I’m on Day Three of my new diet strategy which features a significant amount of carbohydrates. I’ve been touting the benefits of low carb dieting for years now, so before anyone calls me out on it, I’ll state it plainly. I still believe low carb dieting is healthier and makes it easier to get and stay lean. This is an experimental process for me to see if:
A. Energy Balance really is the end all be all of weight management.
B. More carbohydrates will allow me to train harder and add more volume and frequency.
Let’s start with A. Many years ago, before I knew anything about anything, I used to love to shock people by saying that I could eat 2000 calories of Snickers Bars or 2000 calories of chicken, rice and broccoli and maintain my weight. Clearly one of the two options is healthier, but in terms of weight management, they’re the same. That’s energy balance in a nutshell and I’m going to find out if it holds up. The idea behind going ultra-low carb was to remove glycogen as a fuel source, forcing the body to adapt to fat as a primary fuel source. Theoretically, one should burn more stored fat if they’re fat adapted, however energy balance is still key. I gained weight quite easily on a ketogenic diet by just eating more food.
The insulin hypothesis for obesity has been pretty much debunked. It was tossed about that high levels of insulin were causing the body to store more fat as insulin is a storage hormone. There was also the hypothesis that excess carbohydrates were being converted to fat. Both of these are not quite right. Dr. Lagakos has an excellent article explaining the mechanisms of why the body doesn’t just change glucose molecules into fat molecules and store them away. In terms of insulin, yes, it’s a storage hormone and it’s very good at storing fat in fat cells. But here’s where I think energy balance remains supreme: our bodies will expend a given amount of energy every day to stay alive. Maintaining our body temperature, feeding our brains (which are energy pigs), organ maintenance, tissue replacement, and all the nasty stuff that goes on under our pretty outer skin coatings. It will use the energy we eat as well as stored energy to get the job done. If we don’t eat enough energy, it will tap into stored energy. If we eat enough energy, it won’t. If we eat more energy than it needs, it will store the rest away.
Now this doesn’t bring activity into play. Clearly doing things besides being alive consumes energy as well. But unless you’re a professional athlete exercising for hours every day, you’re really not using that much energy to work out a little every other day, or do 20 minutes on an elliptical. So energy requirements don’t fluctuate all that much from week to week. Which brings us to part B of my experiment. Progressive overload is a key component of continued progress in strength training. One might argue it’s the strength training equivalent of energy balance on the diet side. If one doesn’t create a workload that forces the body to adapt, one will not adapt. That is, no progress takes place. Will having fully topped off glycogen stores on a regular basis allow me to get a few more reps in per set? Will I be able to do more volume without getting fatigued?
Maybe.
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