A Novel Idea: Eat When Hungry

The usual dietary prescription for someone looking to gain muscle is to simply eat more calories.  But the more I've looked into and thought about this, the less this simplistic notion makes sense.  I think the problem is in looking at calorie intake as an input, when really it seems to be more of an output or result of training.

If someone is looking to build muscle, they first have to stimulate this process through resistance training.  If a growth stimulus is correctly applied, then the body should naturally want more calories to facilitate growth, and signal this need through more hunger.  I feel the body is smart enough to know how many calories it needs, and that listening to hunger signals will be more efficient than trying to increase calories by a set amount.

Trying to force-feed calories just seems like a bad idea to me, as it is an attempt to override the body's natural system of hunger and satiety.  There is also the issue of whether the growth stimulus is really effective or not.  If a person isn't lifting weights with enough intensity and volume, then any force-fed calories will just go to fat.

Another issue is timing.  After resistance training, when does the body actually need nutrients to make muscle?  The bogus six meals a day idea says food should be eaten every three hours "just in case" that's when the body decides to create muscle.  A more logical approach would be to listen to the body.  If you're hungry, you're hungry for a reason: you body is seeking food for some metabolic process.  (This assumes you are eating natural/Paleo foods and the hunger is genuine.)

For example, a few weeks ago I had a bad weightlifting workout - nothing seemed to work and the workout didn't feel productive.  The next day, I wasn't really hungry at all, and that was probably because I didn't get the growth stimulus right.  Conversely, yesterday I had a solid workout at the gym,  and today I was very hungry.  So I listened to this hunger and ate a good bit today.

In this way, you could view hunger the day after a workout as a test of whether the workout stimulated any growth.  If you're hungry, it did; if not, maybe the workout was off the mark.

Regardless, I still find no reason to supersede the body's regulatory systems and try to force calories in order to build muscle.  Instead, I will simply try to get in good workouts, listen to my body, and just eat when I'm hungry.   

Comments

[Charles Richardson]

I think this is exactly right.

My experience is that people with weight loss challenges, or weight gain challenges, or fitness challenges often have either a badly tuned messaging system (from the body to the mind), a badly tuned message-listening system, or both.

(High-density carbs tend to short-out the messaging and listening systems. So reducing or removing those is important to tuning this system. I think that's probably because there is no experienced evolutionary intelligence to interpret the effects of those kinds of calories.)

But what I've always tried to tell people is that learning to listen to the messages from their bodies is just about the most important thing you can do when you're trying to get healthy or fit or lose weight.

And I've always thought that these purely rational approaches to either fitness or weight-control really miss the mark. I see the point as being not only to reach some abstract goal, but to educate and inform the whole messaging system between mind and body.

You can rationalize your way to some particular body configuration or other. But I don't think that generally leads to overall happiness or holistic health.

That doesn't mean to reject all more rational approaches, it just means to see the process as one of internal education as well. Surprising stuff tends to come up when you do that. You may not end up where you thought you'd end up, but you are recruiting more of your whole-body intelligence.

[Matt Metzgar]

Great points, Charles. I think people give up on using hunger and satiety because of overdosing on simple carbs. So yes, if you eat a bowl of sugar for breakfast your hunger will be out of whack, but if you instead eat natural foods I think the body is smart enough to figure out what it needs.