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Appetite For Construction
Dec 6 2002

By Dr. John M Berardi, Ph.D.
First published at www.t-mag.com.

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Q: I don't eat vegetables much at all. Would drinking something like V8 juice make up for this dietary shortcoming? Or is veggie juice as bad as fruit juice?

A: Recently, I graded 120+ dietary analyses for a Sports Nutrition class that I help teach. Basically the students were told to write down what they ate for three representative days of the week, plug this intake into a computer program on campus (ESHA, if you’re interested), and hand in the computer generated analysis of nutrients (as well as some questions designed to assess their ability to understand what that amazing little box had just printed out for them). Well imagine my surprise as I began to read over what they had turned in. On the whole these 4th year Kinesiology and/or Nutrition students certainly weren’t practicing what we had been preaching!

Many of the females had total energy intakes under 1200kcal. The males weren’t doing much better as they averaged in the 2400kcal range. In addition, most had a woefully low protein intake, just barely reaching a minimum 1g/kg or less than 0.5g/lb. When turning to fat intake, the fat ratios weren’t so good either. Most had at least half of their dietary fat intake coming from saturates while their ratios of omega 6’s to omega 3’s were something like 20:1. Now these aren’t students that have no idea about what good nutrition is. These are students that, in one semester, will be graduating with Bachelor’s degrees in health related fields. And their diets are right up there with those of the average North American, diets that will lead to premature aging, heart disease, cancer, type II diabetes, and syndrome x.

Interestingly, although these diets were pretty poor on average, the thing that struck me as most amazing was the fact that their fruit and vegetable intake was pathetically low. Therefore the foods that could most help combat the damage that their diets were doing to them were the very foods suspiciously absent from their intake.

I’ll be honest; it’s always amazed me to hear that so many North Americans simply don’t eat many (if any) vegetables and fruits. The closest thing they get to fruit is the warm filling in a McDonalds apple pie and to a vegetable is the tomato sauce on their pizza. But since they’re doing so many other things nutritionally wrong, it stands to reason that they would also screw this up too.

However when I get emails from hundreds of weight lifters who don’t eat their vegetables, my head gets sore from banging it against the wall. These guys and girls abuse ephedrine and caffeine in order to increase their energy but they will skip taking their vegetables, foods that contain all the nutritional factors necessary to make your own energy!

Meatheads, whas a madda wicha? Vegetables are at the base of my nutritional pyramid. They are the foundation of a good, healthy diet. You slug down nasty faux chocolate tasting powders that give you gas, dry out your mouths, and give you bad breath but you won’t eat some vegetables – fresh or otherwise. Shame on ya.

Shaming aside, lets talk about why you should eat your vegetables. You know what, scratch that thought. If you don’t know that vegetables provide antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and the more recently touted phytonutrients, I think that you’ve probably stopped eating all foods a long time ago and you’re now brain dead, or, as some might say, a vegetable yourself. Of course we all know that veggies provide these important nutrients.

So why aren’t we eating them? Convenience, right? Or some bad childhood experiences with not being allowed dessert until you ate all your brussel sprouts. Well if it’s the latter one I have three words for you: Get over it. If it’s the first – convenience – then let’s talk about how to make vegetables more convenient.

First, you’ve got vegetable juices. Buy V8, keep it in your fridge, and drink a couple of servings per day in addition to your normal fluid intake. V8 contains tomato juice from concentrate (water, tomato concentrate), vegetable juices from concentrate (carrots, celery, beetroot, parsley, lettuce, watercress, spinach), salt and spices. While the processing of these veggies means that you get fewer of the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that you might get by eating whole veggies, and also removes a lot of the fiber, if you’re not eating any veggies, getting some vegetable juice into you is a good start.

A better alternative though, is to make your own vegetable juices. That’s right bodybuilders, I’m encouraging you to start juicin’. No, not that kind of juicin’. I’m talking about following the lead of that 120-year-old guy on TV and blending up your vegetables into a thick veggie juice with the Mix Master 2000 or whatever it’s called. This way you can be sure what’s going into your veggie shake. Also you can be sure that all the nutritional goodness is in there. Simply get a food processor, add all the veggies you can think of to your blend, process them down to a pulp, add some salt, pepper, and various other spices to taste, and drink away.

