she’s a master with our rice cooker. She makes it for many meals and can eat prodigious amounts of it without ever feeling full.
I am primarily northern European. For years, I’ve shied away from carbs, but that’s because it seemed to me that eating them pretty rapidly got me chubbier. It now also seems that I have limited capacity to eat them in large quantities anyway, as I’ll start feeling full quickly from rice or potatoes.
But in the same stroke, I have a pretty much limitless capacity for eating meat. I stop simply because I know I’m no longer getting benefit from it, but I’ve never found the bottom of my appetite there. Meanwhile, my wife has very little capacity to eat it, and even if she has an enjoyable piece, she’ll tap out pretty quick in her consumption of it.
There may be some sort of genetic component to how well these foods are digested and metabolized, similarly to how lactose intolerance seems far more rampant in those of Asian descent vs Northern European.
This sounds right to me, and hopefully we can discuss things like this without anyone getting upset about the eventual stereotypes =)
I guess I am a natural born milk drinker as well, backed up by my northern European roots. Would rather be a rice eater.
One thing I had in the back of my mind and that I wanted to ask you out of curiosity… In your post about nutrition on your blog, you were listing some things that are too high on carbs and hence not on your “veggie” list.
One of those things was carrots. I thought that was understandable, but why not tomatoes as well then?