Due to the fact that I am exhausted with the pseudointellectualism parading as exercise science in general, it’s rare I even address modern “scientific” idiocy of the current crop of vaguely muscular halfwits masquerading as expert coaches. As I saw my edification of the world regarding somatotypes mostly come to naught (and how’s that for an ancient callback to the OG readers?), I’ve no real hopes in divesting people of the belief that you can really quantify any part of the relationship between diet and exercise, because the entire idea of doing so is dumber than the idea that a violent revolution benefits anyone in the modern world. Just like the chicken-or-the-egg or the argument is an example of an infinite regress, so too is the relationship between diet and lifestyle (of which exercise is only a part).
If you’re already going “what the fuck is he babbling about?”, the TLDR is:
Diet and exercise aren’t two pieces of a pie chart- they’re more like a picture of Ouroboros labeled “Diet and Lifestyle,” because exercise is only one piece of the puzzle.
To begin, I’ve always chafed at the various metrics of basal metabolic rates, because in my experience they have no application to me whatsoever, because I’ve always been an active person. Rather than drive to the convenience store or the gym, I walk when it’s possible, and live where it’s possible as a general rule. On any given day I walk 2.5 miles just getting to the gym, in addition to at least one trip to the bodega, which is another mile roundtrip. I like to play first person shooters standing rather than sitting, and I have a tendency that borders on compulsion to run stairs rather than walk them. That said, none of that shit is exercise- it is just basic human activity, and if you consider that shit exercise you should consider taking up rad new habits like heroin and reality television, because you’re in the wrong subculture- and as such I have never thought to track it (and unless my phone randomly announced my steps to me after an update, it never even would have occurred to me that I am quite the walker.
Beyond that, most people are so lazy they’ll procrastinate on going to the bathroom, which is so ludicrously slothful I’d think Baptists would make it a capital offense. I’ve been too drunk to change the channel on the tv, but never too lazy… and I’m definitely in the minority there as well. The list goes on, but I’m no Luddite, and I don’t live on a farm, so my life’s easier than I have any right to expect and I don’t mind doing the easy shit myself. That entire mentality begets higher caloric expenditure, but none of it constitutes any kind of appreciable exercise- it is simply the biometric cost of living life.
Then there are the requirements of one’s job, which for most people involves a shitload of sitting, after which you claim to be too tired to do more than sit, after which you lay down. Perhaps one of the reasons my writing is so active is due to the fact that I type while standing, just like I try to do many of the things I do- why walk when you can run, sit when you could stand, or lay down when you could be sitting? And don’t even get me started on the people who lay around in bed- if you are a person who hangs out in bed when you’re not fucking or sleeping, you have chosen to get zero decent sleep and have a shitty metabolism for life. Congratulations- you are the first wave of the fatties Wall-E portended. There is genuinely no hope for you to have a decent physique or a decent bench.
If you’d not already gathered as much, my activity levels demand higher levels of calories and increase my utilization of calories- and it isn’t as though you absorb all of the nutrition from the food you eat (nutrient absoption rates vary wildly from person to person due to lifestyle and biological individuality. Extra activity ensures a higher rate of protein synthesis, whether it’s aerobic or anaerobic, so you can absorb more of the nutrients you eat and put those nutrients to better use. And that is on top of the increased protein synthesis I am getting from my five or six lifting sessions a week, the long-term effects of a lifetime of eating a high protein diet, and the cumulative effect of a lifetime of heavy, intense, explosive exercise. Nevertheless, it creates exactly the type of infinite regress scenario by which I need more calories because I simply exist as I do.
And while we’re at it, the effects of diet and lifting on your body are CUMULATIVE. Yes, life is a cumulative test, as it happens, and your physical performance and appearance are a reflection of the life you live and have lived. As such, you’ll need to remember that if you spent all of your formative years picking your nose and eating Cheetos while sitting on the couch like a massive dehydrated slug, your physique is going to revert to that every time you look askance at a cookie for a few years, whereas thirty years of being lean means that provided I lift a couple of times a week and walk a bunch, I’ll have a visible six pack on my deathbed, even if I finish every day eating a large pizza for the rest of my life… and not just because I eat meatlover’s pizza on thin crust, either, though that certainly helps matters considerably (high protein meals have a thermic effect of around 30%, meaning just the fact that you ate the protein means you’re only going to absorb 70% of the calories you’ve eaten, as opposed to 80-90% of the calories from carbs and 100% of those from fat).
Being lean isn’t something you do by tricking your body with bullshit math, and efforts to do so will be both short-lived and wholly unenlightening. Instead, being lean is about learning your body and eating to facilitate your lifestyle, whatever that may be. Food isn’t the enemy- your lazy-ass brain is. So fix your brain, because if you do so it will at some point let you know that pie is a bad look for breakfast unless you’re planning on being a circus fat man or woman (or an as-yet unlabeled third gender), and the mirror is a pretty good indicator of whether you’re a fatass or not, so ditch the scale too.
Postscript:
Frankly, it disgusts me to even post Pubmed support of what is obvious to any hard training human being with a goddamned brain, but as everyone seems to think science leads the way in sports science (when in reality it’s easily 20 years behind any decently built 40-something’s broknowledge) I feel compelled to “prove” my suppositions with recent scientific findings. I’ve happily been my own test subject for the last 29 years and will remain so until the moment of my death, at which point I’ll be working on flexing metaphysical muscles, I suppose.