Finally, and this idea may be a bit too revolutionary for most of you, you could just eat some damn vegetables! You know, go to the grocery store, buy some bags of frozen veggies as well as some fresh veggies and then, when it comes time to eat a meal you could microwave some of those frozen veggies for about 3 minutes or you could simply take some carrots, stalks of celery, broccoli florets or whatever you like and put them in your mouth. Before you go ahead and do this, however, there’s one important instruction that I don’t want you to forget. Chew before swallowing. This is definitely the preferred route of vegetable administration.

I want to share with you a little story about how I discovered the amazing effects of a high vegetable diet. Last December I was suffering from a whole host of over use injuries. Since I was also getting ready to travel, en route to visiting family and friends, I decided to take a month off from weight lifting. Since I can’t ever stay out of the gym for that long, I decided to simply to do 15 or 20-minute high intensity interval work (running or cycling) each day in order to give me some stress relief and some metabolic expenditure. Since I wasn’t lifting and my energy demands were about to take a nose dive, I decided that I should taper my diet down so that I didn’t get fat like the Christmas goose my mom was preparing around this time. To make it simple, I decided to eat 5-6 times per day. Each meal consisted of about 10-12 oz of animal protein (I consumed no protein powders this month), some good fats (from fish, flax, and olive oil) and loads of fruit, veggies, and beans (i.e. big salads with all kinds of fresh fruit, veggies, and beans thrown into a huge bowl as well as frozen veggies in a bowl on the side).

Well, as the month progressed, obviously the overuse injuries began to heal. Now, of course, that was probably due to the time off from lifting. However, the interesting thing was that I just began to feel…healthier. I’m not exactly sure how to describe what feeling healthier means but there were several things that were different. My GI health had improved dramatically (I wont get any more graphic than that). My energy levels had increased. My skin had gotten better. And I was actually getting leaner.

Now, some of you might be thinking it’s the lack of grains in the diet, or the extra fats, or the time off from the gym, or whatever. But the interesting thing is that I’ve followed low grain diets before and I never felt this good. And I’ve always taken in lots of good fats. And I’ve had breaks off from the gym. So I know that it wasn’t these factors. No, for me the only variable that had changed was that I was now eating 4 or 5 times my usual intake of fruits and vegetables.

To verify this fact, I asked my brother to simply add tons of fruits and vegetables (mostly vegetables) to his diet without changing anything else. And he had the same experience – a general perception of increased health.

Behold the power of the fruits and vegetables!

Q: Is there an optimal time of day to take your vitamins?

A: Yes! The best time to take your vitamins is right after you say your prayers (this, according to my nutritional mentor, Hulk Hogan). Or is it: say your prayers first and then take your vitamins. I could never get this straight.

In all seriousness, it depends on which vitamins you’re talking about. If you’re like me and you just take a multi-vitamin, there is no optimal time. It’s interesting to note that food can actually facilitate the absorption of some of the micronutrients provided by your vitamin while it can interfere with the absorption of some of the others. Therefore a smart idea may be to take a multivitamin in the morning with breakfast and another at night between meals.

If you’re talking about individual vitamins, I can’t help you here. It would take a whole text book on nutrient-nutrient interactions to cover which vitamins should be taken with which other vitamins and which should be taken apart from others. To find this information you’ll need to go to a university bookstore and pick up a nutrition textbook or go online and search for this type of book.

Or (begin shameless self promotion), you could just hire me to design your nutritional program. With most of my nutritional programs, the micronutrient density is quite high and therefore vitamins are often unnecessary - unless you’re on a restrictive “cutting” diet – then you’ll need a bit of vitamin support (end shameless self promotion).

Q: I'm a skinny guy and I'm getting tired of everyone telling me to just eat more. I eat as much as I can, four to six times per day. How can I just eat more if my stomach is about to pop? Any suggestions for me? Am I genetically screwed or something?

A: So you’re hoping I’ve got some magical supplements up my sleeve that can help you increase your appetite, right? Well, I don’t. Despite my searching, I haven’t been able to find any nutritional supplements that really work in appetite stimulation. You see, when I was younger, I thought I too was genetically cursed. No matter how hard I worked out and how much I ate I still didn’t get any bigger. So I tried to seek out any supplemental help I could get to increase my appetite, my muscle mass, etc. But alas, I never found anything. Instead, I found the true secret in another place; and it didn’t take a supplement or a drug bottle to help me find it.

