The Meat and Potatoes Diet for the Fucking Win (The Empire Builder Diet, Part 5 and/or the Beginning of the Meat and Potatoes Diet Series)

Missed the first four parts? Go here, here, here, and here.

A Modern Interpretation of the American Empire Diet

When Americans thrived, they did so on meat and potatoes- those were the mainstays of the diet, along with corn, veggies, and the occasional fruits. Roasted, broiled, boiled, fried, or stewed- the how didn’t matter nearly as much as the what. They might throw some baked goods in here and there to backstop their intake, but overall what most people think of as the quintessential American badass diet is the shit that makes farm boys from Nebraska and Iowa so fucking humongous. They throw around a few thousand hay bales each summer, eat like you would have on Leave it to Beaver, and fuck up everyone in everything athletic all the fucking time.

And that diet isn’t without its proponents overseas, either- Nordic peoples have subsisted on meat and potatoes for centuries. You’ll note that they have been killing it in both Crossfit and strongman like no other small populace has ever killed it at anything beyond Pacific Islanders in professional wrestling and football, and it’s due in large part to their traditional diet, which like the diet of our American forebears was heavy on roasted and stewed meats, potatoes, crusty breads, and veggies.

And speaking of Pacific Islanders, guess what the primary components of their diet are? Meats and tubers, though with a twist- their dietary mainstays foods are taro, sweet potato, breadfruit, bananas, coconut, fish and shellfish, chicken, and pork, all in sauces based in coconut milk and cream. Once again, meat and potatoes like a motherfucker, bringing it home with a bullet on the side of getting jacked, strong, and virile enough to impregnate ovulating chicks with a glance and a little bit of Terry Crews-esque pec-flexin’.

And if that wasn’t enough, the diets of the tallest people on the planet, like the people of the Balkans and Dutch, are all heavy on meat and potatoes. Hell, Steak Frites hails from Belgium- a bigass steak and fries is about the manliest fucking dinner in history, and though the name is French, the dish is Flemish. Meat and potatoes are the backbone of any gigantic badass’s diet who doesn’t hail from Japan (and today’s chankonabe generally includes potatoes as well, as even the wildly xenophobic Japanese are willing to eat icky gaijin potatoes if it means getting huge and strong).

You Might Want to Move Some Fucking Weights

The aforementioned meat-and-potatoes-eatin’, cornfed farmboys have a hell of a heavy daily workload, which seems to be where they device the base levels of strength off of which they building the gym. So those summers growing up, where they’re doing all the heavy work on local farms to make pocket money for the school year pays dividends for more than their bank accounts- they get fucking jacked as well.

To give you an idea of how seriously farm work hits your metabolism and musculature, a 180lb dude will burn 574 calories an hour doing heavy farm work like stacking hay bales. For instance, 200-250 bales of hay can be stacked by hand in a 12’x18′ shed. At 50-60lbs apiece, that means you’re throwing, dragging, and carrying 10000-15000lbs of hay around. Not just moving it 12″ in an air conditioned gym, but heaving that shit all over the place, for a few hours a day. And while I recognize the fact that your average farmboy doesn’t match a serious gymgoer in terms of physique, they have the work capacity and the protein synthesis rates from their lifestyle that put them in a position to get crazy fucking jacked even if all they do is train for American Ninja Warrior, looking at some of the competitors in that sport.

Skeptical? Don’t be. Magnus Samuelsson and his brother Torbjörn are full time farmers, and between them have won the WSM once and competed in it 16 times, and have won Sweden’s Strongest man 11 times. Likewise, insanely huge champion arm wrestler, brutally strong gym rat, and former professional wrestler Richard Lupkes is a farmer, as was the legendary deadlifter Bob Peoples- all that hard farm work pays off.

Fuck a Challenge- Just Do Pullups

If you lack a farm on which you can get in a ton of extra work, throw a pullup bar in a doorway you go through or near regularly, and bust out a set of pullups whenever you got near it. With one near my bathroom, I’ve added between 100 and 300 pullups to my daily workload without adding to my gym time, which had a nearly immediate effect on my physique. I’ve plans to add similar shit throughout the house to increase my daily workload without unduly taxing my body for my actual workouts, and frankly knowing that I did 300 pullups even on days I spent them shit drunk on the couch playing Madden has me thinking I will look a hell of a lot better at 44 than I did at 34. And I’m not calling this a 36500 Challenge or anything of the sort, because it is a fucking certainty that I’ll do 50000 and as I get better at pullups over time, might do close to 90000. The number is completely immaterial- it’s the intent that matters.

