Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

Nutrition for Muscle Growth or Fat Loss
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• Three-quarters of a cup of cooked rice
• One large baked potato
• One large sweet potato
After a workout, your body quickly reverts to burning a higher percentage
of fat. The carbohydrate you eat is likely to be used to replace glycogen in your
muscles and liver. It doesn’t really matter how soon you eat that carbohydrate.
As long as you aren’t starving yourself, 24 hours is plenty of time to refuel your
muscles for the next workout.
Carbohydrate foods are tricky for fat loss. Since they’re not essential, it’s
easiest to just minimize them to keep your overall calories down and better
manage insulin. In most cases, my patients who are trying to lose fat limit their
carbohydrate intake to preworkout nutrition. The other meals consist of healthy
protein, fat, and cruciferous vegetables. Berries work well for fat loss since they’re
high in nutrients and low in carbohydrate. One cup of raspberries has 5 grams
of carbohydrate compared with one cup of banana or pineapple, which has 24
and 20 grams, respectively. For gaining muscle, carbohydrate helps a lot. The
following sources add high-quality calories that provide additional nutrients to
support growth and repair:
• Organic white or brown rice
• Organic white or sweet potato or yam
• Any organic whole fruits (not juices)
• Organic oatmeal
• Organic quinoa
• Organic Ezekiel bread
• Any organic berries (usually for a fat-loss plan)
It is likely that people who are significantly overweight or have difficulty losing
weight have insulin resistance or leptin resistance. Insulin resistance is very similar
to type II diabetes (Petersen and Shulman 2018). You have too much blood
glucose and too much insulin at the same time, causing chronic inflammation
and a resistance to fat loss (Wu and Ballantyne 2017). Leptin resistance means
your body is telling you it’s starving when it’s really not, which causes excessive
food intake that worsens the problem even more (Liu et al. 2018). Following a
low-carbohydrate diet is an effective strategy for overcoming insulin resistance,
and maybe it will help with leptin resistance as well (Liu et al. 2018; Westman
et al. 2018). That is why the nutrition plan for fat loss in this book consists of
around 50 grams of carbohydrate per day. But for muscle gain, there are many
benefits to increasing your carbohydrate intake well beyond that. For decades
professional bodybuilders have consumed up to 60 percent of their calories from
carbohydrate to build muscle with minimal fat gain. The tricky part of that plan
is keeping your fat to 10 percent of calories per day since the other 30 percent
should be protein.
Finally, avoid consuming fruit juices of any kind, even tart cherry juice, outside
of your preworkout nutrition. Fruit juices have been stripped of many of their
nutrients, including fiber, which drastically increases their rate of absorption,
elevating your blood glucose too quickly.