Now, of course, there are drugs out there for the job. The two main clinical appetite stimulants megestral acetate and dronabinol are used in AIDS, burn, and cancer patients. Unfortunately they cause mostly fat gain. Cyproheptadine is an antihistamine and serotonin antagonist that increases growth hormone secretion and appetite. This drug works pretty well for weight gain. Anabolic steroids, of course, do a really nice job of increasing appetite, body weight and muscle mass but that’s no surprise. And there are some new ideas on how to block one of the body’s big satiety hormones through the use of CCK (cholecystokinin) antagonists.

However, let’s depart from the drug and supplement discussion and get down to what I think the true secret is. It’s the fact that you have a screwed up perception of what needs to be done to get bigger. It’s written all over your email. You mention that you eat 4-6 times per day as if that actually tells me something about your diet, as if you’re doing everything you need to but the genetics are conspiring against you. Well, as long as that attitude persists, you’ll always be skinny.

Remember, it’s not the strategy but the result that matters. If 4-6 of your current meals per day were enough, then you’d be growing. Since you’re not, how about changing the strategy by eating a lot more food within those 4-6 meals? If that doesn’t work, how about trying to eat 6-8 times per day? Perhaps that won’t work and you’ll have to skip eating distinct meals altogether and you’ll have to simply eat all day long. So do whatever it takes!

Sure, I may sound a bit unsympathetic. But trust me in that I’m not at all unsympathetic to your plight; I’m just unsympathetic to your excuses. I’ve been exactly where you are today and can honestly say that I overcame it with a few simple strategies that I’ll detail below.

When I was 18 years old I was in the same predicament you were. I tried eating 4-6 times per day and simply couldn’t gain weight no matter what I did. So I sought out the big guys in the gym to inquire as to what they were doing. Their advice was to eat all the time. Now, all the time meant something very different to them than it does to most people. Most people think that eating all the time means 3 meals and then some snacks. Well, to these guys, eating all the time meant literally chewing food all day long. As a result of their tutelage, here is the diet I generated:

Breakfast 8am: 6 whole eggs, 4 slices of whole grain bread, and 4 packets of instant oatmeal

Lunch 12pm: 1 lb extra lean ground beef, 1-cup cauliflower, and 2 large baked potatoes

Evening Meal 4pm: 1lb of extra lean ground beef, 1-cup broccholi, and 2 large baked potatoes

Post Workout 8pm: 0.5 lb of pasta (weighed before cooking), 1-cup green beans, and 0.5lb extra lean ground chicken

Before Bed: 6 whole eggs, 4 slices of whole grain bread

*Also, upon waking each morning I would mix up a 1-gallon jug of water and somewhere between 5 and 10 scoops of whey protein. In addition, I would open a bag of 6 cinnamon raisin bagels and put peanut butter in between each bagel. The protein drink and the bagels were to be consumed all day long when an actual meal wasn’t being eaten. The motto was “If I’m not chewing, I’m not growing”. I’m not lying when I say that as soon as I would finish each meal, I’d start right away with my protein shake and bagels and continue on them until the next meal.

Gluttony? You bet! Did I grow? You bet! On this plan I went from 165lbs at 8% fat to 210lbs at 12% fat in about 6 months. Hurray for newbie gains! That’s 34 total lbs of lean mass or about 6 lbs of lean mass per month.

Will this plan work for everyone? Probably not as well as it did for me. Does it violate my Massive Eating guidelines? Yes it does. But my body didn’t know it was violating any guidelines. All it knew was that it needed a whole lot of calories to grow bigger and stronger and once I started providing them, I grew like crazy.

In the end, the point of my story is not to give you an exact diet to follow. Nope, my goal is to illustrate just how important it is to push the boundaries of your comfort zone if you’re interested in making gains. Quit worrying about being full and just eat more. As you continue to push yourself in terms of how much food you can eat, the body will adapt by becoming more comfortable at these new levels of intake. Just like with training. Increasing your muscle mass isn’t about comfort. In the gym we train until we’re uncomfortable. And likewise, if we’re interested in getting as big as possible, at the table, we should do the same.