If that seems excessive, or you’re wondering where to build in off days, bear this in mind- I’ve done far more pullups than this daily in the past. In jail (don’t get too excited, it was in a bougie gym with tablets that streamed music for a DUI), I often did 2000-3000 pullups on non-weight room days, just out of boredom and rage, hanging off a stair on a staircase. On blocks wherein I had no access to stairs or the gym, I’d do them hanging off the side of a bunk, with my forearms braced on the “don’t roll off the top bunk bar or plate.” I never tracked the numbers and I never cared how many days off I took- I just did a fuckton of pullups, which is what I’m doing now.

• You’re gonna take the occasional day or two off every week or two weeks.
• You’ll have days where you’re cramping or insanely sore and you’ll miss the target.
• You might suck at pullups and ten sets of ten for a bare minimum might be too high. Do ten sets of five or three for a minimum. Shit, do ten singles if you want. Your numbers and frequency will progress organically, and there is no reason whatsoever that you need “a plan.”

THEY ARE JUST FUCKING PULLUPS. NO ONE EVER GOT STRONGER BY MAKING AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET.

Whatever you do, make sure you do something- you can’t put in that bullshit, three-days-a-week of “powerlifting” nonsense and expect to emerge from it a fucking superman just because you started eating a diet of meat and potatoes. Train hard and heavy at least four days a week, in addition to your daily dose of pullups. Again, the what doesn’t matter as much as the how- just train fucking hard and heavy. Killing the weights and the pullups is what makes this diet so effective- as one of Robb Wolf’s contributors pointed out,

“So does that mean everyone should be out there chowing down on potatoes? Unfortunately, no. Not because there is anything unhealthy about potatoes, but a lot of people cannot process dense carb sources in a healthy way. It ultimately depends on your activity level and metabolic status. Basically those carbs fuel your activity level. If you’re living a desk to couch lifestyle then either up your activity level or keep the intake low. You have to earn your carbs. If you have metabolic issues (read: abdominal fat) then you need to get that sorted out first since you are not processing carbs correctly. It ends up being shuttled to the fat tissue instead of being available as energy.

But if you are a lean, hard training athlete then go ahead and eat up. In fact, you NEED to. Without sufficient dietary carbohydrates your body will start scavenging protein to convert to glucose (a catabolic process) and your aerobic capacity will suffer without sufficient glucose to burn the fat” (Lentzner).

The Meat and Potatoes Diet

I’ve fucked around with this off and on throughout the years, and it has quite frankly never failed me, even when I lived on a diet of vodka, strip steaks, and tater tots for a few months. Essentially, it’s an isocaloric diet based on red meat and potatoes, stews, and my ubquitous protein shakes. If you stick roughly to a ratio of 40% protein / 30% carbohydrates / 30% fat, you get more than enough protein to fuel brutal workouts, and enough energy from carbs and fat to keep you moving and facilitate better anabolism, plus you should be able to slowly lean out like that as well.

Should you want to bulk, you just do an even split between the three. If I’m honest, I never track my macros closely- I just ballpark em and modulate my intake based on how I look in the mirror- if I need to lean out a bit I raise the protein and drop the fat and carbs, and if I want to bulk more I raise the fat and carbs to match my protein, or just increase my calories and stick with the same ratio. You fucking people and your Fitbits mystify me- do you people think that’s fun, or are you just incapable of doing quick and dirty mental math?

I just base the entire thing off protein intake, and use a 1.5x BW basis for a good baseline. From there, you can always increase or decrease your calories by modulating your protein intake or switching between the 40/30/30 or 33/33/33 ratio. I realize that this ratio isn’t historically accurate if you’re looking at the examples I’ve provided, but it’s really the food choices that were the point of those examples, rather than the macros themselves- we lives an extremely sedentary lifestyle compared to those people and are a hell of a lot bigger, so it stands to reason our macros should be a bit more robust.

Leaning Out While Slow Bulking: 40/30/30

For a 200lb person: 350*4=1400/.4=3500 calories. If you need that math explained to you, it’s 4 cals per gram of protein, then that’s 40% of your calories. Then 30% of those are carbs, at 4 cals per gram, and 30% fat, at 9 cals per gram. And if you’ve already forgotten or never read Part 4 of this series, go there and read it now so you know why the leaning out version of this diet is heavier on protein than the bulking version– the composition of your diet plays as much or more of a role in fat loss than does the caloric intake.

So you’re gonna eat:

350g protein / 263g carbs / 117g fat

At this point, I break it out over 5-6 meals. I can’t be bothered to eat 7-8 times a day anymore. It’s fucking annoying and seems to have no appreciable benefit. Figure in two shakes at 50g of protein per pop and you have roughly 250g of protein, 255g of carbs, and 117g of fat to play with, and you can have a lot of fun with those macos over three meals. I don’t stress about making the meals equal in macros throughout the day- again, I’ve seen no tangible benefit. Nor do I fucking chug shakes like an Gymshark-clad n00b post workout- I eat fucking food, like an adult with dignity and self respect. If it fucking worked for Arthur Saxon, it’ll work for you, and trust me when I say that you will reach a point in your life where you’ll forgo a little extra potential protein synthesis to avoid yet another thin ass protein shake.

