Not Just a Man's World

One of my responsibilities at home is to continually research and improve our own diets to enable both me and Chris to achieve our goals. 

Recently I’ve done quite well at meeting my own nutritional goals.  However, while I have been cutting, Chris has been working on turning into the Incredible Hulk and has some serious training goals in his sights.  Despite training hard his progress has been slowing and I think this is mostly diet related so I’ve been doing some detailed research to help him reach the next level.

What is he eating at the moment?

A standard day for Chris at the moment has the following:

• Breakfast:  5 eggs and broccoli.
• Early morning snack:  Homemade shake (30g whey protein, 30g egg yolk powder and 10g flaxseed).
• Mid-morning snack:  Tuna coleslaw (made with 1 can tuna, 1 cup raw cabbage and 1 tbsp mayo).
• Lunch:  Celery, cucumber, corned beef, peppered salami, 2 boiled eggs, 50g cheddar cheese.
• Mid-afternoon snack:  Homemade shake (as before).
• Dinner:  Beef Bolognese (or chilli or curry) with broccoli and cottage cheese.
• Supplements:  6g fish oil, glucosamine condroitin, 2,000iu Vitamin D.

Fitday analysis:
Total calories: 2,904
Protein: 277.4g
Net carbs: 39.5g
Fat: 170.1g

Pre-workout snack on weights days:  250g yoghurt, stewed fruit (3.5 apples and 3 plums) all mixed together, plus a banana and a spoonful of honey.  He also has a protein shake mid-workout. 

Fitday analysis of workout food:
Total calories: 694
Protein: 38.2g
Net carbs: 118.3g  
Fat: 6.2g

What are the likely problems?

• There aren’t enough calories going in.  He’s gained noticeable muscle in the last few months and the extra muscle needs more calories to maintain, yet we’ve hardly changed his diet in the last 4 months.
• He’s getting some tuna, which is a good source of omega 3, but he also has a lot of meat, eggs and dairy so his omega 6 to 3 ratio is almost certainly too high.
• I’m concerned that he’s got a very high acid-base – he struggles to eat enough vegetables and fruit since these fill him up a lot and limit the space for bulking up on calories.
• His pre-workout snack is fairly low protein and the majority of the carbs in it come from fructose (the stewed fruit was my previous attempt to improve his acid-base balance).

There are probably other issues, but these seem like the big ones to start with.

Next week I will do a detailed series of three posts explaining the technicalities behind the omega ratio, acid-base balance and fructose.  In the meantime, I have outlined below what would need to change in his diet to resolve the problems.

Omega 6 and omega 3 balance

I’ve tried to reduce the omega 6 sources, stripping out the corned beef and salami as a start and have instead replaced this with lean meat, such as pork loins, and avocado to replace the fats in his diet.  I’m also going to increase his fish a bit to increase the omega 3 in his diet.

Since it is possible to cook lunch at the weekends, Chris is also going to be finding himself facing liver and onions for weekend meals.  Organ meats are an excellent source of omega 3 and this should therefore help to redress any imbalance that may occur during the week.

Wish me luck with this – Chris hates liver!

Acid-base balance

Foods present themselves to the kidneys as either acid or alkaline base, but the cells in the body function optimally within a certain pH range which is not particularly acidic.  Therefore if you let the body get too acidic it will make adjustments internally to rectify the imbalance.

As a general rule meat, fish, dairy, grains and eggs are all acidic, while fruit and vegetables are alkaline and it is therefore crucial to make sure there is plenty of vegetation included in your diet.  It’s also worth avoiding the worst of the acidic foods, such as hard cheeses.

To address this I’ll be stripping the cheese out of Chris’s lunches, trying to get some more alkaline veg into his meals and I’ll be swapping one of his shakes to a shake based on coconut milk and avocado, as inspired by Mark Sisson.

Carbohydrate source

Currently, Chris’s pre-workout snack sources much of it’s carbohydrate from fruit but fruit is processed by the body in a very different way to other glycogen sources so I’m going to swap the fruit for sweet potatoes in the hope that he gets a better effect from the carbohydrate.

The diet going forward – putting it all together

Trying to rectify these problems results in the following amended menu:

• Breakfast:  5 eggs and broccoli.
• Early morning snack:  Coconut and avocado shake (2 cups coconut milk, ½ avocado, 30g protein shake).
• Mid-morning snack:  Tuna coleslaw (made with 2 cans tuna, 1 cup raw cabbage and 1 tbsp mayo).
• Lunch:  Celery, cucumber, 2 grilled pork loins, ½ avocado, 2 boiled eggs, ½ pot cottage cheese.
• Mid-afternoon snack:  Homemade shake (30g whey protein, 30g egg yolk powder and 10g flaxseed).
• Dinner:  Beef Bolognese (or chilli or curry) with broccoli and ½ pot cottage cheese.
• Supplements:  6g fish oil, glucosamine condroitin, 2,000iu Vitamin D. 

Fitday analysis:
Total calories: 3,102
Protein: 275.4g
Net carbs: 49.6g
Fat: 183.4g 

Pre-workout snack:  
3 medium sweet potatoes
1 tub cottage cheese
1 scoop whey powder 

Post workout snack:
1 cup blackberries
125g quark 

Fitday analysis of workout food:
Total calories: 766
Protein: 77.9g
Net carbs: 84.7g
Fat: 4.3g

This increases his daily calories a little but should also fix some of the things that may have been negatively impacting on his performance and results.  We’ll see how it works out for him.  Do you have any other suggestions of things I might try?

Related posts:

1. Diet to gain muscle as a woman
2. Muscle gain without fat gain
3. Workout nutrition: timing
4. Workout nutrition: protein, fat or carbohydrate?