Faster Bulking:

For a 200 lb lifter using the same metrics: 4300 calories: 350g pro / 350g cho / 170g fat.

This shit is easy peasy Japanesy- your protein and carbs will always match, and your fat is slightly less than half of your pro and carbs intake in terms of grams. About the easiest thing in the world to track in your head, if you’re so inclined, and finding Zone Diet recipes is as easy as whipping your dick out in Louis CK’s dressing room. Except that unlike Louis CK’s dick, people actually like Zone Diet recipes. Just bump up the protein in those recipes and you’ll be good.

You can raise the rate of bulking by doubling your protein intake, which will add another 600 calories to your diet and definitely help you pack on the mass- just ensure you’re training hard enough to justify the caloric intake and you’ll be in good stead.

The Key to this is Cooking Your Own Food and Making Good Food Choices

The point of the preceding four articles wasn’t so much about getting jacked as it was to illustrate the fact that eating whole foods is vastly preferable to processed. Eating in rather than eating out leads to a great physique and serious strength- not eating those bullshit sliced chicken breasts in the deli section, deli meats, mass produced breads, mass produced pastas, and any fucking thing containing high fructose corn syrup.

I’ve never been a guy to promote healthy living- I figure health comes as a byproduct of hard training and eating well. This is the culmination of that belief. The populace of our nation was unfuckingstoppable from 1770-1950, due in large part to the superiority of our nation’s eating habits in comparison to those of other nations. People were bigger, stronger, more virile, and more robust. Since 1950, we’ve gotten less strong, less virile, and less robust. We’ve gotten fatter, weaker, and now we’re getting shorter as well, and diet has played a major role in this. We’re making terrible food choices, eating out far too much, and have gotten away from the dietary mainstays that made us who we are, and have made other great peoples who they are- as I said, these food choices are constant across borders and across cultures. I just happened to see it from the perspective of an American, having been steeped in American history over the years, but this just as easily could have been written by a Latvian, a Maori, a Montengrin, or a Dutchman.

Eat this shit:

• beef
• pork
• game meats
• seafood (Icelanders, Samoans, and Fijians eat a lot of seafood)
• fresh sausage
• beans, like a motherfucker. Morning, noon, and night, of every variety.
• potatoes
• vegetables
• rustic breads (not shit that comes in the bread aisle, but from a bakery)
• corn
• fruits
• milk and cream

Eat less of this:

• processed breads (that “wheat bread” in that bread isle is no better for you than the white bread)
• processed pasta
• rice (brown white, white rice- it doesn’t fucking matter what kind of rice you eat. White is better than brown, frankly)
• processed meats (hot dogs, fast food meats, mass produces sausages)
• sweets of any kind
• fucking yogurt. Pull yourself together, sweet cheeks. Unless your tan is as fake as your tits and like is your favorite word, leave the yogurt to the dipshits who think it’s “protein rich.”

Eat none of this:

• soy
• high fructose corn syrups
• fake meats
• highly processed desserts like mass produced pastries or ice cream
• deli meats

Seriously, this shit ain’t that hard. If it didn’t exist in 1950, don’t eat it. And before you ask about diet soda and all that, I don’t see any reason not to consume it, but make your own choices. I’m not going to debate you on the health effects of Diet Coke because I’m right and the conversation frankly bores me. If you’re a fat person with a sweet tooth- avoid it, because it’s like a heroin addict taking Tylenol 3- you’re the only type of motherfucker on the planet who’s going to have issues with something benign to normal people.

Stop Eating Out So Much

though food at sit-down restaurants is far better for you than the shit you’ll get at a fast food place, it’s still not something you should be ramming down your gullet daily, unless you happen to have a pub that serves banging shepherd’s pie or something, in which case have a double shot of whiskey and some shepherd’s pie post workout and watch the gains roll in. Just don’t drive home, lest you want to find out exactly how easy it is to build up to a couple thousand pullups a day.

I’ll be continuing the Meat and Potatoes Diet series with recipes in the future. In the meantime, you can use the Recipe Nutrition Calculator to game recipes to hit the macros you want, and mine the old Stewroids series for ideas. As I said, it’s basically just eating like you were sitting down to dinner with the Cleavers on Leave it to Beaver– roast beef or steak and potatoes with green beans sauteed in garlic is easy as hell to make, and you can always eat Steak Frites with spinach as well.

Start eating like you don’t hate yourself, for shit’s sake. It’s time to build your own motherfucking empire.

and always remember…

It doesn’t matter how you find the pot of gold. All that matters is that you beat the leprechauns.

Didn’t get enough rage in that one? Need to feel a little more of my hate burning through your soul? 365 Days of Brutality, my badass new book is available in print and ebook!

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